Finland finishes 200 kilometres of fence on the Russian border, under budget

Finland has completed 200 kilometres of barrier on its border with Russia, the Finnish Border Guard said at a media event on Monday in Nuijamaa, near Lappeenranta. The fence does not run the full 1,340-kilometre frontier, the longest that any European Union or NATO member shares with Russia. It stands in the stretches where the Border Guard judged the operational need highest and the cost justified.

Each section is a 4.5-metre barrier, a technical surveillance system, a patrol road and a 25-metre cleared strip. The metal mesh rises 3.5 metres and carries a metre of razor wire on top. Cameras, lights, sensors and loudspeakers sit on the line. The fence also goes below ground. Chief of the Border Guard Markku Hassinen said the package will improve patrol movement, situational awareness and the ability to handle a large irregular crossing.

Cost, map and timetable

The Border Guard put the final cost at €356 million, €22 million under the original budget. Yle has also cited a figure near €380 million at earlier stages of the project. Annual upkeep is estimated at about €1.5 million. About 1,000 private landowners received some €3 million in compensation. The line crosses 17 municipalities from Lapland to the Gulf of Finland.

The longest run, about 140 kilometres, sits in the southeast. North Karelia has about 35 kilometres. Another 25 kilometres stretch through Kainuu and into Finnish Lapland, including sections at Onkamo and Kelloselkä in Salla and at Raja-Jooseppi and Virtaniemi in Inari. Pilot stretches went up at Pelkola near Imatra and at Salla in 2023. Main construction ran from 2024 to 2026. Large-scale work started in Nuijamaa in August 2024. The job finished slightly ahead of the public timetable.

Interior Minister Mari Rantanen, of the Finns Party, said the fence is one part of a wider surveillance system and also serves as an external EU border. She said the government should later ask whether more sections are needed, and that eastern member states need EU money for this kind of work.

Why it was built

Party leaders agreed in October 2022, after Russia announced mobilisation and nearly 17,000 Russians entered Finland in a single weekend, that selected fencing was required. In autumn 2023, crossings from the Russian side rose sharply. Helsinki treated that rise as directed migration and closed the land checkpoints. They have stayed closed.

The fence is not a wall along the whole forest. It is a set of controlled corridors at the points where a mass of people could be walked to a crossing or pushed through woodland toward a road. Unfenced kilometres remain. The Border Guard's argument is that cameras and patrols on the fenced sections free staff to watch the rest.

Moscow has called the closure and the fence a political act. Finnish officials say the alternative was to leave the longest NATO-Russia land border as an open path for a tool Russia had already used.

What completion changes

Completion does not reopen the checkpoints. It does give Helsinki a finished piece of infrastructure it can point to when it asks Brussels for money and when it talks to NATO allies about the northern flank. Rantanen's comment about more fence is the next political decision. Adding length is expensive, at roughly €1.8 million a kilometre on earlier figures, and it runs through more private land.

The practical test will come on the first night a large group is directed at a closed crossing. The cameras and the 25-metre strip are built for that night. Until it arrives, the fence is a finished line on a map and a budget that came in light.