Europe has between three and five years to prepare for the Kremlin to return as a serious military threat on Nato’s eastern flank, the Estonian prime minister has told The Times.
Underscoring the sense of precariousness, Kaja Kallas also became the first Nato leader to suggest that Russia was behind a recent spate of disruption to GPS navigation across the southern Baltic Sea, although she said it did not seem to be deliberately targeted at Nato members.
After a series of Ukrainian setbacks on the battlefield, there are growing concerns within the alliance about how long it might have to ready itself for the revival of Russian forces on its borders after a prospective ceasefire.
One much-discussed German paper suggested this time window might be five to nine years.
However, Kallas said it could be considerably shorter. “Our intelligence estimates it to be three to five years, and that very much depends on how we manage our unity and keep our posture regarding Ukraine,” she said.
“Because what Russia wants is a pause, and this pause is to gather its resources and strength. Weakness provokes aggressors, so weakness provokes Russia.”
Kallas was drawing on a report from the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service (VLA) that said Moscow regarded Estonia and the other two Baltic states as the “most vulnerable part of Nato” and its likeliest target for attack.
The VLA said the Kremlin’s highest priority after an end to the fighting in Ukraine would be to swiftly rebuild its forces in the Russian western military district, next to Nato’s eastern borders. It said: “From the Baltic states’s perspective, Russia still has enough strength to exert credible military pressure in our region.”
As a result Estonia is pushing emphatically for its western allies to redouble military aid to Ukraine in the hope of a decisive blow that would set back Russia’s territorial ambitions for years to come.
“The people of Estonia support Ukraine until victory. It is very important to all of us,” Kallas told President Zelensky when he visited Tallinn last week.
In the long run, however, Kallas said Nato needed to adopt a Cold War-style “containment” strategy towards Russia.
This would involve ratcheting up each member state’s defence spending to at least 2.5 per cent of GDP and buying time for the structural weaknesses in the Russian economy and armed forces to take their toll. President Putin’s military is estimated to have sustained up to 300,000 casualties in Ukraine.
The biggest gaps Kallas sees in Nato’s deterrence are shortages of military equipment, especially ammunition supplies, and the difficulty of rapidly deploying large numbers of troops to the front lines.
While Finland’s accession to Nato means it would now be significantly easier to reinforce the Baltic states by sea, the slender land bridge across the Suwalki Gap between Poland and Lithuania remains a point of fragility.
Russia has repeatedly threatened and conquered Estonian territory since the days of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century.
This included 200 years of occupation from the early 1700s and more than 40 under the yoke of the Soviet Union until the Baltic republics peaceably wrested back their independence at the end of the Cold War.
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Kallas said Moscow’s “colonial” mindset had persisted into the 21st century and there was no prospect of it renouncing aggression against its neighbours until it was forced into a painful reckoning, much as Germany was after the Second World War.
“Russia has never lost its last colonial war,” she said. “I’ve been reading a lot and trying to understand how we can break this historical cycle. And the key element to this is accountability. They have never been accountable for the crimes they committed.
“To give an example: one of the effects of the Nuremberg tribunals was that the German people got to know about the crimes the Nazis committed, and hence they also had the public gaze.”
However, amid signs that war fatigue is setting in across several western countries, and with the prospect of Donald Trump returning as president of the United States and undermining Nato’s efforts at deterrence, Kallas conceded that it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the unity of the alliance.
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“It’s becoming harder [to maintain unity] all the time because the topics are getting harder as well,” she said.
“And we have a year of elections in different countries and so this is becoming more and more difficult … We are all democracies, and in democracies you have domestic problems that kick in and the war has been going on for some time so that it sort of becomes wallpaper.
“But I think it’s the obligation of the leaders to keep on explaining why a Russian victory [in Ukraine] is dangerous not only for European security but for the security of the whole world, because if aggression pays off somewhere, it serves as an invitation to use it elsewhere.”
In a sign of the extent to which the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is destabilising the situation across the region, since the middle of December there have been reports of widespread GPS jamming from central Poland to southern Sweden.
Kallas is the first western leader to explicitly point the finger at Moscow, although she said the disruption had not been significant and might not have been aimed at targets outside Russia.
One theory in Tallinn is that it is a side-effect of Russian electronic warfare defences against Ukrainian drone attacks or surveillance.
“We have reason to suspect that yes, it was originating from Russia, but it wasn’t mal-intended,” Kallas said. “It didn’t really have an effect on aviation, security or anything.”
