Putin’s next target
Estonia is girding itself for an invasion as its Russian minority grows restless
By Wendell Steavenson with Maris Hellrand
On a grey afternoon in April, in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, Berit Osula, a blonde woman in her 40s with pink lipstick and long, mascara-painted lashes, presented her fingers to the manicurist.
“The gun oil is terrible for my nail polish,” she joked.
Osula is the mother of two and, like 30,000 other Estonians, a volunteer in her country’s defence league.
(Volunteer soldiers vastly outnumber Estonia’s professional army of a little over 7,000.)
She had watched Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in tears and was shocked by the massacres carried out by the occupying forces.
She thought: what if it happened here?
“I wanted to protect my family and myself,” she told me.
“I didn’t want to sit at home afraid and asking for help.”
Osula is now a corporal, one of six women among the 200 volunteers of Alpha company.
She specialises in mortars.
Defence-league volunteers are required to train for a minimum of 48 hours a year – Osula signs up for every exercise she can.
Her husband, Otto, and her children wish she was around more, but they understand her devotion.
Osula pointed out a bruise through the ripped knee of her trendy jeans.
“Last weekend I was carrying the machinegun and it was raining and muddy.
It wasn’t easy, running long distances.
The machinegun weighs about 12kg, and we’re already wearing armour and packs which are another 20kg.”
Over the past two years, Osula has done things she thought were beyond her.
She was proud to tell me she came first in her machinegun course.
She was scheduled to participate in an exercise with the regular army the day after we talked.
The forecast said that rain was likely and she was thinking about what to pack.
The manicurist applied pale-pink gels and Osula held out her fingers to admire the finish: shiny, tough, unscratchable.
More than 4,000 Estonians signed up as volunteer soldiers after the invasion of Ukraine.
Estonians are acutely aware of their vulnerability as a little nation of just 1.4m people, roughly a fifth of whom are ethnic Russians.
Vladimir Putin has voiced ambitions as expansionist as those of Tsar Peter I – known in Russia, but not Estonia, as Peter the Great – who wrested Estonia from the Swedes in the 18th century.
Estonia and the Baltic states remained part of the tsarist empire for 200 years before achieving independence in 1918 after the October revolution.
At the end of the second world war, they were seized by the Soviet Union.
Like Latvia and Lithuania, Estonia regained its independence after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
All three joined the EU and NATO in 2004.
The smallest and most northerly of the Baltic countries, Estonia is entirely flat, with Russia on one side and the Baltic Sea on the other.
It lacks, as one Estonian politician wryly put it to me, “any strategic depth”.
For a number of years, Russia has engaged in a covert campaign of intimidation and disruption against Estonia using cyber-attacks, undercover agents, sabotage and legions of disinformation bots on social media.
The war in Ukraine has sharpened fears of invasion, but peace in Ukraine could be no less threatening if it freed up Russian troops for an attack.
In response, NATO is building up a presence in the region; there are currently over 2,000 troops stationed in Estonia.
In the new era of American retrenchment, Estonia could very well be where Europe and NATO’s defence is first tested.
Two crenellated fortresses, one in the Estonian town of Narva, the other in the Russian town of Ivangorod, face each other across a river, just 100 metres apart.
They testify to centuries of frontier battles.
Estonians like to show off the handsome new promenade along their side and point out that the Russians, who were also granted EU funds for a similar riverside development in 2019, have built only a short path.
Narva, despite being in Estonia, is populated almost entirely by ethnic Russians.
The bridge over the river is now closed to vehicles and I watched a queue of pedestrians on the Estonian side shuffle slowly forwards.
Since 2022 a series of enhanced checks have lengthened what would otherwise be a journey of a few minutes.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities have set up a screen and loudspeakers on their side of the river every May 9th – the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany – and broadcast the military parade in Moscow.
A crowd of Russians in Narva gather to watch from across the river.
For the past three years, Maria Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova, the director of the Narva museum that is housed in the fortress, has defiantly hung from the battlements a large banner of Putin’s face, with the words “war criminal” below it.
In January this year a court in Moscow issued an arrest warrant for Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova on the charge of spreading false information.
Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova has blue eyes, a china-doll face and a soft voice that belies her steel.
In the park outside the museum she has erected a series of panels describing, in Estonian, Russian and English, the Soviet bombing of Narva in 1944, as the Red Army advanced against the occupying Germans.
The barrage levelled Narva; its centre has been rebuilt with grey, brick housing blocks.
You can still see the humps and depressions of shell craters and trenches along its grassy esplanades.
Estonia’s independence has been betrayed twice in grand bargains between great powers: in 1940 the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union carved up Poland and the Baltic states.
Five years later, at the Yalta Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt ceded the Baltic countries to the Soviet sphere of influence.
Estonians remember the Soviet occupations that began in 1940 and 1944 as a terrifying time of deportations (at least 10% of Estonia’s population were killed or sent to the gulag during the second world war and its aftermath).
For many, the intervening German occupation, following the collapse of the alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, felt less repressive, though Estonia’s 4,000 Jews either fled or were rounded up and killed, and Soviet POWs endured terrible conditions in work camps.
Caught between two totalitarian regimes, Estonians fought on both sides, sometimes brother against brother.
In the Narva museum there is a room full of mannequins dressed in military garb from different centuries.
An Estonian soldier in the rough khaki wool of the Red Army faces a soldier wearing the crisp grey lines of the Estonian SS Wiking division, with the eagle and swastika badge on his shoulder.
I asked my guide why both mannequins are blindfolded.
He said that this was the only way they could face each other.
In the aftermath of the war, bands of former soldiers throughout the Baltics, known as the Forest Brothers, hid in the countryside and continued to resist the Soviet occupation into the 1950s.
The Estonian population of Narva, whose homes had been destroyed, was not allowed to return; instead the town was repopulated with Russians recruited to work in a large textile factory.
Nearly 500,000 people from across the Soviet Union moved to Estonia during the post-war communist era.
The Russians who came to Estonia in the 1960s and 1970s believed they were building a bright future – Estonia was a centre for electronics in the Soviet Union.
But Estonians remember the Soviet period as one of repression.
Estonians hid their national flags and passed down their memories of democracy to their children in whispers.
Many Estonians are related to someone who was deported.
One Estonian told me about his grandfather, who spent a decade in a Siberian gulag.
When Estonia received its independence, his grandfather couldn’t understand why they didn’t just send all the Russians back.
Past is present Maria Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova (bottom) is the embattled director of the Narva museum (top) which stands on the river that forms a border with RussiaMore than 30 years on, Russians have gone from being politically dominant to a minority underclass, though many in Narva still feel an attachment to the Soviet version of history.
For years, young married couples would have their picture taken in front of a tank on a plinth that served as a war memorial, until it was removed, amid grumbling and complaint, a few months after the invasion of Ukraine.
“We have a permanent conflict with our local politicians” – most of whom are ethnic Russian – “about my point of view of the museum’s mission,” Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova told me.
As a result of the exhibition about the bombing of Narva, said Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova, “there was a wave of threats at me and museum staff.”
This April, a historian was assaulted leaving a local restaurant allegedly for lecturing about the Soviet destruction of Narva.
Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova remains undeterred by the controversy.
“It gives me adrenaline and a mission.”
She thumped her fist lightly on the table for emphasis.
Russian drones regularly hover intimidatingly over the Narva museum.
In 2024, under cover of darkness, the Russians removed the buoys in the river that demarcate the border.
These tactics are part of the hybrid warfare that Russia has long deployed in other former Soviet republics. Estonians are used to constant harassment.
In 2007 Estonia suffered one of the first ever cyber-attacks by a foreign power when Russian hackers targeted government and financial websites.
More than 30 years on, Russians have gone from being politically dominant to a minority underclass, though many in Narva still feel an attachment to the Soviet version of history
Since the war in Ukraine began, Russian destabilising efforts have escalated across Estonia.
A seemingly liberal sociology professor was unmasked as a Russian agent last year.
In 2023 the cars of the minister of the interior and the editor of a Russian-language news website were vandalised.
The headquarters of KAPO, the Estonian intelligence service, looks like a rhinoceros, its façade made of overlapping grey panels.
Inside, in a windowless meeting room, Harrys Puusepp, one of the department heads, was modestly confident about Estonian resilience in the face of Russia’s machinations.
“We have been able to stop most of the attacks,” he told me.
The investigation into the car attacks led to the arrest of ten people.
Puusepp said that the suspects were at the end of a “long chain” and probably didn’t even know that the Russians were behind their orders.
When it came to Ukraine, Putin claimed that Russian-speaking people in the country’s east were being oppressed and used this as a casus belli.
So far their efforts to stir up Russians in Estonia have been unsuccessful – but everyone is aware of the precedent.
For the moment, political parties with a “pro-peace”, pro-Russian agenda are politically marginal.
The most prominent Putin apologist received only 11,000 votes in the most recent European Parliament election, while in jail on treason charges.
Meanwhile Russian efforts to recruit Russian speakers for low-level sabotage through social media have found few takers – in part, says Puusepp, because the government has made it clear it will expel Russian nationals with connections to Putin’s security apparatus.
Part of the strategy of dissuasion is to make public pro-Putin social-media posts and photographs of trips to Russian training camps taken by deportees.
Homeland insecurity KAPO department head, Harrys Puusepp (top), in the Estonian intelligence service’s new headquarters in Tallinn. Lasnamäe (bottom) is a suburb in the east of Tallinn, where the majority of the population are ethnic RussiansRussian propaganda, focusing on the glorious victory over fascism during the second world war, has failed to animate Russian-speaking youth.
Their parents and grandparents are more likely than younger generations to have nostalgia for the Soviet Union, but a latent threat remains.
“That doesn’t mean we don’t have people who support Putin here,” said Puusepp.
“But they are just not organised in any way that we could say there was a fifth column.”
In the last week of April, Tallinn was still dank under the cloudy Baltic sky.
The Hanseatic old town, with its cobblestones and church spires and medieval fortress, was quiet.
I noticed plaques commemorating the names of those deported to Siberia, when the Soviet Union first occupied Estonia in 1940.
Ukrainian flags flew in solidarity over government buildings next to Estonia’s black, blue and white stripes, the NATO compass and the European Union’s circle of stars.
Outside the Russian embassy, a crowd barrier was hung with posters showing grotesque caricatures of Putin, his hands dripping blood.
To the east of the city, beyond a revamped industrial district filled with museums, tech startups and artisanal bakeries is the suburb of Lasnamäe, a tract of dull grey, Brezhnev-era blocks.
Around 115,000 people live there – a quarter of Tallinn’s population.
The majority are ethnic Russians.
Here, on a windy afternoon, I met Artjom Dmitrijev, a young Russian recently disenchanted with Estonian politics.
We looked in vain for a café.
“Not much around here,” said Dmitrijev.
“It’s pretty much only shawarma places and off-licences.”
Luckily, we found a hotdog kiosk with a few stools.
“You live in this bubble,” explained Dmitrijev.
“It feels like a tiny Russia.”
Schools and workplaces here use only Russian.
People watch Russian TV and follow Russian-language social media.
He described a sense of “isolation and alienation”.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” acknowledged Marianna Makarova, who grew up in a Russian-speaking family, learned Estonian in school as a teenager, and is now a research adviser for the Integration Foundation, a government agency that supports social cohesion.
“But it is changing.
Russians in Estonia have never been more polarised internally – largely depending on how well-adjusted in society they are.
Some prefer to remain in the comfort of their Russian-speaking families, neighbourhoods and workmates – in a Russian sphere – and isolation limits their opportunities until their so-called comfort zone becomes quite unbearable.”
Dmitrijev was 20 before he began to socialise with Estonians.
He trained as a software designer and worked mostly in English.
When he posted a series of videos on YouTube in Russian criticising Tallinn’s urban planning, he attracted the attention of the centre-left Social Democratic Party, which he would go on to join.
He finally taught himself Estonian simply by speaking to people and moved from Lasnamäe to central Tallinn, “where it felt much more wealthy, much more Estonian”.
He began “to feel far more patriotic”.
At independence, Estonia awarded automatic citizenship only to the descendants of people who had been resident in Estonia since 1940.
Russians and Russian speakers – many of whom came from the Soviet republics in central Asia – and their descendants need to pass a language test as part of a citizenship exam.
Those who don’t qualify are given “grey passports”, an alien citizenship.
They have no right to work within the EU without a permit, vote in national elections or hold political office.
Around 80,000 Russians retain “red passports”, which means they have solely Russian citizenship.
Some would like to give these up.
But Estonia does not allow for dual citizenship and many are too frightened to make the necessary trip to Russia to renounce their citizenship in person.
Tallinn, Putin out The streets around the Russian embassy in Tallinn’s old town are plastered with posters condemning Vladimir Putin as a war criminal (top). Freedom Square in Tallinn, where the Ukrainian flag is on display (bottom)The segregation of the two communities has been reinforced by the education system.
Until reforms came into effect this year, schools taught in either Russian and Estonian, despite the fact that Estonian is required for higher education and most government jobs.
Estonian, which is closely related to Finnish, is a notoriously difficult language with 14 cases.
Dmitrijev told me they were taught Estonian at school, but he never got to grips with it.
“It was regarded as a pointless hassle.”
(In practice secondary-school graduates who have obtained a pass in the Estonian language are eligible for citizenship.)
But the results of language-proficiency tests continue to describe the social hierarchy; I heard people referring to someone with advanced Estonian as “C1 level” or with only intermediate as “B2”.
There are many Russians who went through the Estonian school system, integrated and have done well.
But, as Jevgeni Ossinovsky, the mayor of Tallinn who grew up in a Russian-speaking family, admits, “There is a clear and big inequality between the Russian and the Estonian-speaking communities in everything – in terms of social capital, in terms of wages and education as well.”
Almost more important than the language barrier, he stressed, was the lack of social interaction.
“If you don’t have contacts with the other language group then obviously there are the consequences of low trust, differences of opinion in fundamental values.”
More than one Estonian told me they got on perfectly well with the Russians they worked with but didn’t really have Russian friends.
Since 2022, the Estonian government has moved to cordon Estonia off from Russia.
It stopped issuing visas to Russian citizens, restricted Russian businesses, banned Russian TV channels from cable packages and removed Soviet-era monuments.
This year Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania disconnected their electricity from the Russian grid.
Estonia is historically a Lutheran country and there is currently legislation before the parliament to separate Russian Orthodox churches in the country from the purview of the Moscow Patriarch.
Schools have been mandated to teach wholly in Estonian by 2030, but in places such as Narva, there are not enough Estonian teachers.
Most notable, and most contentious, Estonian residents with Russian passports, who were previously able to vote in municipal elections, will be barred from doing so after this year’s elections.
For many Russians – even those with Estonian passports – this feels like a sign of mistrust and of discrimination.
Ossinovsky, the mayor of Tallinn, had been against this measure, even though his party voted for it: “It’s a matter of societal status for a national minority whether you are accepted as an equal part of the society.”
The Ukrainian war has united Estonians but divided Russians living there.
Some Russians feel the sympathetic tug of the motherland, where many have relatives; some are resentful of Estonian nationalism; some are Putin apologists or just wish there was brotherly union like the old days; some, especially the younger ones, have welcomed Ukrainian refugees, who often speak Russian, into their schools and communities.
There is no obvious correlation between ideology and the colour of your passport.
Russians came to Estonia before the invasion of Ukraine seeking refuge from Putin’s repression.
Keep calm and carry on A fisherman casts a line in the shadow of the Ivangorod fortress, a 15th-century castle on the Russian bank of the Narva river (top). Aljona Kordontsuk (bottom) is the headmistress of a school in NarvaBut there remains, in certain quarters, an undercurrent of loyalty to Russia within the Russian community, even though pro-Putin, anti-Europe, anti-woke, anti-gay views are most often confined to social media and, as Estonians call it, “around the kitchen table”.
Russians don’t admit these views to Estonians or foreign reporters, but almost every Russian I talked to said they had relatives who held these kinds of opinions.
Aljona Kordontsuk, the headmistress of a school in Narva, rolled her eyes as she told me she avoids politics with her pro-Putin father.
“He watches television, television!” absorbing anti-European, anti-woke propaganda.
(After the ban on Russian cable channels, the Russians set up more powerful antennae along the river so Russians in Narva could pick up an analogue signal.)
“But then again, he loves Elton John and Freddie Mercury and George Michael,” she told me.
“It’s a paradox.”
Kordontsuk said it was hard to discern the feelings among Russians in Narva.
“I see people changing their minds all the time.
They complain, but they don’t go and live in Russia.
We say they eat from the Estonian fridge and watch Russian television.”
Several Russians I talked to used the phrase “cognitive dissonance” to describe their communities.
Makarova, the researcher, said she understood how challenging it was for Russians to reassess their values in the wake of the Ukrainian war.
“It forces you to review your whole identity, to its core, to take it down brick by brick and reassemble it: who are you?
What does it mean to be Russian?
Do you have grounds to feel good about yourself?
Your background?
Your people?...
Such identity deconstruction requires complete honesty and a lot of energy and it’s painful as hell.”
“The war is pushing everyone to question who they can trust,” said Makarova, her voice faltering.
It hurts when people start judging you by your name or how you sound – she was also aware that, when she was tired, her Russian accent poked through her fluent Estonian.
“I think: Do I have to renounce or hide my Russian roots in order to blend in?
I won’t – they are part of me for better or worse, along with my Estonian and Ukrainian roots.
But it is my choice, not my background, that defines what I stand for.”
Dmitriejev withdrew from political activism because of nasty comments on social media – like “Go back to Russia!” – including from prominent politicians.
“Is this the level of debate?” he asked me.
“Now I have to add about four disclaimers to every comment [on social media] and people will still say, ‘Oh you’re pro-Putin.’”
He now lives between Amsterdam and Tallinn.
“The Estonians don’t take me as one of theirs and the Russians don’t take me as one of theirs because I have really quite a pro-Estonian stance.
So I feel alienated and it’s kind of exhausting.”
The prevailing mood is taciturn.
Few talk explicitly about politics.
Ossinovsky, the mayor of Tallinn, said that the “current situation is very tense so as a consequence you tend not to have those kinds of discussions.”
Dmitriejev told me the silence felt brooding.
“It’s like the dust swept under the carpet, or the steam in the kettle.
You can’t see it but it’s there and one day it might explode.”
Ifound Osula on exercise with the regular army an hour east of Tallinn.
The Estonian army has two brigades, one stationed in the north, the other in the south.
Its soldiers like to joke that there are enough forests and swamps to hold up Russian armoured columns.
In a glade in the middle of a birch forest, shallow trenches had been scraped into the reddish earth.
Alpha company were safety-testing three American-made mortars, ahead of a live-firing exercise in the afternoon.
Lieutenant Kristi Pütsep, commanding officer of Alpha company, reported Osula was a good soldier.
“She is very resourceful and has great initiative.”
Girl Guides with guns School children prepare for a three-day military training exercise in Tartu (top). Estonian troops on exercise in May alongside more than 16,000 troops and volunteers from 11 countriesOsula walked over to join us, almost unrecognisable in camouflage battledress, armoured vest and helmet.
She flashed her nails, still pink and unchipped – the gel had held fast.
Her face was smeared with dark-green greasepaint.
She said that her colleagues had teased her not to smile when in the field because her teeth were a bright white giveaway.
Above, a drone buzzed.
“At every training we are talking about drones,” Osula said, “how we can hide from them, how we can shoot them down, how we can remain invisible in the field.”
She joked that the many bears in Estonia were useful decoys for the thermal imaging used by surveillance drones.
The Finns, the Estonians’ neighbours to the north, offer a historical example of a smaller country defending itself against a much more powerful invader.
They fought the Soviets in a bitter winter campaign in 1939, again in 1945, and managed to keep their independence, despite losing territory.
Finland has since spent decades building a vast network of underground shelters – including swimming pools and schools – for the entire population.
Estonians look towards them with some chagrin.
“People are very worried,” Ossinovsky told me, “especially older people.
They often ask, ‘Where is the shelter?’
We are fast forwarding the civil-defence-plan preparations.”
The government is deploying mobile generators and designating certain supermarkets and petrol stations as crisis centres that would remain open.
Four years ago debates raged about increasing military spending.
Now all parties are in agreement.
This year, Estonia has announced it will increase its defence spending to 5.4% of its GDP – above even the strenuous demands that Trump has made of his NATO allies.
A new NATO base is under construction.
For the first time Narva will be garrisoned by Estonian troops and it was announced this year that a new factory producing military-grade explosives from oil shale will be built.
On April 30th I drove out to the Amari airbase, just over 20 miles south-west of Tallinn, for the official ceremony to welcome the arrival of six new American HIMARS, mobile-artillery systems with a standard range of 80km.
Standing in the pouring rain in front of the artillery trucks with box-fresh tyres and shiny forest-green paint, Estonian and American officials and military brass reiterated their commitment to NATO solidarity.
I noticed Estonian soldiers wore blue and yellow Ukrainian patches on their uniforms, next to their Estonian flag.
Putin claims, absurdly, that his invasion of Ukraine is a defensive war against NATO.
His hostility has strengthened the alliance in Europe: Sweden and Finland, which had remained neutral throughout the cold war, rushed to join NATO.
But the Trump administration has threatened to pull America back from it.
Hanno Pevkur, the Estonian defence minister, told me at the HIMAR ceremony that “of course we rely on our allies.
We believe in NATO.”
Many Estonians said they hoped that European nations would step up their defence spending and co-ordination in response to Trump’s equivocation.
After undersea fibre-optic cables were cut last December, European navies have worked together to establish a presence in the Baltic and deter Russian sabotage.
Red and dead A pilot’s cemetery commemorates Soviet airmen, where the headstones are made of aircraft tail fins (top). The Estonian defence minister, Hanno Pevkur (bottom), at the Ämari Air BaseDeterrence is always preferable to fighting.
When I asked what would happen if the Russians actually invaded, people paused, compressed their lips, and stared, sighing, into an unfathomable distance.
We have a Plan A and a Plan B,” Osula told me.
I met her and her family after her exercise at their home in the pinewood forests in the western suburbs of Tallinn.
Her husband Otto helps run his family transport business – they have a fleet of buses – and their house is comfortable and Nordic with a wall of glass windows looking onto the garden.
Otto said he was aware that the government was beginning to take an inventory of buses and private ATVs (all-terrain vehicles) – he expects that he would have to provide buses, drivers and petrol in the event of an invasion.
The Osulas’ house “sadly has no basement”, Liisbeth, their sharp, eloquent 13-year-old daughter told me in excellent English.
The only room without windows was the larder, which was too small for four people.
“But it is fireproof,” added Otto.
He and his brothers have decided that their parents’ house, just a kilometre away, will be the family redoubt.
It has a generator, two tonnes of petrol stored in an old reservoir for heating oil and a stockpile of drinking water and dried goods.
As we drank cappuccinos and ate fluffy Estonian pancakes with jam, Liisbeth told us how she sings in a choir.
(Singing played a crucial role in Estonia’s struggle for freedom from the Soviet Union: openly protesting was banned, but huge crowds gathered for choral festivals and sang patriotic songs.
Some called it the “singing revolution”.)
Liisbeth has also joined the junior branch of the defence league, which she described as a bit like the Girl Guides with some air-rifle practice.
Her attitude towards Russians was as complicated as that of the adults I met.
She had been pleased that the Russian-speakers in her class had taken a Ukrainian refugee boy under their wing when he had first arrived.
But she also felt intimidated by a group of Russian teenagers roughhousing in the park and frustrated that they didn’t speak Estonian.
She had started to learn Russian herself because she couldn’t understand some of the girls in her synchronised swimming class and felt left out.
The family was proud of Berit’s achievements in the defence league.
At first, they told me that Hugo, their ten-year-old son, had been worried that she could get hurt.
Liisbeth joked about her mother’s new authoritarian tone when telling her to tidy her room: “It’s like having a colonel as a mother.”
Sometimes, she said, she missed “her being the gentle, warm mother at home.”
Recently, Berit had bought a sweatshirt printed with “Thank God for making me so hot!” on it.
“Where did this confidence come from!” her daughter teased.
I looked outside the window.
The tall pines and the suburban houses reminded me of Bucha, the upscale suburb outside Kyiv, where the Russians had committed a massacre in the weeks following the invasion.
Throughout my time in Estonia I had felt the war in Ukraine close by.
I asked Otto and Berit how real they thought the threat from Russia was.
“Consciously I understand that it might happen here,” admitted Otto, “but subconsciously, I block it out.”
He said that he had visited Ukraine on a business trip in February 2022, just two weeks before the invasion.
There were already hundreds of thousands of Russian troops massing on the border but all the Ukrainians he met said, “‘Oh no! It won’t happen.’
Now when I talk to friends who say it can’t happen here, I say, ‘Yes.
This is what my friends said in Ukraine too.’”
Wendell Steavenson won the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2024 for her reporting for 1843 magazine from Ukraine and Israel
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