The Guardian has an update on the Estonian counter-intelligence officer seemingly dragged across the border into Russia on Friday:
According to several Estonian accounts, smoke grenades detonated at an Estonian customs post, and all radio and telephone signals were jammed as armed Russian men suddenly materialised and dragged away a local official. His name is Eston Kohver, a counter-intelligence officer in the Estonian security agency, Kapo, whose job over the past few years has been to keep tabs on the smuggling cartels trying to sneak merchandise through the Luhamaa crossing. But Kohver’s fate has now become entangled in a much bigger issue: the question of just how far Vladimir Putin’s Russia is prepared to go to goad the Nato allies on its doorstep….
The hope that the affair would turn out to be low-key was initially strengthened when Estonian and Russian border guards performed a joint inspection, which seemed to verify the evidence of an incursion from Russia into Estonia, including multiple footprints in a band of raked sand in that runs through no-man’s land. By Sunday, however, it became increasingly clear that Russia had other ideas. The Estonian was taken to Moscow where he was paraded before television cameras. The Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, successor to the Soviet KGB, claimed Kohver had been caught on Russian soil.
The FSB said in a statement: “A Taurus handgun with ammunition, €5,000 in cash, special equipment for concealed audio recording and documents that bear evidence of an intelligence mission were seized from the intruder.”
The statement appeared ominous for Kohver, whom the FSB had identified as a Kapo officer as far back as 2011, saying he was one of several agents trying to recruit agents as they crossed the border. The decision to bring him to Moscow and put him on television made it clear that Moscow was not interested in finding a quick and quiet means of resolving the incident.
Kadri Liik, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said: “My first guess was that this was to do with cross-border smuggling which happened to be sponsored by the Russian security services, which wouldn’t be that unusual. The lines are pretty blended. It could be that Kohver got in the way of a business deal, but if it is business, it’s clearly a business with Moscow connections.”
The question of Kohver’s future now looks likely to become a lever for a resurgent Russia to work on its small Baltic neighbour, which at last week’s Nato summit declared itself in favour of hosting a new Nato base.
“This is not something cooked up the day before yesterday,” said Eerik-Niiles Kross, a former Estonian intelligence chief and national security advisor [a victim of earlier Russian dirty tricks as I blogged here]. “I don’t know if it was an FSB shady deal that went wrong, but whatever it was, you have to put it in the general context. The timing is either an odd coincidence, or it is a signal.”
Best guess: This was indeed designed as a signal, a brutal reminder that, for all Obama’s fine words, Russia still wants to call the shots in this part of the world.