Finland said Friday that work will begin by March 2023 on a three-kilometer test fence on the eastern border with Russia, ahead of the planned construction of a fence along the entire length of the border between the two countries to prevent illegal immigration.
The Finnish Border Service has specified that the construction will begin in the locality of Pelkola in the town of Imatra, near a checkpoint. The fence will start on the banks of the Wuoxi River and will be built in a northerly direction.
Border authorities have indicated that video surveillance will be installed around the entire perimeter. It is estimated that the final fence will be between 130 and 260 kilometers long. Its construction is valued at «hundreds of millions» of euros and will last for the next three to four years, reports the Yle channel.
The government of the social democrat Sanna Marin has justified the need to erect this fence to control the possibility of an increase in illegal crossings across a border of some 1,340 kilometers, the longest among all the countries of the European Union.
At the end of September, Finland approved the closing of its borders to Russian tourists, in the midst of the migratory escalation resulting from the partial mobilization announced days before by President Vladimir Putin, thus joining the restrictions in this sense already adopted earlier by the Baltic countries and Poland.
