Norway may put a fence along part or all of the 123-mile border it shares with Russia, a minister said, a move inspired by a similar project in its Nordic neighbor Finland. "A border fence is very interesting, not only because it can act as a deterrent but also because it contains sensors and technology that allow you to detect if people are moving close to the border," Justice Minister Emilie Enger Mehl said in an interview by the public broadcaster NRK published late Saturday. She said the government is looking at several measures to beef up security on the border with Russia in the Arctic north, such as fencing, increasing the number of border staff, or stepping up monitoring.
The Storskog border station, which has witnessed only a handful of illegal border crossing attempts in the past few years, is the only official crossing point into Norway from Russia, the AP reports. Should the security situation in the delicate Arctic area worsen, the Norwegian government is ready to close the border on short notice, said Enger Mehl, who visited Finland this summer to learn about how the entire 830-mile Finnish-Russian land border was closed. The Finnish government was prompted to close all crossing points from Russia to Finland in late 2023 after more than 1,300 third-country migrants without proper documentation or visas—an unusually high number—entered the country in three months, shortly after the nation became a member of NATO.
To prevent Moscow using migrants in what the Finnish government calls Russia's "hybrid warfare," Helsinki is currently building fences with a total length of up to 124 miles in separate sections along the border zone that makes up part of NATO's northern flank and serves as the European Union's external border, per the AP. Finnish border officials say fences equipped with top-notch surveillance equipment—to be located mostly around crossing points—are needed to better monitor and control any migrants attempting to cross over from Russia and give officials time to react. "It's a measure that may become relevant on all or part of the border" between Norway and Russia, Enger Mehl said.
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