This town of about 55,000 on the border with Russia could be at the edge of a new Iron Curtain created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s a place between two worlds, where Russia and Russian identity meets Estonia and the West.
“We realized that we were at great risk and had to leave,” said Felix, a Russian IT professional who asked that his surname be withheld out of fear of the Kremlin. “When the war started, we thought that there was a very high probability that all possibilities to go abroad, to come from abroad, and so on, would simply be closed — the Iron Curtain would fall.
After that, Teperik said, Estonia pursued greater methods of outreach, which the government repeated each time Russia lashed out: Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014 and now in 2022. Jürgen Klemm, the Estonian Internal Security Service press officer, said that the agency can help people who are being used by foreign intelligence services, but they have to come forward.
Many more signals come from Russia itself: The state Duma, the lower House of Parliament, said it wasthat would declare all Russian speakers “compatriots” of the state and worthy of Russia’s protection, and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who now serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said this week that the goal of the Ukraine war is for “the opportunity to finally build an open Eurasia — from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
“Let’s not fool ourselves,” Rinkēvičs said, noting that some governments in the West were mistaken to insist that Putin’s views did not reflect that of the greater Russian population. “There is a kind of solid feeling that they need to rebuild some kind of empire, that they need to make Russia great again, and that sentiment is shared by many.
Estonia, like other countries, has banned Russian media that is deemed propaganda. Those channels were often popular in Russian-speaking households, not just for the news and talk shows rampant with Kremlin propaganda, but also for their entertainment programs — more rhetorically innocent detective shows and historical dramas.
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