Russia's warning to the Baltics tests NATO

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Russia will be NATO’s chief threats “for years to come,” says outgoing NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Which threat will be greater? Beheadings grab headlines, but minor incidents can sometimes have equally lasting effects. One such episode took place on Sept. 5, when Estonian security officer Eston Kohver went to a meeting with an informant in a wooded area about five miles from the Russian border. He was armed and had armed backup some ways behind him. He was carrying recording equipment and 5,000 euros. The money was no doubt to pay the informant, the tape recorder for his briefing and the pistol in case anything went wrong.

Something went very wrong. The meeting place was suddenly obscured by smoke grenades, and Estonian communications were jammed. By the time the backup arrived, Kohver was gone.

The only physical evidence at the scene were impact craters made by the smoke grenades and footprints in the raked-sand no man’s land at the border that indicated a crossing from the Russian side. The Russians later claimed that Kohver was apprehended on Russian soil while engaging in espionage.

At first, it seemed like the sort of minor friction that frequently occurs (and quickly blows over) on the borders of unfriendly states. But then Kohver showed up in Moscow, handcuffed and solemn as he was remanded to the notorious Lefortovo Prison, which is run by the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB. Russian state TV quickly ran footage of his arrival, the camera lingering over his possessions spread on a table, especially the euro notes and his Taurus pistol, marked “made in Miami, FL USA.” The visuals themselves made everything clear for the Russian viewer: He was a NATO spy paid by Europe and armed by the United States. 

It’s possible that Kohver’s interests were entirely local, concerned with smuggling on the border, as part of his work for Estonia’s security agency, KaPo (Katseipolitseiamet). Of the agency, the country’s president Toomas Hendrik Ilves said, “KaPo, like the FBI in U.S., deals both with counterintelligence and organized crime. Just in some places they turn out to be the same.” Originally, Russian security forces who were making a pretty penny off smuggling — a border checkpoint near the rendezvous point was used for smuggling operations that involved Russian security officers as well as criminals — may have wanted no more than to put a scare into Kohver so he would keep his nose out of their business. Still, they arrived well prepared with flash grenades and jamming equipment. And what about the informant? Did he ever show? Was he just a lure? We don’t know.

Since the incident involves a NATO country, we know that higher-ups in Moscow would have been informed at once, and they may have decided to make this local incident into an international one — that is, if that hadn’t been the intention all along. Note that President Barack Obama spoke in Tallinn, Estonia, just two days before Kohver’s abduction. Reassuring NATO’s East European members, jittery after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Obama said, “You lost your independence once before. With NATO, you will never lose it again.”

After the speech, Kohver’s abduction and publicized detention — a decision that could have been made only at the highest levels — is an insult to the United States, a mockery of NATO and a warning to the Baltics. Moscow’s message is, “We can poke and prod you, stage riots in your cities, overwhelm your Internet and abduct your officials, and NATO will do nothing about it, short of an outright invasion on our part. And who knows even then?”

This is not the first time that Estonia has served as a flashpoint in NATO-Moscow relations. The bad blood goes back to the late 1930s, when Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s Germany signed a nonaggression pact that contained secret articles about the division of Europe, with the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania going to the USSR. The USSR first occupied, then liberated Estonia (after it was seized by the perfidious Germans) in 1944. So Russians see themselves as liberators, while Estonians see them as occupiers and oppressors. Both, of course, are right. This double vision caused a crisis in 2007, when Estonian authorities decided to move a monument to the Soviet liberators — a bronze statue of a Red Army soldier — from the center of the capital, Tallinn, to an outlying military cemetery. Russian MPs called this act insulting and barbarous. Riots broke out: One man was stabbed to death, 13 police and 44 rioters were injured, and 300 arrests were made. About a quarter of Estonia, a country of 1.3 million, is ethnically Russian, with the proportion significantly higher in Tallinn.

Estonia, so wired it is sometimes called E-stonia, was then subjected to what has been termed the first cyberwar in history. In late April and early May of 2007, denial-of-service attacks by Russian hackers rendered many government and bank sites inaccessible. “If a [NATO] member state’s communication center is attacked with a missile, you call it an act of war. So what do you call it if the same installation is disabled with a cyberattack?” asked one senior NATO official in Brussels.

The East Europeans have never trusted the Russians or the Americans, though for quite different reasons. As reported by Strobe Talbott in his book “The Russia Hand,” former Estonian president Lennart Meri succinctly and prophetically expressed the attitude toward Russians, saying of the pre–Vladimir Putin 1990s, “Russia was a malignancy in remission: The Yeltsin era was at best a fleeting opportunity to be seized before Russia relapsed into authoritarianism at home and expansionism abroad.”

The Poles especially harbor resentment toward the West, going back to the 1945 meeting of the Big 3 — Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Stalin — in Yalta, where the West ceded Eastern Europe to Moscow. Some of that old resentment bubbled up in the drunken remarks (recorded secretly but then widely published) by Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski that the “Polish-U.S. alliance was worthless.” That remark, along with others that were racist or simply vulgar, cost him his job on Sept. 19.

For his part, Putin is both fearful and defiant of NATO. He has no desire to take it on in open, conventional warfare. A glimpse at a map shows why Putin has been willing to risk isolation and sanctions by invading Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. If Ukraine is in the Western camp, Russia is flanked from the Baltic to the Black Sea. If Ukraine and Georgia were both in NATO, as both wish, Russia would be surrounded on the Black Sea, its navy bottled up and its southern flank vulnerable. Putin would be toppled if he allowed the Black Sea to become Lake NATO.

Conflicts often have unintended consequences. The Russian cyberattack on Estonia led NATO to create a cooperative cyberdefense center in Tallinn. Similarly, incidents like the abduction of Kohver may lead to a stronger NATO. But a situation in which NATO is tested further by Russia is particularly worrisome, especially if the crisis in Ukraine lasts for years. 

Russia is clearly gearing up for the long haul. To deal with the economic sanctions imposed by the West, Moscow has been buying considerable amounts of Hong Kong dollars and gold — some 9.4 tons in July alone. Putin has long been outspoken about the hegemony of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The consequences of the Ukrainian crisis have made it both possible and necessary for Russia to begin freeing itself from the almighty dollar. Gold is Putin’s hedge against that hegemony.