Estonia will offer Ukrainian war refugees shelter in Finland under an Estonian-Finnish agreement on receiving refugees, BBC Russia said on Monday.
BBC recalled how the refugee aid system in Estonia is overloaded, which is why the two countries came to the decision to offer the refugees transferral to Finland. Special bus and ferry connections are to be established to that end.
Finland is much larger a country than Estonia in terms of surface area (over sevenfold) and population (fourfold). Regardless of the disparity, Estonia has welcomed nearly the same number of Ukrainian war refugees as Finland had. The BBC said that over 40,000 refugees found shelter in Estonia. The country’s authorities said in December 2022 that from the beginning of the war the country has welcomed over 115,000 refugees from Ukraine. Half of them have continued their journey elsewhere.
The provision of apartments for long-term stay is the main issue Estonia has been struggling with, Finland’s public broadcaster Yle said last week. The abovementioned agreement signed between the two countries is based on Finland’s continuous capacity to provide such lodging. To help Estonia out, Helsinki decided to welcome a quota of 50-100 Ukrainian refugees weekly. For the time being, it is difficult to estimate how many refugees will avail themselves of this opportunity.
Although winter has already come, Finland has not recorded any new waves of Ukrainian refugees. The Finnish Interior Ministry assessed that the situation could change with future Russian attacks on the Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
Finnish authorities estimated that around 40,000 Ukrainian citizens would look for shelter in the country in 2023. Its Interior Ministry said in May 2022 that some 40,000 stay applications filed by Ukrainian refugees in Finland amounted to 1 percent of all applications filed in the entire European Union where the number amounted to four million.
SOURCE: TVP
