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Soriek  5mo ago (text post)   1812 thread views

Transnational Thanksgiving (comes one day early)

Posting this a day early because I won’t be around tomorrow.

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum lives in or might be interested in. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Finland

Situation with asylum seekers at the Russian border situation is taking pretty much all attention at the moment.

TROUBLE AT THE BORDER: Pretty much the entire last week (as well as this week) have been dominated by trouble at the Finnish borders, namely an influx of new asylum applicants arriving through Russia. This has been widely regarded as a hybrid warfare op facilitated by Russian authorities, though there are differences in view as to what Russia would specifically be trying to achieve. Some think, for instance, that Russia is trying to punish Finland for a new defence agreement with the US. One possibility would be a counterreaction to something like this, for example.

The seekers arrive, or at least claim to arrive, from a variety of traditional asylum-seeker countries, like Syria, Afghanistan and so on. If such asylum applicants manage to pass the border, they can still apply for asylum in the normal order. Finland can, of course, handle some hundreds of asylum seekers, as has arrived now, but if the numbers start reaching tens of thousands – and that’s the fear of what happens if something is not done – then it’s a whole other question.

What's the state of the discourse on this one? Are people mostly united on border security? How about politicians? Any ops from the NGO industrial complex?

It's a pretty interesting tactic from Russia, and it has really been something to watch the Euro policy wonks go from "diversity is our strength" to "hybrid warfare".

Mostly pretty united. Some legal experts and politicians have issued criticism, rather carefully, and on the other hand on the nationalist side there is some amount of grumbling that Finland isn't just closing the border for good, no matter what the treaties say. Probably the funniest moment man-bites-dog moment was when the Green presidential candidate Pekka Haavisto momentarily castigated the government for not closing the border for good, until it turned out they can't just go and do this.

until it turned out they can't just go and do this.

Is this even true? Didn't Poland and the Baltic states build a literal wall?

It's currently not possible in the sense that a top civil servant in charge of looking at whether what government does is legal looked at the government's proposed bill to do this and decreed that it doesn't offer enough guarantees for actual chance of seeking asylum.

Of course this is slightly ridiculous since the currently accepted and valid method of just closing all entry points expect one which is literally the northernmost border entry point in Finland in November in the middle of nowhere is intended to functionally hinder asylum seeker entry from Russia as much as functionally possible, but that's how it still is. Of course it's possible that the government will find some legal workaround and close the border anyway - they're certainly still looking at how to do this.

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