https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...linn-estonia-girds-for-war-with-russia-218965
NATO heads of state are due to meet Wednesday in Brussels beneath the disinterested gaze of President Donald Trump before he jets off to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. In between, British Prime Minister Theresa May—who faces a pending collision with the brick wall of Brexit—meets first with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and then with Trump. It's a rapid-fire series of what would usually be staid diplomatic photo-ops that could, in this iteration, seriously disrupt the international order that has made the United States a global superpower since the end of World War II.
While the president and other Republican envoys make reassuring entreaties to the Kremlin, Trump continues to view himself as the disruptor of NATO. In the weeks leading up to the NATO summit, the president again berated America's allies for their defense spending. To push back, supporters of the trans-Atlantic framework that is the architecture of American power in the world are on an information blitz, heralding increased defense spending across the alliance.
All this has been accompanied by the usual cycle of pre-summit reports about NATO's defensive vulnerabilities—including the choke point of the Suwalki Gap between Poland and Lithuania. And, as usual, it's the allies to the north of that gap that are trying to stay focused on what matters most: the fundamental transformation of the alliance that is needed.
Almost 10 years after the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008, it's clear NATO still needs to learn more quickly from our partners with a deeper history of fighting Russian aggression in all its various forms. Foremost of those partners is Estonia, which, unlike Georgia, is a full NATO member and has been since 2004.
There's an unspoken duality underlying the mind-set of Estonian defense. To survive, you must integrate: The three Baltic states—Estonia plus Latvia and Lithuania—acted as a unified region to achieve NATO and EU membership, and they continue to engage the U.S. and NATO from that "B3" format above all. NATO's charter requires that the alliance come to the aid of any member who is attacked. But to survive as a small and vulnerable state, you must also believe that a crisis will come where you will again be on your own fighting the Russians, and you have to be prepared for that.
The idea that Estonia—whose entire population isn't much bigger than Russia's standing army, and which has little on its own in the way of air power and armor—could withstand a Russian assault might seem like a silly discussion from the far side of the Atlantic. But Estonia has resources that are as much in demand in the alliance as TOW missiles and tanks: will and a mobilized population. In a country of just over 1.3 million, fully 60,000 are trained and serve in the military or reserves. The importance of this human element cannot be dismissed: Estonians still have vivid memories of the price of occupation, and this perspective sharpens strategic planning in unexpected ways.
On a recent rainy afternoon in Tallinn, in the shadow of Estonia's Freedom Cross, I met Colonel Riho Uhtegi, commander of the Estonian Special Operations Force, to discuss the Russian threat and the new deterrence.
"People talk about this 'Five Days War' in Georgia" said Uhtegi, staring out into the rain. "But it wasn't five days. The hybrid campaign started much earlier. No one wanted to see it."
"Modern warfare is asymmetric in nature," Uhtegi told me. "It is difficult to find the enemy forces on the ground. It is difficult to identify them, fix their position and destroy them. But this is what we must prepare for here. Like Afghanistan, Iraq—but here."
"You know why the Russians didn't take Tbilisi in 2008?" Uhtegi asked me. "They were just up the road, 50 kilometers or so, and nothing was stopping them."
Having spent many years in Georgia, I knew the answer to this one: because Georgians are crazy. Uhtegi barked a laugh. "Yes. Exactly. Georgians are crazy, and they would fight. The idea of this unwinnable asymmetric fight in Tbilisi was not so appealing to the Russians."
He continued: "There are always these discussions. Like, yeah. The Russians can get to Tallinn in two days. ... Maybe. [The Estonian capital is about 125 miles from the Russian border.] But they can't get all of Estonia in two days. They can get to Tallinn, and behind them, we will cut their communication lines and supplies lines and everything else." That dead-eyed Baltic stare fixes me again. "They can get to Tallinn in two days. But they will die in Tallinn. And they know this. … They will get fire from every corner, at every step."
The threat of invasion may seem far less existential from the American heartland, where no one has ever listened to the commander of an elite fighting force talk about his family's plan in case crisis comes. Everyone, Uhtegi said, had such a program for their families during the occupation—and they still do now. Essential to this is an understanding of who fights, and providing those fighters the sense of certainty that their families know what to do to find relative safety without them.
"We didn't believe anyone was coming to help us in 1991," Uhtegi said. "Even after independence, no one would even sell weapons to Estonia at first. So, I knew who in my units had every gun, and how many rounds of ammunition each man had. … We had to hope for a peaceful transition. … But you can only do that with a willingness to fight."
This last part remains a quiet debate across the allies of NATO—whether the willingness and readiness to fight NATO's eastern neighbor can deter Russian adventurism, or whether this preparation is a "provocation" to which the paranoid Kremlin will inevitably overreact. In Estonia, however, there is reasonable clarity that anytime national defensive positions are compromised for the sake of placating Russia, we've already gotten it wrong.
Trump's focus on defense spending misses that some allies like Estonia not only meet spending commitments but also shoulder a disproportionate amount of the ideological burden of NATO—the willingness to fight.
"I don't know what it would be like if the Russians really start to fight," Uhtegi told me as we walked out into the clearing skies, the Freedom Cross now glowing above the square. "Just that every Estonian will fight."
