EXPERT INTERVIEW — In terms of Europe’s “frontline states” that fear about aggression from Russia, the Baltic nations stand aside. They had been beneath the management of the Soviet Union from 1940 till the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet state, and lengthy earlier than that their populations had been topics of the Russian empire. At present, 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 known as its demise the “biggest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century“), and his complaints about NATO’s eastward enlargement – on condition that the three Baltic states are all NATO members that border Russia.
Maybe not surprisingly, then, because the Trump administration has moved extra carefully to Moscow, the Baltic nations are additionally overindexed in terms of 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 larger than the NATO common — and all have cited the Russian menace as the rationale for the shift.
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