Along unknown roads: Virolahti, Finland

So this must be that place. I am standing on the edge of the ditch that was dug by Vladimir Putin.

Virolahti, in Finland’s extreme southeast. The Finns have a total 1300 kilometers worth of common border with Russia, but this border crossing point here, near Virolahti, this is probably the most important connection point between these two disproportionate neighbors, because it is closest to Helsinki, the focal point of the Finnish economy, and because St. Petersburg is a mere 270 kilometers away from here.

The Finns have once calculated differently here, that much is obvious. When Russia was heralded as a young market economy with borderline acceptable democratic conditions and great future perspectives, as a vast sales market and trade partner; when there were wild imaginations abound about selling truckloads of fridges, bucket wheels and insurances to the Russians and about all those expenses-happy Russians travelling abroad in hordes; at around that time, planning must have been done for Finland’s Southeast. So they went and developed the highway and extended it and now it leads from Helsinki almost all the way to the border. They made the other roads going in that direction newer and broader and bigger and a few business-minded people attached signs with inscriptions in Cyrillic script to their hotels and supermarkets and fishing supply shops. A few hundred feet from the border a big gas station was set up and it comes with a restaurant and slot machines, showers and tourist info, a shop that sells gold jewelry and one that offers toys, kitsch and packaged salmon in bulk packaging.

On a day in early April 2015, the winter outside has reluctantly turned a corner and has made room for a grumpy spring, a few elderly Russian women are occupying two tables of the otherwise empty restaurant and are eating candy out of a plastic bag with mechanic bag-to-mouth movements. Two men are standing in front of the gambling machines without a trace of enthusiasm. They are silent, it cannot be concluded whether they are winning or losing. An elderly man wearing a long coat scuffles through the scene and tries to begin conversations. In his hand, he is holding sheet protectors with official-looking documents. Every now and then, one of the women gets up to smoke a cigarette outside.

Other than that, nothing happens. There is one lonely white van in the vast truck parking lot. Nothing is moving on the separate, several kilometers long truck lane leading here, to the gas station and the border. The wind makes the air a little cooler than it would have to be. The few compact cars that are approaching the border are either making a turn somewhere and disappear in the endless Finnish forests or they come for a fill-up. From the eastern direction, no vehicle at all comes; no bus, no passenger car, no truck. In the store, they have pushed the toy shelves together, you have to pass by them to get to the salmon, which is looking fresh but is not bought by anyone.

It was one year ago that Russia ignored the law of nations and occupied Ukrainian Crimea with soldiers that did not wear insignia and later annexed the peninsula. The West probably didn’t believe the charade with the soldiers without insignia, but it acted as if you had to give the Kremlin the opportunity to prove its claims, although the Kremlin didn’t have the slightest intention to do so. Maybe they did that because nobody knew what you had to do when in 21st century Europe someone doesn’t play along with peace, cooperation and international understanding. So Western politicians didn’t really think that whole annexation thing was such a good idea, but the thinly veiled lies were good enough to cover for slimply sowing a seed of doubt. Then Putin let his soldiers invade Ukraine’s East, causing thousands of people to find their deaths and millions to flee their homes and suddenly there were a lot of people who dodn’t know where they should get the bread for the next day. Because the threatening postures from Moscow became harder then and because Russian opposition members every once in a while died under mysterious circumstances, the West set up a sanctions regime and the Kremlin set up a countersanctions regime against goods from the EU.

Since then, traffic at the border has let up noticably. Not only here. Customs officers in Estonia and Latvia have a lot less work on thier hands too, since trade barriers were set up. The sanctions let the lanes of the new road near Virolahti orphaned and the rest was taken care of by a never-stopping propaganda machine which assures the Russians 24 hours a day that the West is pure evil, degenerate, amoral, gay and xenophobic. Now the Russians prefer to sit at home and to travel within their own country. Sometimes they even go to Crimea, but most of them can’t afford that because the Ruble has taken a dive since the West has stopped playing the game with the badly camouflaged soldiers. In any case, nobody ever buys gold jewelry at the border gas station.

Finland’s Southeast is really beautiful. One can drive for ten or fifteen minutes in one direction until the thick birch forest on the right and on the left of the road is interrupted, most often by a street flowing in, before you get another ten minutes worth of birch forest. If you just turn somewhere on the right, the odds are excellent that you will come up to a lake where there are wooden houses on the lakeshore. The Finns call these summer houses „mökki“ and you can hardly imagine a word that would be a more beautiful designation, from an onomatopoetic point of view. Those who like forests and lakes and people who don’t make much noise about themselves could well find their happiness somewhere between Porvoo, Kotka and Hamina.

In most cases, large gas stations aren’t places people yearn for and this one here isn’t, either. It’s a pass-through place, where people cross other people’s lives for a few minutes or a few hours, because they are waiting for something. Outside, a coin is stuck in the dirt. It’s a ruble coin. An unusual souvenir, exotic somehow and actually completely without value by now.

When we return in the direction of Helsinki, going west, we encounter a coach with Russian plates. Seems like the waiting will be over soon.