Putin’s next target - Estonia is girding itself for an invasion as its Russian minority grows restless – The Economist – 13.06.25
- Michael Julien
- Jun 16
- 7 min read
On a grey afternoon in April, in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, Berit Osula, a blonde woman in her 40s with pink lipstick and long, mascara-painted lashes, presented her fingers to the manicurist.
“The gun oil is terrible for my nail polish,” she joked. Osula is the mother of two and, like 30,000 other Estonians, a volunteer in her country’s defence league. (Volunteer soldiers vastly outnumber Estonia’s professional army of a little over 7,000.) She had watched Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in tears and was shocked by the massacres carried out by the occupying forces.
She thought: what if it happened here? “I wanted to protect my family and myself,” she told me. “I didn’t want to sit at home afraid and asking for help.”
Osula is now a corporal, one of six women among the 200 volunteers of Alpha company. She specialises in mortars. Defence-league volunteers are required to train for a minimum of 48 hours a year – Osula signs up for every exercise she can. Her husband, Otto, and her children wish she was around more, but they understand her devotion. Osula pointed out a bruise through the ripped knee of her trendy jeans. “Last weekend I was carrying the machinegun and it was raining and muddy. It wasn’t easy, running long distances. The machinegun weighs about 12kg, and we’re already wearing armour and packs which are another 20kg.”
Over the past two years, Osula has done things she thought were beyond her. She was proud to tell me she came first in her machinegun course. She was scheduled to participate in an exercise with the regular army the day after we talked. The forecast said that rain was likely and she was thinking about what to pack. The manicurist applied pale-pink gels and Osula held out her fingers to admire the finish: shiny, tough, unscratchable.In the new era of American retrenchment, Estonia could very well be where Europe and NATO’s defence is first tested
More than 4,000 Estonians signed up as volunteer soldiers after the invasion of Ukraine. Estonians are acutely aware of their vulnerability as a little nation of just 1.4m people, roughly a fifth of whom are ethnic Russians. Vladimir Putin has voiced ambitions as expansionist as those of Tsar Peter I – known in Russia, but not Estonia, as Peter the Great – who wrested Estonia from the Swedes in the 18th century.
Estonia and the Baltic states remained part of the tsarist empire for 200 years before achieving independence in 1918 after the October revolution. At the end of the second world war, they were seized by the Soviet Union.
Like Latvia and Lithuania, Estonia regained its independence after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. All three joined the EU and NATO in 2004. The smallest and most northerly of the Baltic countries, Estonia is entirely flat, with Russia on one side and the Baltic Sea on the other. It lacks, as one Estonian politician wryly put it to me, “any strategic depth”.
For a number of years, Russia has engaged in a covert campaign of intimidation and disruption against Estonia using cyber-attacks, undercover agents, sabotage and legions of disinformation bots on social media. The war in Ukraine has sharpened fears of invasion, but peace in Ukraine could be no less threatening if it freed up Russian troops for an attack. In response, NATO is building up a presence in the region; there are currently over 2,000 troops stationed in Estonia. In the new era of American retrenchment, Estonia could very well be where Europe and NATO’s defence is first tested.
Two crenellated fortresses, one in the Estonian town of Narva, the other in the Russian town of Ivangorod, face each other across a river, just 100 metres apart. They testify to centuries of frontier battles. Estonians like to show off the handsome new promenade along their side and point out that the Russians, who were also granted EU funds for a similar riverside development in 2019, have built only a short path.
Camo chameleon Berit Osula, a volunteer with the Estonian Defence League, in full battledress (opening image). Pictured at home with her daughter Liisbeth (top), and her military equipment (bottom)
Narva, despite being in Estonia, is populated almost entirely by ethnic Russians. The bridge over the river is now closed to vehicles and I watched a queue of pedestrians on the Estonian side shuffle slowly forwards. Since 2022 a series of enhanced checks have lengthened what would otherwise be a journey of a few minutes.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities have set up a screen and loudspeakers on their side of the river every May 9th – the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany – and broadcast the military parade in Moscow. A crowd of Russians in Narva gather to watch from across the river.
For the past three years, Maria Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova, the director of the Narva museum that is housed in the fortress, has defiantly hung from the battlements a large banner of Putin’s face, with the words “war criminal” below it. In January this year a court in Moscow issued an arrest warrant for Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova on the charge of spreading false information.
Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova has blue eyes, a china-doll face and a soft voice that belies her steel. In the park outside the museum she has erected a series of panels describing, in Estonian, Russian and English, the Soviet bombing of Narva in 1944, as the Red Army advanced against the occupying Germans. The barrage levelled Narva; its centre has been rebuilt with grey, brick housing blocks. You can still see the humps and depressions of shell craters and trenches along its grassy esplanades.
Estonia’s independence has been betrayed twice in grand bargains between great powers: in 1940 the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union carved up Poland and the Baltic states. Five years later, at the Yalta Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt ceded the Baltic countries to the Soviet sphere of influence. Estonians remember the Soviet occupations that began in 1940 and 1944 as a terrifying time of deportations (at least 10% of Estonia’s population were killed or sent to the gulag during the second world war and its aftermath). For many, the intervening German occupation, following the collapse of the alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, felt less repressive, though Estonia’s 4,000 Jews either fled or were rounded up and killed, and Soviet POWs endured terrible conditions in work camps.
Estonians remember the Soviet period as one of repression. Estonians hid their national flags and passed down their memories of democracy to their children
Caught between two totalitarian regimes, Estonians fought on both sides, sometimes brother against brother. In the Narva museum there is a room full of mannequins dressed in military garb from different centuries. An Estonian soldier in the rough khaki wool of the Red Army faces a soldier wearing the crisp grey lines of the Estonian SS Wiking division, with the eagle and swastika badge on his shoulder. I asked my guide why both mannequins are blindfolded. He said that this was the only way they could face each other.
In the aftermath of the war, bands of former soldiers throughout the Baltics, known as the Forest Brothers, hid in the countryside and continued to resist the Soviet occupation into the 1950s. The Estonian population of Narva, whose homes had been destroyed, was not allowed to return; instead the town was repopulated with Russians recruited to work in a large textile factory.
Nearly 500,000 people from across the Soviet Union moved to Estonia during the post-war communist era. The Russians who came to Estonia in the 1960s and 1970s believed they were building a bright future – Estonia was a centre for electronics in the Soviet Union. But Estonians remember the Soviet period as one of repression. Estonians hid their national flags and passed down their memories of democracy to their children in whispers. Many Estonians are related to someone who was deported. One Estonian told me about his grandfather, who spent a decade in a Siberian gulag. When Estonia received its independence, his grandfather couldn’t understand why they didn’t just send all the Russians back.
Past is present Maria Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova (bottom) is the embattled director of the Narva museum (top) which stands on the river that forms a border with Russia. More than 30 years on, Russians have gone from being politically dominant to a minority underclass, though many in Narva still feel an attachment to the Soviet version of history. For years, young married couples would have their picture taken in front of a tank on a plinth that served as a war memorial, until it was removed, amid grumbling and complaint, a few months after the invasion of Ukraine.
“We have a permanent conflict with our local politicians” – most of whom are ethnic Russian – “about my point of view of the museum’s mission,” Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova told me. As a result of the exhibition about the bombing of Narva, said Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova, “there was a wave of threats at me and museum staff.” This April, a historian was assaulted leaving a local restaurant allegedly for lecturing about the Soviet destruction of Narva. Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova remains undeterred by the controversy. “It gives me adrenaline and a mission.” She thumped her fist lightly on the table for emphasis.
Russian drones regularly hover intimidatingly over the Narva museum. In 2024, under cover of darkness, the Russians removed the buoys in the river that demarcate the border. These tactics are part of the hybrid warfare that Russia has long deployed in other former Soviet republics. Estonians are used to constant harassment. In 2007 Estonia suffered one of the first ever cyber-attacks by a foreign power when Russian hackers targeted government and financial websites.
More than 30 years on, Russians have gone from being politically dominant to a minority underclass, though many in Narva still feel an attachment to the Soviet version of history.
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Wendell Steavenson won the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2024 for her reporting for 1843 magazine from Ukraine and Israel
By Wendell Steavenson with Maris Hellrand
Reporting for this piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center
PHOTOGRAPHS: BIRGIT PÜVE
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