Oren Dorell

USA TODAY

TALLINN, Estonia — Incidents involving Russian security forces on the borders of European Union countries are evidence Russia seeks to shut itself off from the West, Estonia's foreign minister says.

Russia sees NATO as a threat and is trying "step by step, brick by brick, to build up the wall between Russia and the West," Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said Friday in an interview with USA TODAY in the Estonian capital.

Paet spoke two days after Estonia summoned the Russian ambassador to demand an explanation for a minute-long airspace violation this week by a Russian spy plane that took off from Kaliningrad on Tuesday and was shadowed by fighter jets belonging to Sweden and Finland as it approached their territories, then crossed briefly into Estonian airspace.

Estonia, a tiny country of 1.3 million people and a former Soviet republic, borders Russia and is one of four countries in the NATO alliance that devotes 2% or more of its GDP to military spending.

Its leaders have watched with alarm as an intricate economic relationship between European Union countries and Russia has been shaken by increasing acrimony over Russia's conflict with Ukraine.

Paet said other recent incidents show a clear pattern of Russia's confrontational behavior.

•Russian military aircraft have buzzed NATO territory over the Baltic Sea and the airspace of Norway, Canada and Alaska, prompting intercepts by those countries' air forces.

•Sweden on Friday called off a week-long search for a suspected Russian submarine it said sent out a distress signal Oct. 17 from Swedish waters before disappearing. Russia denied any of its ships were in distress or in the Swedish archipelago. Sweden is not a member of NATO but agreed in September to perform exercises with the alliance and to call on its help in emergencies.

•Russia seized Estonian intelligence official Eston Kohver on Sept. 5 and is holding him in Moscow. Estonia says Russia took Kohver in a cross-border raid while he waited to meet with an informant in the southeastern town of Miikse. Moscow says he was detained in Russia.

•Russia reopened criminal cases against 1,500 Lithuanians who refused to sign up for compulsory service in the Soviet military in 1990 and 1991. At the time, the Soviet Union was in a state of collapse, and Lithuania had declared its independence. Lithuania refuses to hand the people over, warning them to avoid non-EU and non-NATO countries.

•Latvian media reported the Russian Embassy in Riga was recruiting ethnic Russians to fight with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukrainian. Russia dismissed the allegations.

The frequency of such incidents "is altogether too much" for the pattern to be coincidental, Paet said. Together with the anti-Western propaganda in Russian state-controlled media, the trend looks "like Soviet times," he said.

Paet said many European leaders remain confused and uncertain about how to react to what's happening.

"The conflict continues, and there is no political solution," he said.