Estonia shares Ukraine’s interests with regard to sabotaging the Russian-US talks and receiving more aid from NATO, so passing up the chance to advance these goals by parroting his latest rhetoric suggests that there’s truly no basis to Zelensky’s claims about a Russian invasion of the Baltic States.
Andrew Korybko
Even casual followers of foreign affairs know that Estonia
hates Russia for historical reasons, with the memory of its contentious
incorporation into the USSR still fresh in many of its people’s minds.
That’s why it raced to join NATO after the Soviet Union’s dissolution
and has sought to play the ultimate vanguard role against Russia through
the possible hosting of its allies’ nukes. It’s therefore surprising that Estonia of all countries just publicly chided Zelensky for fearmongering about Russia.
He
recently speculated that Russia’s mobile internet curbs aren’t about
preventing Ukrainian drones from using these signals for targeting
purposes but might precede a massive mobilization ahead of another
large-scale attack on Ukraine or even an invasion of the Baltic States. He then questioned NATO’s commitment to Article 5 in the second scenario. This prompted furious reactions from the Estonian Foreign Minister and the head of the Estonian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
The
first insisted that there are no signs of an impending invasion, argued
that Russia is actually nowadays too weak to launch one anyhow, and
insisted that NATO’s commitment to Article 5 is ironclad, while the
second accused Zelensky of laundering Russian propaganda about the
country’s strength. Those two chided him in spite of Russian Security
Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu recently reminding the Baltic States of his country’s right to self-defense if they allow Ukrainian drones to use their airspace.
The context concerns late-March’s large-scale Ukrainian drone attacks
against Russia’s energy infrastructure in St. Petersburg that some
claimed crossed through those three. With reference to the aforesaid,
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov soon thereafter added
that “Patience is often described as a defining Russian national trait.
As the saying goes, ‘God endured and told us to do likewise.’ Yet
patience is not limitless. It may even be beneficial that no one fully
understands where this ‘red line’ lies.”
The Duma is also in the process of promulgating a bill
that would authorize the use of the armed forces on a case-by-case
basis to protect Russian citizens abroad from persecution in a move that
some have spun as preemptively justifying an invasion of the Baltic
States where its citizens have faced such plights. Despite these three
developments, those two leading Estonian foreign policy officials still
chided Zelensky, thus rubbishing all related speculation about a
supposedly imminent Russian threat to them.
Each has their
motives, with Zelensky wanting to sabotage the Russian-US talks and
create a false sense of urgency for scaling military aid to Ukraine
amidst its setbacks, while those two Estonians want to keep the public
calm, reaffirm NATO’s reliability, and discredit fake news fears.
Estonia shares Ukraine’s interests with regard to sabotaging the
Russian-US talks and receiving more aid from NATO, however, so passing
up the chance to advance these goals suggests that there’s truly no
basis to Zelensky’s claims.
This shows that even one of
NATO’s most anti-Russian members no longer takes Zelensky’s
fearmongering about Russia seriously, thus hinting that other relatively
(key qualifier) less anti-Russian ones feel the same, including with
respect to his fearmongering about Belarus
after he claimed that Russia might launch another offensive against
Ukraine from that direction. Zelensky thus seemingly fears that US aid might soon be cut off to punish NATO and hopes to preempt that through his fearmongering.