The checkpoint at Koidula is on the Estonian-Russian border, one of three such stations in the Southeast of the country, and includes a road border crossing.

The ministry in summer approached other state institutions, including other ministries, to sound out their opinion on optimizing the Koidula checkpoint's work; the finance ministry supported closing the facility altogether, saying it would make savings of nearly €11 million which could be re-purposed for maintaining the border infrastructure elsewhere.

Koidula is around 30 kilometers from the checkpoint at Luhamaa, to the South, while the Saatse cordon is a few kilometers further north from Koidula.

While work to put in a proper border infrastructure in southeastern Estonia, including fencing, was ongoing prior to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine from February 2022, this event concentrated minds further on the work, and also led to a 31 percent fall in traffic at Koidula, between 2022 and 2023.

However, the more recent closure to road traffic, by Russia, of the northernmost of Estonia's eastern border checkpoints, at Narva, has led to a rise in workloads at Koidula and Luhamaa.

Furthermore, analysis commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior revealed that the closure of the border crossing would significantly impact on the lives of local people, and in a negative way.

The ministry's border security and migration department chief Janek Mägi said of these results that: "In the analysis, it was highlighted particularly clearly that one aspects relate to savings, and another to what affects the community. Examples of these include job losses and therefore also a reduction in local government capacity, which in turn can lead to people moving away."

Mägi added that cross-border employment is not viable now, and with that labor flight comes a reduced tax take and thus local government revenues fall.

"Therefore, based on this mathematical and socio-economic analysis, The position of the minister of the interior and his ministry is that closing this border checkpoint is not a practical step at this point in time," he went on.

Decisions do not need to be made in the long-term either, he added, citing the example of Finland, which has closed its eastern border checkpoints on a rolling basis, with the decision reviewed at regular intervals, usually of around a month.

"Commercial traffic with Russia has been constantly falling, and the movement of people is falling, yet it is not reasonable to draw far-reaching conclusions based on current trends," he concluded.

The border in the vicinity of Koidula also cuts across Setomaa, an ethnically distinctive region whose community often has family and cultural ties on both sides of the border.

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