I’m a Finn, and my people have always had that special, famously awkward relationship with Russia. On one hand, the everyday attitudes are quite harsh and prejudiced, even racist. On the other, there’s still this stink of self-censorship (or Finladiserung, as Germans called it) with which we and our media had to live through the entire Cold War. Old habits seem to die hard. Partly it’s surely due to history -I don’t know how many careers, even lives, were ruined in 60-70’s by a stigma of being anti-Soviet- and nowadays Russia is also our most important trade partner, once again.

And after all Russians form today the biggest, and usually the wealthiest too, group of tourists coming to Finland, and are similarly the biggest foreign population that lives here. So I reckon that attitudes towards them are changing into something better.

I’d say that now it would be a turn of our politicians to show that the world is changing and Finland -or the whole Western Europe, for that matter- can come to normal, straight terms with Russia and its wrongdoings. At end of November there will be an EU-Russia summit in Helsinki and there’s an Amnesty campaign for bringing human rights abuses onto the agenda. It will probably do very little but you can nonetheless sign it here.

Peace to Anna Politkovskaya’s memory. Humanity has lost a very brave woman.

We’ll deal with them the way we deal with all external powers. We find a reasonable compromise. We don’t have to love or admire Russia to have sensible cooperation.