MATT FORD - Russia's Seizure of Crimea Is Making Former Soviet States Nervous
For the first time since the Soviet Union's collapse more than two decades ago, Russian military forces have moved into an Eastern European country and occupied its territory. Over 15,000 Russian soldiers are now stationed in Ukraine's autonomous republic of Crimea, according to Ukrainian officials (it's not clear how many of them were already in the region before this crisis), in a deployment ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin to protect "Russian citizens and compatriots on Ukrainian territory." No shots have been fired, but Ukraine's acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, has placed his country's military on its highest alert level to deter "potential aggression," as the United States condemned Russia's "invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory" in violation of international law.
Fifteen independent countries, including Russia, emerged from the Soviet Union's disintegration. Six of them—Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—are in Europe, and all of them have a complicated relationship with modern Russia. Seven other countries once belonged to the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union's military alliance in Eastern Europe. With the Cold War's end, none of them had faced the threat of military intervention by the communist superpower's successor state—until now. (In discussing Europe here, I'm not including Eurasian countries like Georgia, which fought a war with Russia in 2008, or the military support Russia offered Moldova's breakaway Transnistria region in the early 1990s.)
In response to the standoff in Crimea, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves announced that he would convene the National Defense Council on March 2 to discuss the crisis and called upon the Baltic states to increase their defense spending. "The events in Ukraine show that this struggle is taking place within Europe as well," he said in a speech to the Baltic Defense College last week. "This sends a clear signal to Estonia and the [other] Baltic states: we must invest more in our national defense." Estonia, along with Latvia and Lithuania, joined NATO in 2004.
"The Baltic states have been among the most vocal EU states during this crisis, urging Russia to abandon its military intervention in Ukraine and respect Ukrainian territorial integrity," Erik Brattberg, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told me. "They will watch the events in Ukraine closely to see if the U.S. and NATO will stand up against Russian aggression."
Recent experiences with Russia also fuel Estonia's concerns. The removal of a Soviet-era war statue from the capital city of Tallinn in 2007 led to riots among ethnic Russians (who make up almost a quarter of Estonia's population) and diplomatic outrage from Moscow. Shortly thereafter, a concerted, three-week cyberattack crippled Estonian government agencies, banks, news outlets, and other organizations—a vital blow to what some have called "the most wired country in Europe." Estonian officials blamed the Kremlin for the cyberattacks, a claim Russian officials vociferously denied... read more:
