IMATRA, Finland — Finnish border officials on Saturday declared complete a 200-kilometer steel fence along the country’s eastern border with Russia, closing out a project that began in early 2023 and that has come to symbolize the hardening of the European Union’s longest frontier with Moscow.
The final 11-kilometer section, near the lake district town of Parikkala, was inspected by the Finnish Border Guard’s commander, Lt. Gen. Juha Kivelä, who called the barrier “a tool, not a wall,” and said its purpose was to slow unauthorized crossings long enough for patrols to respond. The fence stands 3.5 meters tall, topped with razor wire, and is paired with roughly 1,900 cameras and motion sensors monitored from regional control rooms in Imatra and Joensuu.
The project cost about 380 million euros, or roughly $410 million, about 20 percent over its original budget, which officials attributed to the price of steel and the difficulty of building across marshland and granite. It covers about 15 percent of the 1,340-kilometer border, concentrated near the eight official crossing points, all of which Finland has kept closed to ordinary traffic since November 2023, when authorities accused Russia of funneling asylum seekers to the frontier.
“The fence buys us time,” said Riikka Salonen, a border security analyst at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. “Without it, a person who crosses can be at a road in 10 minutes. With it, the sensors trip, the patrol is dispatched, and the person is still cutting wire. That difference is the whole point.” She noted that recorded unauthorized crossings have fallen from a peak of about 1,300 in the last two months of 2023 to fewer than 40 so far this year.
Not everyone in the border region is relieved. In the town of Imatra, where the Russian city of Svetogorsk is visible across the Vuoksi River, the closure has hollowed out a local economy once dependent on Russian day-trippers. “Before, the parking lot was full of St. Petersburg plates on Saturdays,” said Antti Hämäläinen, 54, who runs a hardware store that has cut its staff from nine to four. “Now we have a very expensive fence and nobody to sell paint to.”
Environmental groups also raised concerns. The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation said the fence had bisected migration routes for wolves and moose, and that camera data showed animals pacing along the barrier. The Border Guard said it had installed 23 wildlife gaps, each monitored by cameras, and would add more if the data justified it.
Finland’s government has said it has no plans to extend the fence to the full length of the border. “The forest, the lakes and winter do most of the work for us,” General Kivelä said. “We built where geography does not.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 4 of the European edition with the headline: Finland Completes 200-Kilometer Fence Along Russian Border, Ending a Three-Year Project.
