The European Union‘s border protection agency has deployed some 50 guards to watch Finland’s border with Russia, it said on Thursday, as Helsinki accuses Moscow of orchestrating a surge in migrants.
“Currently we deploy 55 officers in Finland, a majority of them are border guard officers performing surveillance of the border,” Frontex spokesman Piotr Switalski told AFP.
The support, which was announced in late November, is scheduled to last until the end of January.
“Of course we are ready to change that as the situation changes. We can be here longer or shorter as needed,” Switalski added.
“We know that migratory pressure is one of the tools used by the Kremlin so we can expect this to continue,” he continued.
Nearly 1,000 asylum seekers, mainly from Somalia, Iraq and Yemen, have turned up at the 1,340-kilometre border separating the two countries since the beginning of August, according to Finnish authorities.
Helsinki accuses Moscow of deliberately funnelling these migrants towards Finland, calling it a “hybrid operation.”
“There are more large groups of third country migrants in the nearby area of the border still, even though if you compare to the…
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