Nearly all of Thursday’s papers lead with news of the fall-out from last week’s shooting down of Malaysian flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine. Most outlets print pictures of mourners in Holland lining the route of the grim convoy of bodies of the 298 victims.

President Sauli Niinistö’s phonecall yesterday to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is widely reported. “The call was initiated by Finland,” Iltalehti says, adding that Niinistö urged his Russian counterpart to co-operate fully to ensure a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Putin, meanwhile, repeated his call for an independent investigation into what happened.

The deepening crisis in Ukraine also affords the two tabloids an opportunity for ratcheting up the fear and sense of threat over Finland’s eastern neighbour. “If Russia’s economy collapses…” is the headline in Iltalehti, warning that a financial crash next door would “take tens of thousands of jobs out of Finland”, and put a stop to the annual one billion euros of income brought by visiting Russian tourists.

Ilta-Sanomat, on the other hand, prefers to look back. Under the headline “What next, Russia?”, the paper lists “the eight ways Russia exerts its power over its neighbour”. Cue a run-down of the Finland-Russia scuffles of the past few years, including the row over child protection, this spring’s breach of Finnish airspace by Russian military jets, and what the paper calls an “information war”, citing claims that the English-language news website Finnbay, which publishes news about Finland, was funded by Russia. A subsequent investigation – which Ilta-Sanomat omits to mention – in fact found no evidence of any Russian involvement in the website’s news-gathering.

Child safety checks ignored

Helsingin Sanomat carries the news that the vast majority of Finland’s public bodies and organisations are not making use of new checks to assess a volunteer’s suitability to work with children.

A new law introduced in May made it possible for criminal record background checks to be carried out on volunteers who will be working with children, for instance in sports clubs.

But the paper reports that, in the ten weeks since the new law came into force, only 70 volunteer workers have been subject to background checks, with just a tiny pool of municipalities and charities making use of the protective measures.

“It really is a small number,” a manager for the Legal Register Centre, which processes the applications, says. “The working group who prepared the legislation estimated that up to 40,000 applications would be made to us every year,” she says.

Half of the volunteers that have been checked come from the child protection charity the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare, the paper says, with other checks being made by Helsinki and Vantaa municipalities.

A spokesperson for the Finnish association of sports clubs Valo tells the paper that many clubs aren’t aware that the checks are now possible. “Raising awareness requires a lot of work,” he says. “Clubs will be considering this issue over August and September, when volunteers for the new season are being recruited,” he says.

Finland’s lost year

It’s not been a good month for Finnish jobs, with mobile chip maker Broadcom announcing 600 layoffs yesterday, following Microsoft’s slashing of 1,100 posts last week. So it perhaps comes as little surprise that Kauppalehti’s overview of Finland’s economic outlook is similarly bleak.

Under the front-page headline “the lost year”, the trade daily publishes a graph of leading banks’ assessments of how the country’s GDP has changed in the first six months of 2014. With one exception, all the figures show either stagnation or contraction.

Inside, the paper offers predictions from some of Finland’s most influential economists on what’s still to come. Suffice to say that the words “disappointment” and “downwards” feature heavily, with little promise of growth to come, given market uncertainty, growing joblessness and the situation in Russia.

Danske Bank’s economist, however, does forecast that there are hopes for a weak recovery, if the growing economies of China and the US can help spark demand for exports.