Up 80% from a week earlier, before Putin’s call for conscription
Nearly 17,000 Russians crossed the border into Finland over the weekend, an 80 percent increase from a week earlier, Finnish authorities said today.
The flow of people leaving Russia, in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement of conscription, continues at a steady pace.
By early this morning, traffic on the border between the two countries had eased somewhat, but was higher than in previous weeks.
“The queues are still a little bit longer than they used to be after the pandemic,” Taneli Repo, an official at Finland’s southeastern border authority, told Reuters.
Putin’s announcement on Wednesday of the first conscription since World War Two to bolster military forces that have invaded Ukraine sparked a wave of exodus across the border with Finland, led to the arrests of protesters and heightened concern among citizens.
On Friday, Finland’s government, concerned that it could become a key transit country, announced that within the next few days it would stop allowing all Russians to enter on tourist visas, although some exemptions may still apply on humanitarian grounds.
RES-EMP
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