PrairiePundit

 Yahoo News: Estonian authorities continue their preparations to close the border between Estonia and Russia in the city of Narva, establishing additional barriers on the bridge, on 24 November. Source: European Pravda with reference to ERR Details: The first concrete pyramids appeared on the bridge in Narva on the evening of 16 November, after 19 citizens of Somalia and Syria arrived at the eastern border of Estonia and tried to enter the country without legal grounds. Earlier the police and border guards in the county of Ida-Virumaa, which includes Narva, said that they were preparing for the possible closure of the border checkpoint. Quote: "We are closely monitoring what is happening at the border, because Russia is carrying out migration pressure against Estonia and Finland, sending people who do not have the right to enter the European Union to our border. Since last week, several large groups have tried to enter Estonia," they added. The barriers are also being prepare...

 Fox News: The U.K. and Germany scrambled fighter jets to intercept two Russian aircraft flying near Estonia late Tuesday. The Russian aircraft, a Russian Il-78 Midas refueling plane and an Antonov 148 military transport, approached NATO airspace without contacting Estonian authorities. The incident was the first time the U.K. and Germany have conducted a joint air intercept as part of the NATO treaty. "NATO continues to form the bedrock of our collective security," U.K. Armed Forces minister James Heappey said in a statement. "This joint UK and German deployment in the Baltics clearly demonstrates our collective resolve to challenge any potential threat to NATO’s borders, whilst demonstrating our combined strength." The incident came just hours after two Russian jets downed a $32 million U.S. drone over the Black Sea. The two jets had harassed the unmanned aircraft for several minutes before clipping the drone's propeller. ... Estonia is a former Soviet repub...

NY Times: Why Work From Home When You Can Work From Barbados, Bermuda or … Estonia? Several countries with fragile tourist economies have started to offer visas that allow foreign nationals to live and work for a period of at least six months. If I were young and healthy I would consider such a gig.   My choice would be the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean.  It is government on one side by the Dutch and on the other side by the French.  It is one of my favorite vacation destinations.  BTW, Trump has a mansion on the island. I have a friend I met on the internet from Estonia and it looks like an interesting place.

NY Times: Welcome to Estonia’s Isle of Women What would life be like without men? On this tiny Baltic island, it’s business as usual. But its colorful, folkloric way of life is threatened by a dwindling population. Feminists should take note.

Doc'sTalk: “We caught four moles in the last five years,” Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves told me after a recent security conference in Tallinn. “That means one of two things. Either we’re the only country in the EU with a mole problem, or we’re the only country in the EU doing anything about it.” The note of self-congratulation was nothing new for the famously garrulous Ilves, but it also happened to be entirely warranted. His small Baltic state, long one of the Kremlin’s main targets, was having an “I told you so” moment. For the past decade, Russian warplanes have routinely violated its airspace, Russian military forces have used counterterrorism exercises as a pretext for mock-invading its soil, and a notorious series of cyberattacks in 2007 that almost certainly originated from Kremlin-backed hackers degraded its digital infrastructure. In turn, Estonia has proved itself more prepared to stand up to Russian aggression than any other European nation. Since 2008, T...

Yahoo News: Estonia’s president says Trump gets it about Russia Estonia is on Russia's western border and was once part of the Soviet Union.  During the campaign, Estonia was concerned about Trump's statements where he said the S might not defend countries who were not living up to their commitment to NATO defense/  Estonia was not one of those countries but apparently, some thought it posed a danger to them.  I think what Trump was doing was trying to get all the members to live up to their obligation by pointing out they could no longer be free riders as part of NATO.

Stars & Stripes: The Pentagon intends to spend more than $15 million to improve working conditions for special operations forces on missions in the Baltics, where elite U.S. troops have been a quiet but steady presence in recent years. The Pentagon’s 2019 budget calls for establishing new operations and training facilities in Estonia, one of NATO’s smallest and most exposed member states that shares a border with Russia. “The facilities essentially provide administrative and logistics space to enable our SOF to continue conducting bilateral training with our allies,” said Maj. Michael Weisman, Special Operations Command Europe spokesman. Since 2014, SOCEUR has had forces working with allies in the Baltics to help bolster local militaries. With no end in sight to a broader U.S. military campaign to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank, officials said there was a need for upgrades for the special operators. The facilities, which serve as a small base of operations in Baltics, are o...

George Neumeyer: An article in the Guardian last week provides more confirmation that John Brennan was the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump. One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election — Hillary’s. Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people. John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism,...

New Yorker: Estonia, the Digital Republic Its government is virtual, borderless, blockchained, and secure. Has this tiny post-Soviet nation found the way of the future? ... ... Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous, integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work. “If a couple in love would like to marry, they still have to visit the government location and express their will,” Andrus Kaarelson, a director at the Estonian Information Systems Authority, says. But, apart from transf...

George Neumyer: An article in the Guardian last week provides more confirmation that John Brennan was the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump. One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election — Hillary’s. Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people. John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, ...

Wall Street Journal: Russia has opened a new battlefront with NATO, according to Western military officials, by exploiting a point of vulnerability for almost all allied soldiers: their personal smartphones. Troops, officers and government officials of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries said Russia has carried out a campaign to compromise soldiers’ smartphones. The aim, they say, is to gain operational information, gauge troop strength and intimidate soldiers. The Russian Defense Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment. Russian officials deny that Moscow stages such attacks. U.S. and other Western officials said they have no doubt Russia is behind the campaign. They said its nature suggests state-level coordination, and added that the equipment used, such as sophisticated drones equipped with surveillance electronics, is beyond the reach of most civilians. The campaign has targeted the contingent of 4,000 NATO troops deployed this year to Poland and ...

BBC: The largest shipment of US brigades since the fall of the Soviet Union is arriving in northern Germany. The first of the 87 tanks and 144 military vehicles were being unloaded in the port of Bremerhaven on Friday. The equipment and 3,500 US troops are to be deployed along Nato's eastern frontier. The deployment aims to allay worries of potential Russian aggression in eastern Europe. However, some fear the large number will exacerbate tensions with Moscow. Leaders of the left-wing regional government of Brandenburg - one of the German states through which the American brigades will be transported over the next two weeks - have called for further talks with Russia. The arrival of the equipment and troops marks the start of a new phase of the US's Operation Atlantic Resolve, which foresees the continuous presence of an American armoured brigade combat team in Europe on a nine-month rotational basis. The new forces will gather first in Poland, then fan out across seven coun...

Daily Mail: US sends elite commandos to the border of Russia to defend nervous Baltic states while NATO beefs up its defenses The Americans are eager to help the small armies of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia repel any possible threat from their neighbor to the east and reassure them of Washington's commitment to NATO. The three may be among the few NATO allies who are actually spending a greater percentage of the GDP on defense than NATO targets.  They are being trained to resist a Russian invasion with insurgency tactics.  Having been a part of the old Soviet Union they are familiar with Russian military operations and the weaknesses of some of their older equipment.

NY Times: Spooked by Russia, Tiny Estonia Trains a Nation of Insurgents A NATO member, Estonia is using an improbably popular form of “military sport” to help put together a guerrilla resistance army — just in case. Because they were a part of the old Soviet Union, the Estonians are familiar with Russian weapons and tactics.   I think that makes them a valuable ally for NATO and it is a resource the US should take advantage of.  The Estonians have also been something of a success story in Eastern Europe where they have grown their own high-tech industry.  They have no desire to be a part of a new Russian empire.

Guardian: Estonian officials have said that Russia appears to be moving powerful, nuclear capable missiles into Kaliningrad, a Russian outpost province sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania along the Baltic coast. The Iskander-M missiles, which have a range of over 500km, are reportedly being transported by ship from the St Petersburg area. It had previously been reported that the Russians might seek to place the Iskander-M missiles in Kaliningrad but not until 2018-19. If confirmed, the move would be seen by western governments as another sign that Russia is seeking to establish facts on the ground, from eastern Europe to the Middle East, before a new US president takes office in January. Estonian officials said they were monitoring the ship and its contents. The ship, called the Ambal, was due to dock on Friday; reports of the cargo came from Estonian government sources. An Estonian defence expert said: “This weapon is highly sophisticated and there is no comparable weapo...

Daily Beast: If You Knew Putin Like We Know Putin… Estonia’s president and Lithuania’s foreign minister talk to The Daily Beast about the menace Moscow poses to them, Europe, and the United States. ... (Estonian President) Toomas Ilves : We’ve been facing this dezinformatsiya [disinformation] ever since our independence, in many ways already before that. I remember as an ambassador — in ‘93, ‘94, ‘95 — in Washington, constantly having to defend myself or my country at the State Department in the face of completely outrageous and nonsense claims made against it. People took seriously outright lies. On Donald Trump’s questioning of whether or not the United States would defend an invaded NATO ally, as mandated by Article V of the Atlantic Charter, and his supporter Newt Gingrich’s recent comments that ‘Estonia is in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.’ Ilves : It was just odd, having been the ambassador to the United States in 1994 when the “Contract for America” was introduced [by...

Washington Examiner: The president of Estonia took to Twitter on Thursday to defend its role in NATO after Donald Trump said he may not come to allies' aid as president if they didn't pay enough for their own defense. President Toomas Hendrick Ilves said that Estonia is one of only five NATO allies that meets the goal set two years ago to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. He also pointed out that Estonia fought "with no caveats" in Afghanistan when the U.S. invoked Article 5, which requires NATO allies to respond to an attack on one country as if they themselves had been attacked. ... Estonia is an important ally for other reasons.  As part of the former Soviet Union, it is familiar with Russian equipment and tactics and is a frontline state in dealing with Russian aggression. I suspect this is another one of Trump's bluff's he is using to try to get other NATO countries to live up to their commitment on defense spendin...

Washington Free Beacon: A new report by the Estonian Internal Security Service emphasizes the danger a resurgent Russia and a weakening European Union poses to stability and democracy in the region, highlighting Russian propaganda efforts in recent years. The service, known in Estonia as Kaitsepolitseiamet or “Kapo,” produces an Annual Review summarizing trends and internal threats to Estonia. The 2015 Annual Review , released last week, includes sections on cyber security, preventing international terrorism, and fighting corruption, among other issues. However, the first page of the report makes it clear what the service considers the top threat to Estonian and European security: “In the context of Russian aggression, the security threat arising from a weakening of the European Union is many times greater than that arising from the refugees settling in Estonia.” “This is the most important point,” Martin Arpo, Kapo’s deputy director general, told the Washington Free Beacon. “For Es...

Newsweek: COUNTING DOWN TO A RUSSIAN INVASION OF THE BALTICS Although Russia's economy is reeling and its military forces are increasingly engaged in Syria and Ukraine, NATO commanders, governments and analysts are concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin's adventurism has not run its course. Most anxieties focus on the Baltic states as Russia's next potential military target. Russia has many advantages in the Baltics. The situation of Russians there, particularly in Estonia and Latvia where many Russians remain non-citizens, provides Moscow with an issue with which to stoke tensions. ... In other words, the situation  is similar to the pretext used by Germany in the lead up to World War II.   Estonia especially has been one of the more successful countries to gain freedom after the fall of the former Soviet Union.  It will probably take more than sanctions to defend these countries.

Forbes: Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and seized control of Crimea, Pentagon planners have been trying to figure out how they could cope with further land grabs by Moscow. Their greatest concern is that Russia will move on the three small Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — the only former provinces of the Soviet Union that have joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and that other alliance members are therefore obligated to defend. Internal Pentagon estimates suggest Russia’s military could occupy the Baltic states in 2-3 days — well before NATO could organize a coherent response. More generally, the alliance’s entire eastern flank is vulnerable to invasion given the proximity of Russian forces and the absence of natural barriers to a quick advance (see map). In the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion, Western military planners no longer think they can predict how Russian leader Vladimir Putin might react to perceived provocations or opportun...