The aggressor country of russia is carrying out provocations along the border with Estonia and may attack this country to force the North Atlantic Alliance to intervene in response.
This was reported by Politico on Thursday, December 26.
Moscow regularly jams satellite navigation, uses surveillance drones with the letter Z for provocations. The publication writes that about a quarter of Estonia's 1.4 million population are ethnic russians, although most of them have Estonian citizenship. The publication writes that the Kremlin loves and knows how to use ethnic differences to declare the "protection of the russian diaspora", as was the case in Georgia and Moldova and became a pretext for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“The concern is that the Kremlin could play the same card and try to seize eastern Estonia, with its large ethnic russian population, and then force NATO to start a global war in response. The lack of a response would show that NATO’s Article 5 on mutual defense is meaningless. Russian president vladimir putin even suggested in 2022, shortly after Moscow launched an all-out war against Ukraine, that Narva was historically part of russia,” the article says.
Narva, Estonia’s third-largest city, is closer to St. Petersburg than to Tallinn. Of the roughly 56,000 residents, 96% speak russian, and a third hold russian passports.
The director general of the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board, Egert Belitšev, said his country had no intention of starting a third world war, but saw constant attempts to provoke it into doing something in response to russia’s actions. Estonia believes that the threat of a russian attack is real after the end of the war in Ukraine. The smallest Baltic country already spends 3.4% of its GDP on defense and plans to increase this figure to 3.7% by 2025.
Russia’s blocking of GPS signals in the area also makes it difficult to track planes or drones and detect smugglers, and makes it impossible for guards to pinpoint locations in the desert.
EUR 157 million has been allocated to strengthen the Narva border. In addition, Estonia plans to recruit 1,000 security personnel across the country as a reserve in case of an attack, in addition to the 29,000 volunteers already training as part of the Estonian Defense League.
As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, on the night of May 23, the russian border guard removed buoys in the Estonian waters of the Narva River, which are used to mark shipping lanes.
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