Kaidi Peterkop doesn’t think of herself as a solider. And with her studies and her recent move to Tallinn, Estonia’s picturesque capital, the 22-year old student certainly doesn’t have much time to think about a Third World War.
But Peterkop — with her training in small unit tactics, vehicle identification, and battlefield medicine — is one of thousands of unlikely volunteers who have answered the call to duty in response to a confrontation that NATO generals fear could lead to war with Russia.
“Of course we think about it,” said Peterkop, a volunteer in the Estonian Defence League, the country’s equivalent of Britain’s Territorial Army, a crucial element of this tiny country’s deterrent.
“But we don’t worry about it, because we know what we can do,” she said at a meeting in the group’s Tallinn headquarters.
Ever since Russia annexed Crimea and launched an unacknowledged war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, with their large Russian-speaking minorities, have feared they could be next on Vladimir Putin’s list for “reunification.” Since 2014, jets from NATO air forces including the RAF have patrolled Estonia’s skies. In spring an 800-strong battalion of British troops equipped with tanks will arrive as part of what the alliance calls an “enhanced forward presence.” The mission is to deter Russia by demonstrating Western commitment to Baltic security.
Estonia joined NATO and the EU in 2004 and is one of only five members to currently meet the alliance’s defence spending benchmark of two per cent of GDP (Latvia and Lithuania say they will achieve this in the next few years).
For a country so dependent on its alliances, the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and the rise of populism across Europe is worrying.
“If the world turns from a rules-based system of international relations and returns to one of realpolitik, it is small countries on the periphery who will pay the price,” said Marko Mihkelson, chairman of the Estonian parliaments foreign affairs committee.
The Estonian government has commissioned a study into the security implications of Brexit and is planning to increase spending on diplomacy to make sure its voice is heard in allied capitals.
NATO commanders believe Russia has already run large-scale war games to practice a pincer movement of forces operating from Kaliningrad and the Russian-allied Belarus, to close the “Suwalki gap,” Poland’s narrow 60-mile border with Lithuania and the only land route between the Baltic States and the rest of NATO.
If Putin gave the order, there would be little NATO or the Baltic’s own tiny armed forces could do to stop his forces overrunning all three republics.
War games run by the Rand Corporation, a U.S. defence think-tank, have predicted the Russian army could be in the Baltic capitals of Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius in less than three days.
The EDL, or Kaitselit, reported a surge in membership after Russia’s operations in Ukraine in 2014 and now boasts 18,000 members that can be mobilized at 24 hours’ notice.
In the past, members have been called up in response to flooding and forest fires. But in the event of war, many of them would take to the country’s deep forests to wage a guerrilla campaign.
If that invasion comes, it will probably begin as it did in Crimea and East Ukraine: not with massed tanks crashing through border posts, but with Kremlin agents stirring up unrest among the ethnic Russian communities in Estonia and Latvia.
There are about one million ethnic Russians in the Baltic States, mostly in north-eastern Estonia and eastern Latvia, where they make about a quarter of each nation’s population.
That makes the Estonian border town of Narva, where two massive medieval fortresses glare at one another across the river separating Russia from the EU, a potential Ground Zero for a 21st century confrontation.
With 90 per cent of its population of 58,000 either Russian or Russian speaking, Narva is probably the largest Russian city in the EU and more ethnically homogenous than Crimea at the time of annexation.
Like Ukraine’s Donbas region, Estonia’s north east is an economically deprived centre of heavy industry with a potentially porous land border with Russia. And tensions over language rights and conflicting views of the Second World War, both key ingredients in the cocktail of resentment that the Kremlin’s propaganda machine fuelled and exploited in Crimea and Donbas in 2014, have caused strife in the past.
Vladimir Alexeyev is a former chairman of the trade union at the local power plant, one of the major employers here, and a prominent activist in the Russian community.
Today he insists talk of separatism in Narva is “complete idiocy” dreamt up by “paranoid” NATO generals. But in 1993, he was among a group of Narvan activists who drafted a constitution and organized a referendum on autonomy remarkably similar to that held in Crimea two years ago.
A native of Russia’s Tver region who settled in Narva after leaving the Red Army in the early Seventies, Alexeyev says he never had any doubts about Estonian independence.
“Ever since they formed the Baltic Way,” he said, referring to the human chain Baltic activists formed linking Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius in 1989, “It was clear to me then that they were a nation who wanted their independence and they should have it,” he said.
For 30 years the Baltic states have been degrading Second World War veterans, denying them citizenship
But he soon found himself one of thousands of ethnic Russians left stateless after newly independent Estonia and Latvia made fluency in their national languages a condition of citizenship, and joined other activists in an attempt to win local self rule.
The movement petered out peacefully when the Estonian authorities declined to recognize it, but for a few days, the region appeared to teeter on the brink of bloodshed.
Alexeyev says he still thinks autonomy would have been a good thing and that grievances against the Estonian authorities remain, especially in relation to the language law.
He himself remains a “stateless person” with a grey passport. But he says a Crimean-style uprising is impossible. NATO and Estonian planners fear, however, that Russian officials and media could attempt to stoke discontent from a distance.
Maria Zakharova, the spokesman for the Russian foreign ministry, recently issued a shrill condemnation of the Baltic States’ treatment of their Russian minority in response to criticism of a Holocaust-themed ice dance performance by Tatiania Navka, the wife of Putin’s spokesman.
“For 30 years the Baltic states have been degrading Second World War veterans, denying them citizenship…” she said in a Facebook post written in capitals. These days, most Narvans are Estonian citizens, and many “stateless” individuals have traded their grey passports for Russian ones.
The events of 2014 seem to have shocked the Estonian authorities into wooing its Russian minority.
By 2015, the government had launched ETV Plus, a Russian language state television channel, in an effort to offer an alternative to the Russian federal channels most people here watch.
Next year key government institutions, including the interior ministry’s police college, will move from Tallinn to Narva.
The impact of these soft-power projects is difficult to gauge. Viewing figures for the television station, for example, have so far been disappointing.
But for supposed markers of a geopolitical fault line, the twin fortresses on the Russian Estonian border – both partially maintained by EU funds – are quiet.
The gun ports are empty, the ramparts patrolled only by lost tourists, and the bridge between the two bustling with road and foot traffic.
Checkpoint Charlie it is not.
The residents of Narva benefit from slightly higher living standards than their Russian counterparts.
That is more or less the opposite of the situation in Crimea and east Ukraine, where many pro-Russian activists looked forward to much higher Russian levels of pensions, wages, and general living standards after “reunification.”
Perhaps most reassuringly, ordinary people on either side of this supposed flashpoint border appear to have almost zero regard for the rhetoric coming out of Moscow and Washington.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Nina, a market trader selling honey at the Ivanogorod market on the Russian side of the bridge, when asked if she was concerned about the imminent arrival of a British army battalion in Estonia next spring. “It’s politicians’ hot air. No one thinks there is going to be a war.”
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