O., who previously tried to enter the EU via the Belarus-Poland border and was pushed back by Polish border guards, said he no longer trusts the people smugglers. He said he and his friends would wait for the Russians to remove roadblocks along the route to the Finnish border – BIRN was unable to verify whether these are still in place – and then hire rides to the border for themselves and the bikes they will purchase in Saint Petersburg.

“I have no choice but to go forward,” he explained.

“I cannot go back to Syria and I don’t want to die,” he said, in reference to the risks that migrants like himself believe they face if they remain in Russia.

O. is one of the estimated thousands of migrants currently stuck in Russia after Finland closed all of its eastern border crossings in late November. With Poland and the Baltics making it nigh-on impossible to cross into the EU via their own borders with Belarus, the migrants have been left at the mercy of the Russian state, which is intensifying arrests, deportations and conscription.

New route

From 2022, as BIRN reported at the time, migrants from the Middle East and Africa trying to reach Europe via the Eastern Border Route have typically been flying to Moscow rather than the Belarusian capital of Minsk before heading west.

After reaching Moscow, migrants like O. interviewed by BIRN have typically tried – and mostly failed – to enter the EU by travelling to Belarus and trying to get across the now-heavily reinforced border with Poland.

It was after those failed attempts that adverts for the Finnish route became more appealing. According to a BIRN review of some of the relevant Telegram channels, the ads for the Finnish route either appeared in the autumn on channels used previously by migrants and people smugglers, or on entirely new channels dedicated to this new route.

In at least one case familiar to BIRN, one people smuggler active on the Belarus-Poland route simply started working on the Finnish route too in November.

Despite people smugglers advertising help to traverse this route, migrants were initially able to cross into Finland without paying intermediaries. Unlike with the Belarus-Poland route, where migrants need help in cutting through fences or crossing rivers and marshes, the border crossing with Finland was done at official points, with the Finnish Border Guard accepting asylum applications there.

Famously, migrants used bicycles they had bought off people smugglers or Russian officers to enter Finland, as some border crossings did not allow foot traffic.

When learning about the Finnish route option, many migrants in Belarus chose to return to Russia and head up towards the Finnish border.

Finnish-ed

In November, over 900 migrants from the Middle East and Africa crossed into Finland from Russia via the official crossing points and lodged an asylum claim. The number may be small in absolute terms, but the Finns pointed out that in previous months they had typically seen less than one crossing per day on average.

The Finnish government was adamant that the rise in numbers was down to Russia intentionally channelling migrants via this route in order to punish Finland for joining NATO in April. There is a growing body of evidence that the Kremlin, in league with the Belarusian regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko, has been ‘weaponising’ migrants as part of its hybrid war with the West.

“This is an active measure of instrumentalising third-country citizens, which Finland cannot accept,” Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen said.

Marek Menkiszak, a Russia expert at the Warsaw-based Center for Eastern Studies, describes it as “a pretty crude political calculation”.

“Russia cannot retaliate militarily for Finland’s EU accession – not least because they withdrew their own troops from the Finnish border to have them fight in Ukraine – so they had to find another way,” he told BIRN.

“They want to have a migration crisis which they believe will destabilise the political situation in Finland,” Menkiszak said. “The intended effect is to intimidate the Finnish government so that it is reluctant to escalate its conflict with Russia and, to that end, refuses the stationing of US troops there.”

“Russia can’t annul Finland’s NATO membership, but it can try to nullify its military effects,” he concluded.

In response, over the month of November, Finland gradually closed all eight of its non-freight border crossing points with Russia.

On Tuesday, after two weeks of total closure, the Finnish Interior Ministry announced the border crossing points at Vaalimaa and Niirala in the south will be reopened for traffic from Thursday, December 14, while the rest of its eastern border will remain closed.

Kremlin collusion

The Kremlin denied it has been tempting migrants to the Finnish border and helping them to cross. However, the Finnish Border Guard pointed out that while Russia implemented a bilateral agreement with Finland whereby it would not allow travellers without proper documents to the border area until August, it began allowing greater access to the border zone from that time on.

Interestingly, in some videos posted on Telegram channels used by migrants to communicate with people smugglers, the Russian authorities are clearly seen organising the migrants near the Finnish border.

In one such video (above), published on one of the Telegram channels on November 23, tens of migrants are seen hanging out in the snow next to tents and bikes, under the watchful eye of what appears to be a mix of uniformed local Russian police, border guards and traffic police, some of them carrying guns. A municipal ambulance stands nearby.

While neither the location of the video nor when it was filmed or by whom has been verified, a road sign visible in the video points to the town of Priozersk, which is about 50 kilometres from the Finnish border in the Leningrad Oblast. The visible license plates are from the Murmansk region and Saint Petersburg.

In two other videos (below) posted on November 24 and 25 on the same channel, migrants are seen getting on a bus under the guidance of the Russian officers and later getting on bikes that appear to have been carried in a truck accompanying the bus.

Attempted crossings have dropped off since Finland closed all the border checking points on November 30. The Telegram channels on which trips could be organised have also been mostly quiet over the past two weeks.

One people smuggler who appeared to be offering crossings via the Taiga forests, outside the official border crossing points, for a price of 3,000 euros, pulled the offer when contacted by BIRN, saying it was best to wait for the official announcement from the Finns over the reopening of the border crossing points.

According to the Finnish Border Guard, only four people crossed the Finnish-Russian border illegally – that is, though the Taiga – during all of November.

“No other illegal crossings of the land border have been detected,” a spokeswoman for the Finnish Border Guard told BIRN. “There could be multiple reasons why this phenomenon has not shifted towards the land borders, but the cold weather conditions and the snowy terrain certainly raises the bar to do so.”

“The other reasons would be more or less based on speculation,” she added, saying the Finnish Border Guard only deals with facts.

The Russia expert Menkiszak said, of course, the conditions are part of it, but that hasn’t stopped people trying at the Belarus border.

“The Russians might not want to be caught red-handed, documented while assisting migrants in crossing illegally, as happened to Belarusian officers,” the expert said, stressing that he can only speculate about Russian motivations. “We all know Russia is coordinating the migration crises on all these borders, but hard evidence is lacking and they still have deniability.”

“They might also want to keep that kind of provocation for a next level of escalation if deemed necessary. They take a step, watch the reaction and then re-calibrate their approach,” he added.

Conscription risk

On announcing the reopening of the two border crossings at Vaalimaa and Niirala on Tuesday, the Finnish government simultaneously warned that “it will close the entire eastern border again if instrumentalised migration at the eastern border continues.”

It is impossible to estimate how many migrants are currently in Russia waiting to cross into the EU, either via Finland, Estonia or even Belarus; the Polish Border Guard continues to report attempts to cross its border every day, though the numbers are not high. Yet whatever Russia’s future intentions for the border crisis with Finland, these migrants are desperate to get out of Russia.

Over the last few weeks, migrants have been reporting that the Russian police are intensifying arrests of those whose visas have expired. Usually, they are imprisoned and then quickly deported. But, alarmingly, one migrant interviewed by BIRN presented evidence that the Russian Armed Forces were attempting to recruit migrants whose Russian visas have expired to fight in the war against Ukraine.

A., whose nationality and personal details BIRN chooses to withhold to protect the man’s safety, is currently in a Russian military camp close to the border with Ukraine, according to his statements and court documents, as well as photographic evidence that he has shared with activists familiar with Russia who have been in contact with BIRN.

Escaping his country where he said he faced threats to his life, A. flew to Moscow during the summer and initially attempted the Belarus-Poland route. He failed to cross that border despite three attempts. When he heard about the Finnish route, he decided to head back to Russia to try it. However, by that time the visa that he had used to enter Russia had already expired. The man was stopped during a police check while driving towards western Russia and arrested for overstaying his visa.

“We were arrested about 40 kilometres from the border with Finland, during the night,” the man recounted to BIRN over a messaging app from the military camp in Russia where he still was at the time of writing. “The next morning, they took us to the immigration police and then to court, and we were sentenced to deportation and fines.”

After receiving their sentences, the man said his entire group of 12 made up of different nationalities were offered a contract in Russian to sign, told it involved a job working for the Russian state, and that they would get a salary and the right to stay legally in Russia after one year of performing that work.

Nine men refused and were deported, but three others, including our interlocutor, signed the documents. “It was only after we got here, to the military camp, that we understood what kind of contract we had signed and that we had been fooled. We refused to be part of the army,” he said.

A., who has received advice from human rights organisations, was allowed to bring his plight to the Karelia regional court and eventually received a ruling that reinstated the initial deportation decision, since he is refusing to comply with his military contract. (BIRN is in the possession of this court ruling, whose text highlights the trade-off between staying legally in Russia and completing the work contract).

“Now I am back to facing the issue of the dangers that made me leave my country in the first place,” he commented, bitterly.

According to court documents analysed by BBC Russia, it seems that between 200-300 migrants have been arrested in each of the three Russian regions bordering Finland over the past few weeks for overstaying their visas. For the moment, it is unclear how many of these people are being offered to join the army, but the practice has been employed before by the Russian authorities.

According to Human Rights Watch: “In September 2021, Russian authorities adopted a law on simplified naturalization of foreigners who serve in the Russian military and started to actively lure and coerce migrants to join the Russian military, presumably to fight in Ukraine.”

The practice was used before with Central Asian labour migrants arrested in Russia, according to a report by Meduza, a Russian- and English-language independent news website headquartered in Riga.

Annu Lehtinen, executive director of the Finnish Refugee Council, told BIRN that local human rights groups had heard “there might be some kind of forced recruitment of migrants and asylum seekers into the Russian army under threat of deportation”.

“Forced migration always exposes people to violence, exploitation and extortion,” she said. “But if, on top of this, these people have no real possibility of seeking asylum outside of Russia, then they are in a very difficult position.”

Lehtinen added that even if Finland has the right and duty to control its borders, this should not be done at the expense of its international treaty obligations and human rights.

“Closing border points puts the people caught in the middle in an even more vulnerable position and jeopardises their possibility of seeking asylum, which states have an obligation to provide,” she said.

Majd Helobi and Maria Mocanu contributed to this report.