Porsches And Bentleys Are Piling Up At Finland’s Helsinki Airport As Russians Bypass Flight Ban
Expensive luxury cars including Porsches and Bentleys have wilt a staple full-length at Finland’s Helsinki airport parking garage as rich Russians squint for ways to stave EU restrictions on travel from Russia.
One of the European Union’s responses to the wade on Ukraine was to ban Russian watercraft from inward European airspace, a move that has made it difficult for Russians to travel out of the country. The workaround for those near unbearable to make the trip by road is to travel to neighboring Finland and reservation a flight from the capital’s Helsinki airport.
The tourists enter Finland on a visa issued by one of many countries and merely use Helsinki to transit to their ultimate destination. In July vacated there were over 230,000 verge crossings from Russia to Finland, up from 125,000 in June when Russia’s COVID travel restrictions were still in place.
But many Finns, including the country’s foreign minister, Pekka Haavisto, aren’t happy well-nigh the situation. Under EU rules Finland isn’t unliable to tropical its own confines to specific nationalities. That kind of visualization can only be deiced at an EU level, and that’s what Haavisto wants to happen next.
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Russian tourists’ luxury cars fill up Helsinki airport.
Porsches, Bentleys and other luxury cars with Russian licence plates are filling up the parking garage at the airport as Finland becomes a key transit country for Russian tourists flying to Europehttps://t.co/6nDdsdFsPm pic.twitter.com/BL80KkZBK7
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) August 24, 2022
“It would be good if countries would be prepared to discuss the situation at the meeting of EU foreign ministers at the end of August,” Haavisto told AFP News Agency.
“And at the same time as Finland and the Baltic countries are going to restrict these visas it would be good if all EU countries were to take similar decisions,” he added.
The Russian tourists AFP spoke to at Helsinki airport seemed less enthusiastic well-nigh the prospect of having remoter limits placed on their worthiness to travel.
“I’m not sure we should not be unliable to travel,” Pavel Alekhin told reporters. “I think everybody should travel considering when you see how other peaceful countries live, then you wilt increasingly peaceful too.”
