The war in Ukraine is proving valid one North Atlantic Treaty Organization member’s strategy to join the security alliance nearly two decades ago as it shifted away from the former Soviet sphere of influence.
During a visit to Atlanta, Estonia’s ambassador to the United States said his country of just over a million people on the Baltic Sea sees justification for its own westward-leaning strategy in Russia’s aggression against another neighbor.
“We’ve never had any doubts regarding the NATO membership anyway, but this war happening in Ukraine vindicates it,” Kristjan Prikk told Global Atlanta.
The interview took place Friday, March 5, a day before Mr. Prikk was to headline a local celebration of the 104th anniversary of Estonian independence (and centennial of U.S. diplomatic ties) organized by the country’s honorary consul in Georgia, Aadu Allpere.
Estonia traces its freedom back to February 24, 1918, the start of an inter-war experiment that lasted two decades before its absorption into the Soviet Union in 1939. Estonia would emerge free again after the end of the Cold War in 1991.
Mr. Prikk, who gave lectures to three Georgia universities during his three-day visit, also spoke with Global Atlanta few days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Estonia March 8 on a European tour shoring up commitments to allies hosting regular rotations of U.S. and NATO troops. (The Wall Street Journal reported that the secretary said Monday in Lithuania that the Ukraine war is forcing NATO to consider permanent troop installations in the Baltics.)
During the interview in Atlanta, Mr. Prikk pushed back on an argument espoused by Russian leader Vladimir Putin (and given play by some in the foreign-policy world) that NATO perhaps expanded too quickly in post-Soviet states, creating a sense of unease in Russia. Mr. Putin has justified his incursion into Ukraine as a measure to “demilitarize” the country and prevent its accession to NATO.
This view of NATO expansion obscures the fact that they actually knocked on NATO’s door — not the other way around, Mr. Prikk said.
“When people present that kind of argument, they quite often give the impression that NATO was just actively seeking for members just to get closer to Russia,” he said, noting that countries like his went through an “incredibly difficult” and “very long consensus-building” process before joining in 2004 — the same year Estonia also joined the European Union.
This was the natural progression of a clear decision to align more with the West — not only militarily but economically through organizations like the Organization for Economy Cooperation and Development, the World Trade Organization and other multilateral bodies.
“The mantra of Estonian foreign and security policy has been ‘Never alone again,’” Mr. Prikk said, noting that non-alignment was demonstrated in Estonia’s history to be a failed strategy for a small country with such large neighbors.
He also noted that the case of Estonia and other countries included consultations with Russia as outlined under the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 — a mechanism expressly designed to assuage Russian fears of a permanent troop presence or nuclear deployments on its doorstep, he said.
“When you read that, it’s all about trying to save Europe’s security, and this was also supposed to manage the risk of anyone getting it wrong and considering the expansion of NATO offensive,” he said.
With its NATO membership, Estonia isn’t “panicked” about the prospect of an outright Russian invasion, even considering that a quarter of its population is ethnically Russian or Russian-speaking.
In fact, Estonia is seeing many Russians seek access to the relative prosperity of Estonia, a digitally savvy society with high living standards and salaries that in some cases outpace Russia’s by “many fold,” even before the collapse of the ruble as a result of sanctions.
“Every day we have lines of people asking about the possibility to actually flee Russia now because life is becoming so unbearable. I think we have fewer who are naive about what Russia has to offer,” he said. In the short term, Mr. Prikk is more acutely worried about the circulation of false narratives spread by Russian disinformation campaigns in Estonia.
Meanwhile, Ukrainians are facing a Russian assault including the targeted bombardment of civilian areas in multiple cities, according to the United States and other allies — an assertion Russia denies.
In Mr. Prikk’s view, blame for the war to be squarely placed on Mr. Putin’s insecurity over Ukraine’s clear moves toward the West on trade and democracy, despite the fact that NATO accession in Ukraine was “nowhere on the horizon.”
The alliance was actually relatively unpopular in Ukraine, he said, given how its brand was smeared under decades of Soviet occupation (though he noted surveys had somehow found support for the alliance when its acronym was written out and “Atlantic” surfaced in the name.)
“One can easily say that what triggered the Russians was that Ukraine was just taking a different political path,” Mr. Prikk said, pointing out that many in the West thought Ukraine’s democratic reforms were too slow. “Apparently these steps were too fast for Russia. They saw Ukraine drifting away.”
Mr. Prikk, who has been posted in Estonia’s embassy in Washington twice before and served as the country’s permanent secretary for the Ministry of Defense before becoming ambassador to the U.S., said he was astounded by how badly Russia “miscalculated” in its Ukraine foray.
“They expected the West to be split, they expected the West to be weak, they did not expect really biting sanctions,” he said. “Now they have it all wrong.”
If NATO can continue in its resolve, he said, it will be successful in dealing with other global challenges including a rising China, he said. Solidarity in the face of Russian aggression has shown that squabbles over defense spending and other concerns about the alliance’s internal health in the past few years were overplayed.
“It’s actually a good reminder for us all in the West that what joins us is so much more than what divides us, so we should throw away or drop the quarrels about the nitty-gritty and focus on the really important things.”
In addition to meetings at Georgia State University, Oglethorpe University and the University of North Georgia, Mr. Prikk spoke at a World Affairs Council of Atlanta breakfast briefing at the law offices of Smith, Gambrell and Russell March 5.
In the interview, he also highlighted ways Atlanta’s growing tech hub could tie up with Estonia, a recognized leader in startup activity, cybersecurity and digital governance despite (and in some ways thanks to) its small size. The country is well-known as having produced tech unicorns like Skype and Wise (the cross-border payments platform formerly known as TransferWise). Those ideas will be explored in a separate article set to be published soon.