Russian neighbors close borders to those fleeing Putin’s draft
The many desperately leaving Russia in response to President Vladimir Putin’s move to start using conscriptions for the war in Ukraine will face dwindling options on where to go, as key neighboring countries—Finland became the latest on Saturday—announce restrictions to keep from being flooded with fleeing Russians.
Finland, which shares around an 800-mile land border with Russia, officially said Saturday it would close its borders to Russian tourists in response to a surge of Russians trying to flee there this week, though it also said it was still “important to ensure that people can enter on humanitarian grounds.”
Nine European Union countries decided earlier this month to stop accepting Russian travel visas, even before Putin’s announcement: the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Slovakia.
The EU as a whole adopted new policies earlier this month to discourage Russians from traveling, including tripling the maximum wait time for a visa approval decision from 15 days to 45 days, though it included exceptions for “dissidents.”
Putin said in a prerecorded address Wednesday he was activating 300,000 reservists to serve as reinforcements in Ukraine in what he called a “partial mobilization” of reserve forces. He claimed the draft would only apply to those already in the reserves, but many Russians appeared unconvinced. Putin’s move came after a series of humiliating defeats for the Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, where they have ceded dozens of settlements back to the Ukrainians this month, including the city of Izium, a key supply hub.
The draft order has sparked the most widespread anti-war protests in Russia since immediately after the start of the invasion in February. More than 2,080 demonstrators have been arrested across the country, according to Russian human rights organization OVD-Info. Some of those arrested are reportedly being drafted into the military, a move Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov defended this week as “not against the law.”