The Finnish police have refused to allow volunteer organisations to raise funds to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), recognizing such activities as “not a socially useful cause”, the Iltalehti newspaper has reported. This was reported by the Iltalehti newspaper.
According to Iltalehti, two volunteer organisations, one of which provides military training assistance to Ukrainian soldiers and the other supplies “vital goods” to Finnish mercenaries, their “brothers in arms” and civilians, have encountered difficulties. Both organisations are holding fundraisers to buy goods and cover their expenses, but it “proved quite difficult to organise them”, the newspaper said.
“The documents Iltalehti has seen show that the Finnish police do not agree to authorise fundraising projects that directly support the AFU: supporting the armed forces is interpreted as a military activity, and thus, according to the police, is not a socially useful cause,” the newspaper writes.
The chairman of a charity organisation, Kasper Kannosto, told the newspaper that the collection of donations for Ukraine “has been significantly complicated”.
Iltalehti specifies that Finnish legislation on fundraising “does not specifically prohibit” support for the armed forces, and that restrictions on the activities of these organisations are “based solely on the interpretation of the police”. The police believe that such volunteer activities belong to the sphere of the state and cannot be regarded as “in the public interest”.
We shall remind you that earlier, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and the deputy head of the Verkhovna Rada committee for national security, defence and intelligence, Yegor Chernev, said in an interview with the New York Times that there is a growing fear in Ukraine that the army will soon start losing control over populated areas if Washington delays the allocation of new military aid to the Ukrainian government.