The Finland-Russia border fence is now complete, with around 200 kilometres of barriers built at selected points along Finland’s roughly 1,300-kilometre eastern border. The project, developed by the Finnish Border Guard (Rajavartiolaitos), cost €356 million and is intended to make unauthorised crossings more difficult and give border authorities more time to respond to large or organised movements of people.
The fence does not cover the entire border. Instead, it has been constructed in around 40 areas considered particularly important for surveillance, with most of it concentrated in southeastern Finland. According to the Finnish Border Guard, fencing the full 1,300-kilometre frontier would not have been considered practical.
Finland’s Russia border fence is more than a physical barrier
The structure is generally 3.5 metres high and consists of metal mesh topped with an additional cylindrical barrier. But the project extends beyond the fence itself.
It includes an adjacent patrol road, a cleared strip of land and a technical surveillance system using cameras, infrared lighting and other monitoring equipment. According to the Border Guard, the system is designed to detect, slow and direct movements across the border while allowing officers to respond more quickly.
The authorities describe the barrier as one component of Finland’s broader border surveillance system rather than a solution capable of stopping crossings on its own. Its expected physical lifespan is around 50 years, while parts of the technical surveillance infrastructure will need to be replaced more frequently.
Construction involved difficult terrain ranging from forests and wetlands to steep slopes. More than 3,500 security clearances were carried out for people working inside the restricted border zone, according to Yle.
The completed fence crosses land belonging to about 1,000 private landowners. The state has paid approximately €3 million in compensation, while ownership of the land remains unchanged.
The project was transformed by the 2023 migration crisis
Planning for a barrier had already received parliamentary approval in 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Finland’s reassessment of security along its eastern frontier.
Its political importance increased substantially in late 2023, when people without the necessary travel documents began arriving at Finnish border crossings from Russia. Since August 2023, more than 1,300 third-country nationals have entered Finland from Russia without visas, according to the Finnish Government.
Finnish authorities concluded that Russian authorities or other actors were facilitating what Helsinki describes as instrumentalised migration, meaning the deliberate use of migration flows to exert political or security pressure on another state.
The Finnish government subsequently closed all land-border crossing points with Russia to passenger traffic. They remain closed until further notice.
The situation at the border has since been relatively quiet, with only sporadic unauthorised crossings reported in 2026. The government nevertheless says the threat has not disappeared and considers a renewed attempt at instrumentalised migration possible.
On 3 September, the government also proposed extending Finland’s Border Security Act until the end of 2028. The temporary legislation gives authorities additional powers in particularly serious cases of instrumentalised migration. Minister of the Interior Mari Rantanen said the threat level at the eastern border remained high.
A permanent change along Finland’s eastern frontier
The completed barrier has also changed the physical landscape of communities along the Russian border. In places such as Värtsilä in North Karelia, sections of fencing now cross areas that had previously remained largely open except for the traditional border zone.
The project is expected to cost around €1.5 million a year to maintain, according to Yle. During construction, it also generated disputes over land use and compensation, including a legal challenge by a landowner in southeastern Finland that was rejected by an administrative court.
Operational experience remains limited. Yle reports that only one asylum seeker is known to have crossed over the new barrier, in summer 2025, while construction was still underway.
For Finland, however, the significance of the 200-kilometre border fence with Russia extends beyond the number of people it may physically stop. It is one of the most visible permanent changes to the Finnish-Russian border since relations between the two countries deteriorated following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and part of Helsinki’s wider effort to prepare for hybrid pressure along what is also the longest EU and NATO external border with Russia.
