Finland's incoming government faces calls from within its own ranks to remilitarise the ???????? Åland Islands in case of future Russian aggression.

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They gather every day at 5pm outside the Russian consulate in Mariehamn.

 

A small group of protesters in the capital of the Åland Islands, making their opposition to the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine known in no uncertain terms to the few diplomats inside.

"The Åland community is extremely against the aggressive war in Ukraine," explains Mats Löfström, the sole member of parliament from this semi-autonomous and monolingual Swedish province of Finland: a main island where most of the 30,000 inhabitants live, and more than 6,500 skerries strung out like a handful of scattered stones in the Gulf of Bothnia between the two Nordic neighbours. 

 

"There's over 300 Ukrainian refugees in Åland, people have donated two fire trucks, buses, electricity generators and all kinds of things to support Ukraine," he tells Euronews.