Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are such small countries that if Russia wants to take a bite from it, since it took a bite in 2008 and a bite in 2014 and 2022, it will simply swallow them. To reduce their teeth, they have armed themselves and formed alliances with Europe and the United States. But when President Donald Trump dressed up Ukrainian President Vorodimir Zelensky in the Oval Office, the U.S. side of the alliance suddenly looked unreliable and accused him of starting a war that began with his own country invasion. If that scene looks disastrous in Washington or Kiev, consider the look of the Baltic Sea.
I visited the states shortly afterwards to see how they plan to survive with the support of the U.S. for its security. Russia reluctantly separated from the states in 1991, with Russian President Vladimir Putin calling their alliance with NATO “seriously provocative” – the language and logic are the same as his reason for attacking Ukraine. In Washington, Trump's opponents and friend of Ukraine were irritated by his reversal and frightened. On the Baltic side, the concerns were softer, and even top diplomats acknowledged the crazy European competition against re-competition.
Margus Tsahkna, Estonian Foreign Minister, told me: "Everyone knows now that no one else is here to solve" the problem in Europe. He said Estonia understood this reality a long time ago and welcomed the belated understanding of others. “I personally like this change in attitude.”
For the leaders of Baltic countries, a certain level of optimism must be a psychological necessity. They share borders with Russia and its partner Belarus, unlike Ukraine, where they do not have hundreds of miles of grassland between Russia and their capital. The Baltic countries are small, and each country is small. Over the past century, the Baltic states have ruled from Moscow and they hope to avoid this fate in the future.
In 1968, historian Robert Conquest published Huge horrorat the time Joseph Stalin supervised the state-guided Megadeath's most unhesitant account. After the book was published, some readers still doubted that the Soviet Union could be That Bad? In fact, the situation is even worse. But many years before his defense, Conquest was accused of suffering from Russian phobia. After Glasnost modified his old book, his publisher asked him to come up with a lively new title. His friend Kingsley Amis suggested I told you, you're fucking fool. (Publisher finally Huge horror: Reassessment.)
Desire to say I told youThese days, throughout the Baltic Sea, with or without accompanying debris, it is powerful. Like conquest, the three former Soviet republics found themselves proven after years of accusing Moscow of plans and committing widespread sins. As the Baltic leaders have suggested over the years, can Putin really plan to invade and retake the former Soviet state? Actually he is. Since 2004, the three republics (NATO members) have fully supported Ukraine since the invasion in 2022. All these three people know is that their warning is true.
The Baltic government has encouraged its citizens to store enough food at home to survive the emergency and plans to meet outside the capital. "Talking with family is not easy," Lithuanian defense analyst Deividas škelys told me. "People become scared because suddenly it's no longer a movie. It's reality." The still-existing memory of Soviet rule helped it. In Tallinn, signs of psychological preparation for Russian invasion are everywhere. About a quarter of Estonia's population is Russian. They speak Russian at home and in many cases they maintain close ties with Russians in Russia. But in public places, the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union were completely despised. Estonia retains a national museum dedicated to Soviet evil and its suppression of Estonian nation and identity. It equates communism with Nazism and spends more time recording the former's crimes. During an intermission at the Tallinn Opera House, an elderly Estonian man stared at the Soviet-era Soviet Socialist Realist ceiling mural that depicts the victory of communism. He pointed out a dirt area of barbaric slogans ("art belonging to the people") that has recently been gradually disappeared.
"We have lived here for 7,000 years and have never seen anything good from the East to Europe," Taschner told me. From 2016 to 2017, he was formerly Estonian Defense Minister and said that the Russians summoned at the border have long been concentrated in the collective minds of Estonians. At that time, on the other side of the border, "120,000 soldiers were ready to set off in 48 hours." But Estonia and its Baltic neighbors often assured that the era of war in Europe was over and their concerns no longer apply. Europe “does not believe in a brutal war of all-out war, as we last saw during World War II, it is possible.”
Tekner said now his European allies are aware of their mistakes. When I visited the Baltic Sea, the German Parliament had just voted for spending about $1 trillion on the army, a budget allocation that would have been unthinkable before the invasion. On the streets of the Baltic Street, people are constantly seeing NATO soldiers. I met German soldiers at a cafe in Vilnius. In Tallinn, at the airport, British soldiers were eating hamburgers at the food court, while Colonel William of Mercian Gorgiment was in town, inspecting his troops at a British camp 100 miles from the Russian border. American soldiers on the border with Belarus.
But are the European senses sufficient to make up for American failures? Tuscany (Tsahkna) appears to have begun repeating the Kremlin propaganda wholesale and claims that Ukraine began to wage war with Russia. But Tsahkna told me that Estonia has raised its stance in many ways since the beginning of the Ukrainian war, and that he denies Trump’s absurd claims and constant doubts about NATO’s values are important. "I can't see a change in the US' commitment to NATO," he said, noting that Trump called himself "very committed to" at the meeting he argued with Zelensky. (Trump said he is "very committed to it". Poland", the reporter asked him directly at the meeting: "Where is the Baltic Sea? "He stuttered by responding and said he was "committed to NATO" and obviously not mentioning the Baltic states by name.)
Tuscany (Tsahkna) noted that the U.S. military has been in three Baltic countries since the annexation of Crimea, and the first Trump administration has overseen their number. "I'm a practice person, so I'm looking at the agreement we've reached and what I've seen in real life. What I'm seeing is the U.S. military in Estonia." He said before: "We don't have NATO troops permanently, there are no American troops, there are no British people, there are no French people." Estonia is safer now than ever before. Taschna said it is also worth noting that the number of Russian troops on the other side of the border has declined. He subtly said, “They no longer exist.” He then gave up the euphemism to make sure I saw his views on the 120,000 Russians who had previously camped. "They were sent to Ukraine. They were dead."
A defense analyst in Latvia told me, "In the past two years, we have seen Russia go from being the second largest army in the world to the second strongest in Ukraine." (His joke is part of the region's standard humorous track.) Among these three countries, people have repeatedly called Ukraine a war, a war that has taken some time for others, which may be soft targets for Russia. Lithuanian defense analysts say his country has been planning to mobilize its population and defend itself. But since the Ukrainian invasion, this ability has been activated. “We are in sleep mode,” he told me. "Ukraine should have lost in a few weeks. But then people stood up. We saw that now in the Baltic, it was a completely different game." He said that there was no wasted at that time. "We're heading towards where every adult citizen knows what to do in wartime: drivers, sausage makers, paramedics. Maybe you're a good guy and you're going to drag Russian trolls."
He agreed with Tsahkna, saying geopolitical pictures have changed in some positive ways since the Ukrainian invasion. Support from Poland and Finland doubled, which joined NATO in 2023 after decades of neutral jitter. Suddenly, the idea of retrieving the Baltic states became even more complicated. "If you want to attack the Baltic Sea, you have to do something with Poland and Finland." Because it is impossible to maintain control of these small states among the well-equipped enemies next door. "If you want to attack Lithuania, you have to attack Latvia and eastern Poland. This has become a bigger game."
The establishment of the alliance is contrary to Trumpism. I told Tsahkna that when I left Tallinn’s Foreign Ministry, I found that American liberals in Washington were so scared of Trump’s ambiguity about Ukraine, while in fact people within the Russian artillery range were relatively calm. He assured me: "Russia has a bigger plan for the future." He said that after Ukraine's overwhelming power movement, after Ukraine's unstoppable power, as expected, it is resorting to hybrid wars: destructive, espionage, information ops. But he brought easy digging at DC Craverwarts. "We are very practical people," he said. "We have no extravagant sadness and fear."