Plea From the Baltics: As U.S. Pivots to Russia, ‘Where Are We Going?’

EXPERT INTERVIEW — Relating to Europe’s “frontline states” that fear about aggression from Russia, the Baltic nations stand aside. They have been underneath the management of the Soviet Union from 1940 till the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet state, and lengthy earlier than that their populations have been topics of the Russian empire. In the present day, nervousness within the three Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – has a number of sources: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s often-expressed ambitions for a “better Russian world”; his nostalgia for the Soviet Union (he referred to as its demise the “biggest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century“), and his complaints about NATO’s eastward growth – provided that the three Baltic states are all NATO members that border Russia.

Maybe not surprisingly, then, because the Trump administration has moved extra intently to Moscow, the Baltic nations are additionally overindexed with regards to protection spending and advocating for a stronger European stand towards Russia. After a pledge final week by Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal, all three Baltic states will spend at the least 5% of GDP on protection this yr — a determine far increased than the NATO common — and all have cited the Russian risk as the explanation for the shift.