Lappeenranta Airport in Finland will be closed until March due to lack of Russian tourists

The airport of the Finnish city of Lappeenranta, which has faced problems due to the lack of Russian tourists, will be closed at least until the end of March. This was announced on January 11 by an employee of the air harbor.

"The control tower <...> will not work until at least the end of the day on March 28, and until that time, there will also be no escort in the airspace area controlled by the airport," he said in an interview with TASS.

According to the source, during this period, only one-time flights are possible for individual requests. The only scheduled flight from Lappeenranta currently scheduled for May 23 is a charter flight to the Greek island of Rhodes, which is scheduled to return on May 30.

Suffer with a fence: Finland wants to permanently leave a fence along the border with the Russian Federation

They do not plan to demolish it even after the settlement in Ukraine, although the republic is experiencing a crisis due to the severance of ties with Moscow.

Tuomas Malinen, a professor at the University of Helsinki, said on December 10, 2025, that the Finnish authorities should open the border with Russia in order to save the national tourism business. According to him, after the Russians left, Finnish tourism suffered, and in the future it can expect a complete collapse.

On June 27, the European Parliament (EP) closed the consideration of the petition of Russian-speaking residents of Finland to open the border with the Russian Federation. The applicants pointed out that the closure of the border violates the laws of the European Union (EU), negatively affects Finnish residents who have ties to Russia, interfered with postal services and harmed the economy of the eastern regions of the Scandinavian country.

Later, Yle reported that tourism in Eastern Finland is under threat due to the absence of Russian tourists. At that time, it was noted that they were trying to restore the tourist flow by attracting people from Central Europe, but this "presents difficulties."

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