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Soriek  5mo ago (text post)   1818 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.

So currently they cross fully legally, through regular border crossings, with documents and so on?

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