Russia’s war is splitting the indigenous Sami in two

The sami EUare used to change. The indigenous people has been pushed north by settlers and pulled south by economics. They now number just 70,000, a small share of the population of the Sapmi, their ancestral homeland, which stretches across Scandinavia and the Kola peninsula. Now Russian aggression has split them in two.Since Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, border closings have cut off Russian Sami from their kin in Norway, Sweden and Finland. This winter Finland shut its border after influxes of migrants, leaving Norway’s Storskog the only open crossing from Russia to the . Some visa agreements have been cancelled. Russian-registered cars are banned.