But rising tensions between Russia and the West have increasingly put Estonia in the spotlight. Russian fighters regularly invade Estonian airspace. Nuclear-capable missiles have been placed in Kaliningrad, a Russian territory which borders nearby Lithuania. Russian warships with cruise missiles are lurking in the Baltic Sea, and a Rand Corp. war game study earlier this year found that Russian forces could decimate NATO’s defenses and reach the outskirts of Tallinn in just 60 hours.
“When several years ago, President [George W.] Bush looked into the eyes of [Vladimir] Putin and saw something nice there or whatever, we didn’t. When Hillary Clinton as secretary of state pushed this reset button, we didn’t see any chance of that reset working,” Mikser said. “We here in Estonia are rather skeptical that this could end in a success. … It would be good to have a more sober, more realistic approach from the beginning.”
To see what’s happening in Estonia is to get a window into the nebulous, troubling future of conflict, a combination of force, cyber-intrusion and old-fashioned propagandizing to destabilize a country by fomenting internecine conflict. There have already been examples of it in Russia’s sphere of influence—most notably Ukraine and Crimea—but Donald Trump’s election dramatically increases the uncertainty.
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