Russians are granted the most visas to Finland for family reasons, says the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Russian citizens still have around 120,000 visas issued by Finland, but their number is rapidly decreasing, says the head of the immigration affairs unit of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Katja Luopajärvi.
The oldest visas are from 2019. So they were issued before the corona pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
– The majority of the oldest multiple-entry visas will expire next year at the latest, but even now, on average, around 5,000 of them expire per month, Luopajärvi says.
New visas are constantly being issued to Russians, but the numbers are quite small.
Finland’s embassies in Russia accept an average of about a thousand visa applications every month, Luopajärvi says. He reminds that not all of these are for Russians, but there are citizens of other countries as well.
Between January and June of this year, around 5,300 positive visa decisions have been made for Russian citizens, Luopajärvi says.
Most of the visas are issued for family reasons, i.e. the person is a close relative of a Finnish citizen or a person living permanently in Finland. The second largest group are seasonal workers, whose number varies significantly from month to month. In addition, for example, business travelers and students come to Finland.
The number of applications has collapsed
Luomajärvi stresses that the number of visas granted to Russians has collapsed after 2019. Finnish embassies in Russia now receive only two percent of the 2019 number of applications. Not all of these are accepted either.
At the beginning of July, the government renewed the decision in principle of the Government Council issued during the previous government, which concerns the restriction of the entry of Russian citizens. The principle decision and its guidelines are applied when new visas are issued to Russians. It is in use A list of 10 of special groups for which the granting of a visa can be considered.
The government’s decision slightly tightened the right of Russians to obtain a visa. For example, Business travelers are no longer allowed to use Finland as a transit country. In Finland, the persons who own real estate have to prove that managing the real estate requires their personal presence. Just owning real estate is not enough to get a visa.
According to Luopajärvi, the conditions were tightened to make it more difficult for Russian citizens to circumvent the entry restrictions.
The functionality of the new regulations is being monitored, and no new extortions are known so far, Luopajärvi says.