A nightmare foretold An Estonian president predicted the crisis in Ukraine in 1994; the EU should now listen to the advice he gave.

Screaming a warning that goes unheard is the stuff of nightmares. But for many in the ex-captive nations it is the daily experience of more than two decades.

Following Vladimir Putin’s triumph in Minsk, Western leaders and pundits are beginning, belatedly, to notice that Russia is not just unpleasant, but menacing, and that we lack means of dealing with its arsenal of sabre-rattling, sedition and sleaze. A British parliamentary committee, for example, has blasted the government and the European Union for failing to understand Russia. The defence secretary told reporters that – shock, horror – Russia might even menace the Baltic states.

The truly shocking aspect of this is that our leaders have only now started to worry. Yet in 1994 the late Lennart Meri, then president of Estonia, gave a prophetic speech in Hamburg. The Kremlin had just growled that the problems of ethnic Russians living elsewhere in the former Soviet Union could not be solved by “diplomatic means alone”: Russian troops should stay in these countries to ensure their welfare. That, said Meri, spelled trouble sooner or later.

Other politicians, including the Czech Václav Havel and Lithuania’s Vytautas Landsbergis, shared Meri’s concerns. So too did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom Meri quoted in his Hamburg speech. The great author had urged Russians to practise “self-restriction”: they should dump dreams of empire and concentrate on their own economic, social and intellectual problems. Meri also worried that though the new, post-communist Russia claimed to have broken with the evil traditions of the USSR, it still insisted that the Baltic nations – illegally occupied and annexed – had joined the Soviet Union “voluntarily”. Had his own family, he wondered, been deported “voluntarily” to Siberia?

All that was alarming enough, but the Estonian leader reserved his harshest words for what he called the West’s “appeasement”. He warned: “With this approach, one unwittingly becomes an accomplice of imperialist forces in Russia who believe that they can solve their country’s immense problems by outward expansion and by threatening their neighbours.” Trying to influence Russian internal politics was futile, he argued. The only way to help was “to make it emphatically clear to the Russian leadership that another imperialist expansion will not stand a chance. Whoever fails to do so will actually help the enemies of democracy in Russia and other post-communist states”.

He concluded with an appeal to his hosts. Germany faced a fateful choice. “Either the neo-imperialist policy of a great eastern power will be tolerated, financed, and in the short term, possibly even profited from”, or else Germany should choose to spread democracy, freedom, responsibility and peace from the Baltic to the Pacific – in which case it should resolutely contribute to the stability and security of central Europe (a region reaching from the Estonian border to the Adriatic, and, he stressed, including Ukraine). The price of failure, he said, would be so high that Europe could not pay it.

Though Meri’s words gained polite applause, he and others were belittled, patronised and ignored: other issues were more important. The West has pandered to Russia over repression at home and aggression abroad. Yet the warnings were prescient. Meri worried about the failure to uproot the KGB. Now ex-Soviet spooks rule Russia. He bemoaned the failure to renounce Stalinist history. Now it is official doctrine. He decried latent imperialism. Now ethno-nationalism is the centrepiece of Kremlin policy. And many Westerners, not least Germans, financed Russia’s slide to authoritarian crony capitalism – and profited from it.

Conventional thinking was once mired in complacency. Now we are shifting to bewildered panic. Defeatism may be just one somersault away. Welcome to the age of nightmares.

Edward Lucas is a senior vice-president at the Center for European Policy Analysis.