EXPERT INTERVIEW — In relation to Europe’s “frontline states” that fear about aggression from Russia, the Baltic nations stand aside. They have been beneath the management of the Soviet Union from 1940 till the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet state, and lengthy earlier than that their populations have been topics of the Russian empire. Right this moment, anxiousness within the three Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – has a number of sources: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s often-expressed ambitions for a “larger Russian world”; his nostalgia for the Soviet Union (he known as its demise the “biggest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century“), and his complaints about NATO’s eastward growth – on condition that the three Baltic states are all NATO members that border Russia.
Maybe not surprisingly, then, because the Trump administration has moved extra carefully to Moscow, the Baltic nations are additionally overindexed relating to protection spending and advocating for a stronger European stand in opposition to Russia. After a pledge final week by Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal, all three Baltic states will spend a minimum of 5% of GDP on protection this yr — a determine far larger than the NATO common — and all have cited the Russian menace as the explanation for the shift.
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