The New Statesman is running an excellent article by Jeremy Cliffe on Estonia’s impressive prime minister, Kaja Kallas, who like many in the Baltic (I have just returned from there myself, and will have an article on some aspects of the region’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the next NRODT) has been warning for a long time about the realities of Putin’s Russia.
When Russia’s invasion began on 24 February [ironically, Estonia’s independence day], Kallas and her government were grimly vindicated. Like others, they found themselves in a new world. Unlike others, it was a world that they understood and knew how to navigate. Her government accelerated its transfer of arms to Ukraine, sending FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missiles and artillery such as D-30 howitzers. By mid-April, Germany had transferred 0.01 per cent of its GDP to Ukraine. The figures for the US and UK were close to 0.05 per cent, that for Poland just under 0.2 per cent. Under Kallas, Estonia’s figure was 0.8 per cent. She accompanied this with forceful international interventions such as her speech to the European Parliament two weeks after the invasion. “We might just have rediscovered what the liberal, international rules-based order was all about in the first place,” she told European lawmakers. “We will, in the future, speak about ‘before times’ and ‘after times’.”
The Estonian response has indeed been forceful (and also it’s worth noting, as Cliffe does) that Estonia started sending weapons to Ukraine before the invasion.
I’m not so convinced about Kallas’s reference to “a liberal, international rules-based order.” In reality, there was never such a thing, other perhaps than within a club of the like-minded. For the most part, international “law” such as it is, is no matter than a description of how the competition between states or blocs, a competition that ultimately rests on power, not paper, is managed. And these are arrangements forever liable to be torn up at any moment.
Nevertheless, Kallas is correct about the Russian invasion cutting a line between the “before times” and the “after times,” if not, perhaps, quite in the way she meant. In a more accurate interpretation of what the “before times” meant, leaders, in the West, at least, were able to talk absurdly but apparently seriously (and without being laughed off the stage) about how certain types of international aggression had been consigned to history. They were, supposedly, something that could be expected in the 19th or 20th centuries, but not the 21st. To believe such nonsense was to believe in a crude form of historical determinism, unconnected, like all forms of historical determinism, to reality. If the notion of an “after times” is to mean anything worthwhile, it is that such illusions — which will always be with us — are consigned to the fringe where they belong, something many Estonians, and other Balts, have long anticipated.
Cliffe:
“Do you ever get the temptation to say ‘We told you so’?” I ask her, thinking of the many years in which Estonians warned the rest of Europe that Russia had not abandoned its old impulses. “It’s impolite to say so,” Kallas replies. “So, no. But I think some things you just don’t have to say out loud.” I am reminded of this comment when, later in our discussion, she refers to “countries that have much better neighbours than we do”, saying “they don’t feel it in the way that we feel it”. It is a friendly way of suggesting that some nations farther west have been slower than Estonia in adapting to the “after times”. Some things, indeed, one does not have to say out loud
Perhaps I should add that the phrase “we told you so” did come up in some of my meetings in the Baltics. . . .
Cliffe:
Kallas is under no illusions about why Estonia has found new influence. “I have a feeling that we are listened to more than we were before. All those years we were telling [the West] that Russia’s imperialistic dream has never died. And especially in the 1990s we were told: ‘Why do you need Nato? Why do you want to join Nato and the EU? Russia doesn’t pose a threat any more.’ But we said that we know our neighbour. And these were very wise decisions that we took at that time. So coming to today, I feel that we are more listened to as we know what we are talking about.”
And note too, what Kallas has to say about peace with Russia:
Kallas fundamentally rejects the idea that an end to the conflict should be sought at any price. “I think what everybody has to understand is that peace is not an ultimate goal if it means that the aggression pays off,” she says. “What I mean by this is that when you say ‘OK, let it be peace and everybody stays where they are’, it still means that Russia has taken a big part of Ukraine’s territory, Ukraine being a sovereign, independent country. So it means that aggression really pays off.” If this happens, she adds, it will only be a matter of time until Putin acts again: “If Russia is not punished for what they are doing, then there will be a pause of one, two years, and then everything will continue: the atrocities, the human suffering, everything.” She adds that it will not just be Ukraine at risk of an emboldened Putin. “I mean other countries around Russia. Moldova… The imperialistic dream has never died.” Few doubt that Estonia could be a prime target in such a situation.
This is something I touch on in my own article. While a clear Russian victory is easy enough to define (and its consequences easy enough to anticipate and to dread), there is obviously concern in the Baltics about a “peace” deal being forced on Ukraine by a West wearying of the cost of the war, and that that peace will merely be a pause, not a resolution.
Anyway, do read the whole interview.