Helsinki has warned that illegal border crossings to Finland from Russia could rise shortly after Moscow announced it will raise the mandatory age of conscription. According to the Finnish public broadcaster Yle, eleven illegal crossings have occurred on Finland’s southeastern border so far this summer, of which seven were defectors from Russia to Finland.
“The threat of illegal border crossings might grow, though we don’t expect a significant rise in border traffic”, Jukka Lukkari, Deputy Commander of the Southeast Finland Border Guard District, told Yle.
The Russian parliament, the State Duma, recently passed new legislation that will raise the mandatory age of conscription from 27 to 30. Starting in 2024, Russian men aged 18-30 will be eligible for conscription into military service for a year. Mobilised soldiers and conscripted men are not allowed to leave the country. Hundreds of thousands of men eligible to serve in the army may have fled Russia after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement in September that 300,000 men would be mobilised for war.
Last year 1,180 Russians applied for asylum in Finland. Of these, 775 were filed after Russia declared the mobilisation, reports Yle. There are currently 1,275 pending asylum applications from Russians at the Finnish Immigration Service. However, asylum decisions for adult Russian men have been suspended. Finland—and the other Nordic countries—are awaiting a common EU decision on how to handle such cases. There are concerns that Russia could be sending intelligence agents posing as asylum seekers, and once they enter the Schengen area, they would be able to travel freely across most of Europe.
According to Novaya Gazeta, a Russian opposition newspaper that moved its offices to Latvia last year following a crackdown by Russian authorities, there has not been a sharp influx of asylum seekers from Russia, as some experts had predicted. Eurostat’s data reveals that Russian citizens filed 18,400 applications for asylum in European countries in 2022, of which 33% were granted. Before COVID, the number of applications was 15,000 in 2019.
There are no exact figures on how many people have left Russia since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, but the UK’s Ministry of Defence estimated 1.3 million people left Russia in 2022.
Source : European Conservative