The arrival of some 50 Frontex officers is welcome help for Finland’s border guards, who have seen Russian officials flagrantly using asylum seekers from countries like Afghanistan to create instability and political strife in Finland. But Russia’s sudden return to the weaponization of migrants is not just about causing a bit of annoyance for its neighbor. It’s part of Russia’s expanding use of gray zone aggression, which can appear anywhere, anytime, using any means. On November 28, Finland closed its last open border crossing.
It is not possible for migrants from developing countries to move freely around the Russian Federation without paperwork — and certainly not to approach border crossing points. But this changed in November as small groups of mainly Arab migrants began to appear at Finnish frontier posts on bicycles.
The migrants were brought by Russian minders to southern border crossings, which are somewhat warmer than the northern ones. The Russians didn’t seem to mind that the Finnish border guards could see they were involved, and they may indeed have hoped to frighten the Finns. That way, was no question that this was a Kremlin-generated crisis with NATO’s newest member state.
By mid-November, Finland saw no choice but to close the southern border crossings, even though doing so meant denying their use to law-abiding people and businesses. Instead of voicing support for a government trying to tackle a novel and tricky national security challenge, a large group of ethnic Russians living in Finland gathered in Helsinki to protest against the restrictions. (Their sudden galvanization, of course, transmitted another menacing message.) Russia, meanwhile, lodged a formal protest with Finland’s ambassador in Moscow.
The asylum seekers continued to arrive, but now at Finland’s northern border crossings. And the Russian authorities were still involved. Indeed, they quickly adjusted to the closure of the southern border crossings by transporting the migrants northward.
“Our services came and picked them up,” a receptionist at a motel in the town of Kandalaksha, on the Russian side of the border, told the Barents Observer. By that time, some 600 asylum seekers from Yemen, Morocco, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, and Kenya had presented themselves at the crossings.
By November 22, the Finnish government saw no choice but to close all but one of the northern border crossings as well. Only the Arctic border crossing of Raja-Jooseppi now remains open, and as Prime Minister Petteri Orpo reminded people at home and in Russia: “Raja-Jooseppi is the northernmost (border crossing) and it requires a real effort to get there”.
Could the arduous journey and the Arctic weather stop further migrant arrivals from Russia? The Finnish government hoped so, and hoped too that the arrival of Frontex officers might make the Finnish border more secure and convince the Russians that bringing migrants there is not worth the effort. The efforts were futile. On November 28, Orpo announced that Finland would close Raja-Jooseppi too.
Russia’s grayzone aggression against Finland and other Western countries won’t end at Finnish border crossings. Hours after Orpo announced the almost complete closure of the Finnish border, Estonia reported that 30 migrants, mostly from Somalia and Syria, had arrived from Russia at the Narva border crossing. Estonia’s interior minister, Lauri Laanemets, explained that the migrants were arriving “in an orchestrated manner and in groups of seven to 11 people” and that Russian border guards filmed as the migrants were turned back by the Estonian border guard.
Weaponizing migrants is not a new tactic, of course. Two years ago, Poland and the Baltic states faced a campaign of gray zone aggression launched by Russia’s Belarusian satrapy. That too began slowly before expanding into a full-scale crisis for the countries involved and the European Union.
Laanemets called the arrivals a “hybrid operation”. Though I prefer the term gray zone aggression (“hybrid” in the original definition by Frank Hoffmann involved both kinetic and non-kinetic means), he was right to call out Russia’s involvement.
And the fact that the action seems to have shifted, or spread, from the Finnish border to the Estonian demonstrates the flexible and adaptable nature of gray zone aggression. After Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland installed barbed wire along their respective border with Belarus, that country scaled back its weaponization of migrants. But this summer, just when the three countries thought they’d convinced Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko that this policy would not work, large numbers of asylum seekers began arriving via Belarus again.
Where might Russia and its Belarusian friend strike next?
Because gray zone aggression really can involve any means, anywhere, trying to predict the next incident would be foolish. But we’d be equally foolish to focus our complete attention on Raja-Jooseppi or Narva, or for that matter the three sites in the Baltic Sea where undersea infrastructure was mysteriously damaged by a dragged anchor in October.
In fact, while we’re looking elsewhere, the two countries are most likely planning new tools and targets. Be prepared, as the Boy Scouts so wisely say.
Elisabeth Braw is a senior associate fellow at the European Leadership Network and a columnist for Foreign Policy.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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