Russia’s war of aggression has also had significant consequences for logistics in the Baltic Sea region. The West’s trade with Russia has declined dramatically, and Western logistics operators have largely withdrawn from Russia. In a sense, you could therefore say that Finland is once again logistically alone in the north-east of Europe. The collapse of Finnish trade with the East also means that maritime transport accounts for an even larger proportion of our foreign trade, further increasing the island effect.

Together with the Fraunhofer Center for Maritime Logistics and Services (CML), Fintraffic’s Vessel Traffic Services has started a research project in which Finland’s VTS’ marine VHF traffic will be developed in the upcoming years utilizing automatic speech recognition. In the future, the speech recognition system utilizing artificial intelligence will convert talk radio traffic into text form in real time for Fintraffic’s Vessel Traffic Centres. This will support the correct interpretation of messages, particularly in abnormal situations.

Uncertainty in the economy, the now-established trend for hybrid working, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are still impacting road traffic volumes in Finland. During the last quarter of 2022, there were notably fewer passenger cars and heavy-duty vehicles on highways and main roads than a year earlier. In contrast, Lapland had its busiest Christmas season ever in terms of air traffic. All these insights were gleaned from Traffic Management Company Fintraffic’s October–December statistics.