DThat winter has suddenly descended on Finland again. The wind blows snowflakes in front of it, everything seems to be drowning in the white-grey light. It’s April and Ilka Tuomicco puts on his bald head his fur hat and puts on his gloves and thick jacket. It is on the Finnish border, with Russia on the other side. Tuomikko manages the Nujama border station in the far southeast of Finland. He has been living here for three years with the Finnish border guard for almost thirty years. He wants to show how it is at the border, because even politically, winter has come again for relations with neighbors. Finland is now realizing its security policy, and even joining NATO in the summer is increasing.

At the border station of Tuomikko you can see what is happening on this snowy day: almost nothing. Tuomikko walks on empty streets to a checkpoint, a car with a Russian license plate pulls up. This rarely happens here. Otherwise it’s just empty streets, red traffic lights, snow. In front of a gray house, the flags of Finnish and The European Union, There is no trace of the Russian border station, it is a few hundred meters away. The proximity to the older neighbor is familiar to him, says Tuomicco, who has spent his entire life on the eastern frontier. In Russia, however, he was only on business to talk to allies on the other side. But they don’t do that anymore.