Jonatan Vseviov was woken up by a phone call in the early hours of Tuesday last week. Two military drones had crossed into Estonia’s airspace from Russia, an incursion that prompted Nato to scramble fighter jets stationed in the Baltic country to hunt down the possible threat.
“Quite a wake-up,” recalls Vseviov, the secretary general of Estonia’s foreign ministry.
The drones were not launched by Russia, but by Ukrainian forces, and likely part of Kyiv’s new strategy to use the cheap, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) to hit oil refineries, retail warehouses and other logistically important targets deep inside Russian territory.
Russia has been doing what it can to disrupt those efforts by using jamming technology to knock Ukrainian drones off course, which has been offered up as one of the reasons why they end up crossing into friendly states in the Baltics.
“The Russians do their best obviously to defend themselves against these attacks, attempting to shoot down the drones, attempting to jam them. Sometimes as a result some of these drones end up in our airspace. We’re not blaming the Ukrainians,” says Vseviov.
The incidents, if anything, bring home just how close the deadly war being fought between Russia and Ukraine feels to countries on the EU’s eastern flank. “We’re really staring the bear in the face, the teeth and all,” Vseviov says.
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The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported details of a new US intelligence assessment that reckoned Vladimir Putin could try something in the Baltics to test Nato’s mutual defence clause in the next number of years.
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“I’m not going to downplay the gravity of the situation or the challenge that the Russians pose. Having said that, I can assure you that there is no acute military danger on our borders, and nothing in that regard has changed over the past few months,” Vseviov says.
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However, officials in the Baltics and beyond are concerned about Moscow’s escalating “hybrid” campaign, which has been traced to rogue drone incursions, cyberattacks, sabotage, and most recently a foiled attack on a Ukrainian cargo plane in Leipzig airport in Germany.
Russia likes to operate in this “grey zone” where definitively attributing blame to the Kremlin could be tricky, Vseviov says, adding that Russia “is likely to use confusion as one of the tools in its statecraft”.
“We don’t ever downplay the threat that Russia poses and Russia continues to pose the most significant strategic threat to European security, to our way of life,” the senior Estonian official says.
“I would much rather have a Europe that has the might of Ukraine as part of it than a Europe that is facing a resurgent [Russian] empire on the Polish border.”
That has meant the European Union having to throw significant financial and military aid and support behind Ukraine, while at the same time spending more on its own defence and security to deter Moscow.
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Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was supposed to be a war that lasted “a few weeks at best” in Putin’s plans, Vseviov says.
“Now, years later, his hope of Ukraine being handed to him on a silver platter at a negotiating table has collapsed and he’s yet to come up with a new narrative.”
The stakes are high. “This war is about whether or not there is a Ukraine,” he says. “If we allow those concepts, territorial integrity and sovereignty, to be thrown out of the window, then, yes, the Ukrainians might be the first ones to pay the price, but we’re going to be right next …
“Putin has grown more desperate because he’s not succeeding in Ukraine. He’s running out of options.”
No matter what the United States has done, over the past months “Europe has proven that we will stay the course, and that has robbed Putin of his narrative”, says Vseviov, who served as Estonia’s ambassador to the US from 2018 to 2021.
European governments were much more united behind Ukraine today than they had been in the uncertain days and weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion, he says.
The threat posed by Moscow was keenly appreciated by EU states neighbouring Russia or Ukraine.
“When one defends Ukraine’s territorial integrity or sovereignty, we’re not really defending Ukraine’s borders or Ukraine’s freedom, but ours.”
The EU needs to prepare to help rebuild Ukraine after the war, a project that would be on a similar scale to Washington’s Marshall Plan that followed the second World War, says Vseviov.
“The reconstruction of Ukraine is not just about rebuilding Ukraine’s cities; it is going to be the most significant economic project in Europe during this century. Now, Ukraine is going to be rebuilt. The question is: who is going to do the rebuilding and according to whose rules?”