Russia is trying to recruit asylum seekers as spies and send them to Finland under the guise of refugees, Helsinki intelligence has warned.
More than 1,000 people have crossed the eastern border with Russia into Finland in recent months.
Finland’s Security Intelligence Service (Spo) has accused the Russian government of targeting some asylum seekers in an attempt to induce them to commit espionage.
“You can try to get them to cooperate in a variety of ways, including by applying pressure, by tying cooperation requirements to exit conditions, and by promising things like financial benefits,” Supo said.
The agency told state broadcaster Yell that it would not comment further because covert operations were still ongoing.
But Supo added that this was not a large-scale operation among people who fled to Finland from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Around 1,300 non-EU nationals, mainly from Syria, Somalia, Yemen and Iraq, have crossed the border since August.
Supo is working to vet new arrivals in case any of them pose a threat to national security.
Relations between Helsinki and Moscow deteriorated following President Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
After Finland ended its decades-long non-aligned relationship and joined NATO, Russia warned of “countermeasures.”
Last year, Finnish ministers accused Russia of trying to destabilize the country by weaponizing migrants who try to cross the 830-mile border between the two countries.
In October, the Finnish Border Guard announced that Moscow was seeing an increasing number of migrants reaching the border without proper documentation.
“Hybrid War”
The tactics mirror those used by Putin’s close ally Alexander Lukashenko in 2021, and are part of what the Nordic countries say is a hybrid war that Russia is waging against the EU and NATO. is forming.
The Belarusian president has retaliated against the sanctions by forcing tens of thousands of migrants to the border with Poland.
Finland closed its border with Russia for two weeks in November in response to a rise in illegal immigration, then did so again a month later.
Norway’s PST Police Intelligence Service announced earlier this month that some hostile countries are trying to recruit migrants entering Europe as spies.
PST counterintelligence chief Atle Tangen did not specifically criticize the Kremlin’s recruitment efforts, but did mention the influx into Norway via Russia in 2015.
“These are not intelligence agents in the traditional sense, but people who have been tricked or intimidated into doing their jobs by intelligence agencies,” he said on a podcast run by PST.
Norway shares a 190-mile border with Russia in the Arctic Circle. In 2015, the Scandinavian country took in thousands of refugees from Russia during a surge of refugees from Syria to Europe.
Most crossed the border on bicycles given to them by Russian authorities.