Estonia’s city at the ‘end of the free world’ stares across a frozen border at Russia - Politico
NARVA, Estonia — This snow-covered border bridge between two medieval fortresses in a Russian-speaking corner of Estonia might be where World War III starts.
The city of Narva, squeezed along Estonia's border with Russia, has been at the center of efforts to resist what it claims are near constant provocations from Moscow — from satellite navigation jamming, to snatched border demarcation buoys, blaring propaganda, surveillance drones and buzzing blimps marked with the 'Z' of Russia's armed forces.
"We are not intending to start a third world war, but we see the constant attempts to provoke us to do something which would have a higher impact," said Egert Belitšev, the director general of Estonia’s Police and Border Guard Board, on a snowy December afternoon in Narva.
About a quarter of Estonia's population of 1.4 million is ethnic Russian. Most hold Estonian citizenship and a majority feel close ties to Estonia, but the Kremlin is a past master of exploiting ethnic differences to claim a special role in protecting the Russian diaspora. It's done that in Georgia and Moldova and that was the pretext for its invasion of Ukraine.
The worry is that the Kremlin could play the same card and try to seize eastern Estonia, with its large population of ethnic Russians, and then dare NATO to launch a global war in response. A failure to react would show that NATO's Article 5 common defense provision is meaningless.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin even suggested in 2022, not long after Moscow launched its all-out war on Ukraine, that Narva is historically part of Russia.
Narva, the third-largest city in Estonia, is closer to St. Petersburg than it is to Tallinn. Of its roughly 56,000 inhabitants, 96 percent speak Russian and a third hold a Russian passport
Describing the city as "the end of the free world,” Belitšev, an ethnic-Estonian security official, doesn't think Estonia's NATO allies are prepared for what might happen here.
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