Last year Finnish embassies and consulates processed 1,260,000 visa applications, and nearly 95 percent of them were handled by Finnish consular staff in Russia.
Vesa Häkkinen of the Unit for Passports and Visas says that Russians are travelling more because of the country’s economic growth. Häkkinen says that the figures demonstrate rising interest in tourism among middle-class Russians.
“Shopping trips to eastern Finland have increased, but you can also see a lot of Russians in Helsinki,” says Häkkinen.
The majority of Finnish visa applications in Russia are handled at the Saint Petersburg consulate, which received more than 930,000 visa applications last year.
More than half of Nigerian visa applications rejected
Ukraine, Thailand, China and India provide the most visa applicants after Russia. The Finnish embassy in Kiev saw slightly fewer than 13,000 applications last year, while in both Bangkok and Beijing Finnish consular staff dealt with just under 7,000. There were 6,500 Finnish visa applications at the embassy in New Delhi.
The highest number of rejected visa applications came from Nigeria, where more than half of those applying for permission to visit Finland were denied. According to Häkkinen, they were generally denied to prevent illegal entry into the passport-free Schengen area—Finland could be a transit country for people trying to reach other Schengen countries. The rejected applications in Nigeria often include falsified documents.
