In her wooden, snow-covered house 20 minutes from Russia, Maija Poyhia wears a traditional blue headscarf that her mother carried with her when fleeing the Soviet invasion of Finland during World War II.
In Finland, Russia’s assault on Ukraine has stirred up some painful associations with the 1939 Winter War, when Red Army troops attacked the Nordic country across their shared border, which now runs to 1,340km.
As in Ukraine, the smaller Finnish army back then put up strong resistance and inflicted heavy losses on the Soviets.
Photo: AFP
However, Finland ended up ceding a huge stretch of its eastern Karelia Province, driving almost half a million Finns — 12 percent of the entire population — from their homes.
“My dad’s childhood home is still on the Finnish side,” Poyhia told reporters, although her mother’s family farm is now in Russia. “But back then, no one really understood how the border went.”
A second war against the Soviets followed, from 1941 to 1944, this time with Finland in a de facto alliance with Nazi Germany.
In spite of the area’s history, Poyhia and her husband, Seppo Laaksovirta, “are not scared at all” of living so close to the Russian border, and the threat of another invasion feels distant.
“I don’t know anyone around here who’s been saying we need to be on our toes,” Laaksovirta said.
Russia’s shock invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 led to a spike in Finnish support for joining NATO as a defense against possible aggression from the east, with polls showing record levels in favor of membership.
Laaksovirta supports joining the military alliance, a move he believes “would be of more use than harm.”
“Nowadays, we’ve got arms from America and the West here rather than what we had in the 1960s, which was from Russia,” he said.
In the 80 years since the Soviet invasion, Finns along the border have redeveloped strong cultural and economic ties with their eastern neighbors.
“The younger generations have learned to live, and want to live, in a Western, international society,” said Anna Helminen, city council chair in Imatra, a town just 5km from the border.
A thousand of Imatra’s 26,000 residents are Russian citizens and the town “was founded on Russian purchasing power,” Helminen told reporters.
Imatra’s businesses had been desperate for Russian tourists to begin visiting the shops, hotels and spas again as the COVID-19 pandemic waned.
“Now, of course, the same situation will continue,” Helminen said.
Plans for a rail link to St Petersburg and many other cross-border projects “all disappeared overnight” after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Daily contact and future projects have been stopped,” Helminen said.
“Our leaders and officials have said there’s no immediate threat to Finland, and we want to believe that and see the future positively,” Helminen said. “But, of course, this situation leaves its mark, including on interactions between people.”
Some Russian community groups have recently reported increased anti-Russian sentiment in Finland, but mainly on social media.
Anastasia Petrishina, who has lived and worked close to Imatra for 10 years, says she has not received any negative reactions from Finns since the war started.
Her Finnish friends “understand that Russia as a state is not the same as the Russian people,” the pharmaceutical quality control manager told reporters. “But I can’t be 100 percent sure how it’s going to be in the future, especially for people who don’t know me personally.”
The mother of two says the outbreak of war has made her consider: “What does it mean being a Russian person in Finland, in the EU, and staying outside Russia?”
She has shelved plans to travel to her native St Petersburg, even though her elder daughter, in her 20s, is there.
“I don’t want to be like a rat in a trap there,” unable to return to Finland, Petrishina said.
Draconian new Russian laws threatening prison for anyone criticizing the Kremlin mean Petrishina has only had minimal conversations with her relatives back home about the war in Ukraine.
“I’m not ready to discuss these matters, because I prefer to keep them in safety,” she said.
Petrishina said she is “an optimistic person in principle” and believes things will get better.
“But the question is, how much time does it take?” she said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to