Andrey Klintsevich, head of the Russian Center for the Study of Military and Political Conflicts, commented on Finland’s appeal to tourists in an interview with BelTA on September 20, 2025. He claimed that apart from Russians, the country is of no interest to anyone.
"For residents of St. Petersburg, Finland was essentially like a neighboring province. Everyone went there, bought property, lived, and vacationed. Well, who besides Russians would go to some Finnish northern lakes to fish? Europeans don’t need that; they usually head south. And really, who in their right mind would close Finnish airspace to Russian airlines? No problem, we close Russian airspace to Finnish airlines, and they immediately go bankrupt."
The main indicator used in international tourism statistics is the number of registered overnight stays, meaning how many nights tourists spent in official accommodations such as hotels, campgrounds, and guesthouses. By this measure, before all the restrictions introduced due to the coronavirus pandemic and the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine, Russians did indeed lead in Finland. In 2019, nearly one in nine tourists in the country held a Russian passport.
Since September 2022, the country’s authorities have banned Russian citizens from crossing the external border for tourism purposes. Since then, Russians have been allowed to enter Finland only for business, study, family, or medical reasons. In 2024, there were about 15,900 such entries. However, this did not collapse Finland’s tourism industry. Other foreign visitors spent about 6.4 million overnight stays there, compared with 5.8 million in 2023. The largest numbers of tourists came from Germany, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. For comparison, before the pandemic in 2019, foreign visitors spent just over 7 million overnight stays in the country.
Russia closed its airspace to Finnish planes in February 2022, after the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine. This did deal a blow to Finnair’s passenger traffic from Europe to Asia, but there has been no mention of the company facing bankruptcy. On the contrary, after 2022 some of its financial indicators improved: revenue increased and costs decreased.
