In total 735.000 visa applications were filed by Russians at the Finnish consulates in Murmansk, Petrozavodsk, St. Petersburg and the embassy in Moscow last year. This year, it is expected that the Finnish consulate in St. Petersburg alone will issue half a million visas, says St. Petersburg Consul General Pauli Kivinen interviewed by YLE-News.
The consulate had expected demand to drop off this year due to the recession, but still more than a thousand Russians line up outside the Finnish consulate in St. Petersburg every day.
But even if more Russians apply for visas, the number of actual visitors crossing the border doesn’t match the number of visas granted so far this year. The number of Russian border crossings decreased by 14 percent at the Vaalimaa border crossing in southern Finland in May.
It is not only St. Petersburg residences travelling to Helsinki for shopping and pleasure that applies for visa. Finland has not only turned into a major transport route for trade between the EU and Russia, it has also developed into a major centre for tourism and trade focussed on the Russian market. Finnish tourist complexes, among them in Lapland, annually attract hundreds of thousands of tourists.
Finland is also known for having far smoother and well-developed visa services than several of the other Schengen-countries, among them Norway.
