Vimba vimba Sea and Baltic Sea, and in the North Sea basin in the Elbe and Ems drainages. There are records from Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Iran, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and Ukraine. The vimba bream is a semi-anadromous fish, which migrates from brackish water to rivers for spawning. Permanently fresh-water populations exist as well. In the Baltic Sea the species is distributed up to 62°-63° N in Sweden and Finland. Vimba breams move in small shoals along the sea coast, feeding
Finland–Russia border Finnish reindeer fence. Unlike other Western countries, the government of Finland did not protect illegal border crossers but returned them to the Soviet authorities if captured. Illegal border crossers had to get through Finland to e.g. Sweden in order to defect to the West. In the Moscow Armistice signed on 1944 between Finland, Soviet Union and United Kingdom, a small peninsula towards the Gulf of Finland, Porkkala, was rented to Soviet Union as a military base. This created in effect a southern border crossing to the Soviet exclave, operating all the way to 1956. Border crossings were in and .