When the Ukrainian crisis began, some commentators in the West suggested that NATO would not in the end fight to defend the Baltic countries even though the latter are full members of NATO by asking “who is prepared to die for Narva?” But now a senior US State Department has given a clear and unequivocal answer: Western countries are.
During a visit to Latvia this week, Victoria Nuland, US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, said that “when NATO and the US as part of NATO took new members into the alliance, this means that we are ready to participate in the defense of the security of these countries, and this means that we are ready to give our lives for the security of these countries.”
That is why there are young American soldiers in Latvia now, she continued, suggesting that there should be “absolute clarity” that if someone attacks Latvia, we will be here to help defend Latvia” because “no one has the right to shoot at Latvia because no one has the right to shoot at the territory of NATO.”
Nuland was right to say what she did. The best chance of avoiding a crisis in the Baltic is if the Russians can be persuaded that military intervention there is not worth the risk.
But there is intervention and intervention. The chances of an overt Russian attack are, I am convinced, very, very low. The possibilities of something more ambiguous still remain remote but are not quite so easy to discount. In the event of a ‘spontaneous’ rising in (overwhelmingly ethnic Russian) Narva, a city in eastern Estonia just a bridge away from Russia, or in Russian-speaking Daugavpils in eastern Latvia, what would the western response be? Enough has been learnt of Russian tactics in the last year that the US would, I am sure, be able to pull together a posse (Brits? Poles?) to help the Balts out, but would, say, Germany (more ambivalent than it should be) be quite so willing to agree that it was obliged (under Article V of the NATO treaty) to join in efforts to combat what it might choose to deem to be ‘internal’ disturbances? There are excellent strategic reasons for Nuland to portray the NATO alliance as united and resolute, but that does not mean that it is.
Meanwhile Estonian Public Broadcasting reports:
A joint study by the Estonian Institute of Human Rights and Turu-uuringute AS found that 38 percent of ethnic Russians in Estonia would believe Russian media in case of conflicting reports, while 33 percent would believe information from both sides, and only 6 percent would side with Estonian media accounts.
Given the paranoid narrative now spun by most Russian media, that’s not so good, but the news is not all bleak. Two-thirds of ethnic Russians said they would give a public broadcasting Russian-language [Estonian] television channel “a chance”, including, interestingly, a higher proportion of the elderly (the segment of the population that might be presumed to be the most Sovietized of Estonia’s Russians (although this may merely reflect the fact that they watch more television and speak less Estonian).
Also:
When asked if Russia has the right to protect its interests abroad, only 12 percent agreed, and 60 percent said Ukraine has the right to protect its territorial integrity.
That 12 percent seems reassuringly low, at least by the standards of neighboring Latvia and is somewhat encouraging if accurate (the fact that some 60 percent were said to support Ukraine’s rights is also not a bad tally under the circumstances). It’s also worth adding that (again, judging by the Latvian data) support for Russia’s adventures abroad is not the same as wanting the Russian army to show up at home.
The report notes that “slightly over 40 percent of ethnic Russians in Estonia do not speak any Estonian”, a number that is higher than I would have thought, but it is a number that is likely skewed by an older generation unwilling to adapt to post-Soviet reality and/or, perhaps, the complexity of the Estonian language.
Ethnic Russians account for roughly 25 percent of the population in Estonia.
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