TALLINN, Estonia—The scene outside Alexander Nevsky Cathedral one evening earlier this month had all the hallmarks of a Russian plot: dark-clothed heavies chanting and dragging metal bats along the cobblestone streets as camouflaged Estonian troops with heavy weaponry guarded the nearby Parliament.

In reality, it was a training exercise by Estonia’s paramilitary defense force and the police— the kind of drill that has become a regular part of life in a tiny country that has grown increasingly unsettled about the bellicose behavior of its giant neighbor to the east.


Centuries of invasions by czars, Bolsheviks, Nazis and Soviets have made Estonians a stoic lot. Even as American officials in Washington fret about Russian intentions, Estonians are well-accustomed to living with the specter of the Russian threat and the uncertainty it can bring. Memories of the Soviet occupation and a 2007 cyberattack on Estonia by Russia—not to mention Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine—remain fresh here. The country’s large ethnic Russian minority might make it a prime target for Russian Moscow propaganda and meddling.

“We have full confidence in our allies commitment to defend us, but obviously being liberated is not a very attractive option,” Foreign Minister Sven Mikser told POLITICO wryly in an interview last week in the Estonian capital.

But rising tensions between Russia and the West have increasingly put Estonia in the spotlight. Russian fighters regularly invade Estonian airspace. Nuclear-capable missiles have been placed in Kaliningrad, a Russian territory which borders nearby Lithuania. Russian warships with cruise missiles are lurking in the Baltic Sea, and a Rand Corp. war game study earlier this year found that Russian forces could decimate NATO’s defenses and reach the outskirts of Tallinn in just 60 hours.

“When several years ago, President [George W.] Bush looked into the eyes of [Vladimir] Putin and saw something nice there or whatever, we didn’t. When Hillary Clinton as secretary of state pushed this reset button, we didn’t see any chance of that reset working,” Mikser said. “We here in Estonia are rather skeptical that this could end in a success. … It would be good to have a more sober, more realistic approach from the beginning.”

To see what’s happening in Estonia is to get a window into the nebulous, troubling future of conflict, a combination of force, cyber-intrusion and old-fashioned propagandizing to destabilize a country by fomenting internecine conflict. There have already been examples of it in Russia’s sphere of influence—most notably Ukraine and Crimea—but Donald Trump’s election dramatically increases the uncertainty.

Raul Rebane, a prominent journalist and TV presence in Estonia, told POLITICO: That’s why “your election was a problem, not a catastrophe, but here there was a sense of despair. We know we need to be defended from an independent Russia by someone. We are always searching for friends.”

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Tall and rail thin in his dark gray suit, Mikser, a former defense minister, has been in his job only three weeks; Estonia’s coalition government collapsed in late November, ushering in a new administration intent on privatizing some state-owned companies and overhauling the country’s tax code.

But while the government has seen a shake-up, Estonia’s security policy has not. Trump’s complaints that NATO allies do not pay their fair share hit a nerve here in Estonia, which is one of only five nations that pays the 2 percent of GDP that NATO expects a country to spend on defense. (They spend 2.16 percent, to be exact). A spring public opinion poll found that nearly 90 percent of the country supported Estonia’s membership in NATO, reflecting the widespread understanding of what NATO means to the country’s continued sovereignty.

But Trump turned the treaty into a stump-speech talking point about the U.S. getting taken advantage of by foreign countries. Newt Gingrich, one of Trump’s surrogates, wondered aloud in July why the U.S. would protect Tallinn in case of Russian attack, saying Estonia “is in the suburbs of St Petersburg.”

“Obviously, it was reported in the Estonian media,” Mikser said with understatement. “Whatever anxieties there were in society, it didn’t make it better.”

Those anxieties have been especially acute since 2014 when Russian troops entered eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Now, Russia’s army is in the midst of adding 30,000 troops spread along its western border in response to NATO deployments in the region.

Still, it’s not an actual Russian invasion that Mikser is worried about; he’s more concerned about “hybrid” threats, possibly exploiting Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority, hence the training exercise outside the Parliament.

It’s not far-fetched. In 2007, Estonia was targeted by a Russian cyberattack just as riots erupted over the decision to move a statue that commemorated Soviet soldiers. To native Estonians who supported the move, the soldiers being honored were occupiers; for some Russian Estonians who opposed the move, the memorial was honoring soldiers who liberated the country from Nazism. The result was a deadly clash between authorities and Russian speakers protesting the memorial’s move.

Weeks of cyberattacks, which the government blamed on Russia, hit the government, businesses and media outlets. The episode was a wake-up call and the Estonian government—which has already instituted internet voting and enables its citizens to do a wide range of daily tasks online—is now on the cutting edge of cybersecurity thinking, and hosts a NATO-affiliated cybersecurity think tank.

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When Estonia was controlled by the Soviet Union, workers from other parts of the Soviet bloc came to Estonia to work in factories and on farms. The result is an ethnic Russian minority numbering just over 300,000—around a third of the country’s total population.

And for the Kremlin, protecting “Russian-speaking” people—no matter where they are—is considered a top priority, and a guise to meddle in other countries. (One of Putin’s justifications for annexing Crimea was protecting the rights of Russians abroad.) In Estonia, the ethnic Russian population generally speaks Russian, and gets most of its news and entertainment from state-owned Russian television stations operating out of Russia.

As it does across Eastern Europe, Moscow tries to appeal to ethnic Russians in Estonia by saying that “they’re acting for the disenfranchised and saying, ‘We will help,’” explains Darja Saar, who runs Estonia’s first and only Russian-language public TV station, which was established last year with funding from the Estonian Parliament.

Just last week, a Russian-language news story circulating in Tallinn asserted—falsely—that the three Baltic heads of state had called Trump and that he had hung up. Estonia’s president hasn’t actually spoken with the president-elect yet.

“What worries us is if Putin sees his interests threatened somewhere else, this might be the place where he thinks he’s able to rebalance the situation in his favor,” Mikser said.

That’s why Estonian officials, as well as representatives from Latvia and Lithuania, traveled to Washington this week to reassure lawmakers that they’re not free-riding on American military might. The fact of the matter is NATO is beloved, as, for that matter, is the European Union, which Estonia joined in 2004. Foreign battalions are a consistent and welcomed presence in Estonia. German and U.S. air squadrons patrol Estonian skies and by next summer there will be about 4,000 NATO troops in the Baltics.

“We would join a postal union if that existed. We’ll join any international organization, if it means more security,” Rebane, the journalist, told POLITICO.

At dinner one night, an Irish chef served local delicacies like herring and roast pork as technology executives, academics and writers contemplated Trump’s ascension and what it means for the reliability of that security. One attendee proudly recalled interning in the office of the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Another recalled his clerkship at the blue-chip law firm White and Case.

“Of course we’re worried,” one guest told me. “Maybe not terrified. Simply, we just look at your politics and ask, ‘What the hell is happening?’”

Walking through Tallinn’s old town, Rebane—who, in his varied career, was also the manager for a gold medal-winning discus thrower from Estonia—pointed to an obelisk with a “Cross of Liberty” affixed to the top. It’s a memorial to the country’s bloody independence victory in 1920 over the Bolsheviks. A couple of hundred yards farther along, Rebane pointed to a public square next to a church where a famous restaurant once stood before it was leveled in 1944 by Soviet bombers.

“This is our history,” he said as snow fell. “Invasions and a flattened country. It’s in our collective memory. We won’t forget and we never will."

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the year of Estonia's victory over the Bolsheviks. It was 1920.