In the latest sign of the Russia hawks prevailing over the Russia doves, Vice President Mike Pence departs Sunday for a four-day trip to Eastern Europe, where he’ll seek to reassure U.S. allies who see nearby Russia as a threat—and to shore up NATO in particular as a bulwark against that threat.

In Estonia, he’ll meet with the leaders of the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, who are among NATO’s easternmost members. In Georgia, an aspiring NATO member, he’ll visit troops involved in a NATO-affiliated military exercise. And in Montenegro, a new NATO member that has never before received such a high-ranking U.S. official, he’ll attend a summit of current and potentially future NATO members.

According to the White House, Pence is making the trip “at the direction of President Trump.” And surely there’s some truth to that. But the direction of President Trump—especially when it comes to Russia—is far from clear. The countries on Pence’s itinerary offer examples for how the administration’s perplexing, bifurcated approach to Russia could be poked and prodded in the coming months and years. Small nations such as Estonia, Georgia, and Montenegro, which straddle East and West, literally test the limits of the America-First president’s commitment to U.S. allies and to fundamentally changing America’s relationship with Russia. And unlike another testing ground for Trump’s Russia policy—his response to Russia’s alleged intervention in the U.S. election—the one in Eastern Europe will yield results that don’t primarily affect Americans. It isn’t all about “us.”

It’s also very much about Estonians and Georgians and Montenegrins: The vice president is visiting a region that is “somewhere in between the EU and NATO and Russia,” Vesko Garcevic, a former Montenegrin ambassador to NATO, told me. “Therefore, for Russia, this is really a battleground—a place where Russia can influence countries.”

Or consider the view from Moscow: “The Baltic states right now are seen as a U.S./NATO foothold close to Russia’s main [power] centers; Georgia is a U.S. ally in the Caucasus and the Black Sea region, a sensitive area in security terms,” Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote in an email. As the Kremlin sees it, Pence “will be visiting the new U.S. sphere of influence. Russian conventional thinking maintains that the U.S. is supporting the Balts, Georgians, and Ukrainians not because they are democratic or strive for democracy but because they are vehemently anti-Russian and are only too happy to lease their territory to the Pentagon, CIA, et al.”

In each country that Pence is visiting, the perceived threat from Russia looks different. In Georgia, which fought a war with neighboring Russia in 2008 that left two Georgian breakaway regions in de facto Russian control, there are fears that the Kremlin could do what it did in Ukraine in 2014: support separatists and seize control of just enough territory to keep the country in Russia’s sphere of influence and out of the West’s. Moscow currently seems content to nibble around the edges of Georgian territory, in what Georgian officials have condemned as “creeping occupation.”