The Estonian weekly Eesti Ekspress interviewed the heads and several employees of Estonia’s, Latvia’s, and Lithuania’s state security agencies. This is what they had to say regarding Russia.

Highlights

“Toots wasn’t surprised by the atrocities committed in Bucha. Nor were any other of the counterintelligence agents I interviewed in Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania. They’re aware of how Russians conducted themselves in the Baltics during the Second World War. Of how they conducted themselves before that. Of how they’ve always behaved. The West lacks such awareness.

„[The West is] fortunate,“ Toots remarks. „We’re a buffer between them and Russia. They’ve forgotten a lot and think Russia is just like them.“”

“The war in Ukraine is not Putin’s war. The cruelty is not Putin’s. The rapes, murders, gouged eyes, hangings, and burned corpses aren’t special tactics employed by Russia’s leader. It is Russia as a whole.

„The majority of Russians are to blame,“ says Sinisalu.

Western colleagues sometimes have a hard time believing this.

„They’re certainly more naïve and optimistic than we are,“ says one Baltic counterintelligence officer.”

“We coinhabit the world with a country whose citizenry primarily adheres to a code of force. The war in Ukraine was not a surprise, but rather a logical progression.”

“Russian society is accustomed to suffering. An injustice that sends Parisians out onto the streets won’t make a single resident of Novosibirsk scratch the back of their necks.”

“officers of the Baltic security services do not describe Russia’s imperialism and brutality as a military tactic, but a rampant social norm.”

“As Russia’s leaders themselves have declared: Russia ends where it is stopped.”

“Disappointment of falling behind the West has caused Russians to either ramp up national exceptionalism or take offense, grow embittered, and believe that the country has been robbed of something.”

“They only respect force.”