Despite the turmoil in her own government, Kaja Kallas was intent on sending a message to the rest of the world about yielding to Russian demands on Ukraine.
TALLINN, Estonia — Sitting in her office in Stenbock House, a well-appointed neoclassical building in the heart of Tallinn's medieval Old Town, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas wanted to discuss the last 80 years of European history. But she had only 20 minutes.
Her government has been staunchly supportive of Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24. In fact, Estonia, the smallest of the three Baltic states with a population of just 1.3 million, has so far sent more than $270 million worth of military assistance to Ukraine, the equivalent of more than 30% of its annual defense budget.In addition to armored personnel carriers, antitank mines and a wide variety of small arms, Estonia has been an eager supplier of the U.S.
Maintaining that peace is of existential necessity for Estonians, who share an uneasy 182-mile border with a revanchist power currently occupying 20% of Ukraine and threatening to permanently gobble up much, if not all, of that territory. Estonia itself was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 when Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler agreed to the mutual carve-up of Eastern Europe under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Kallas’s sense of history is inextricably wedded to her own genealogy; her family’s suffering can be read in every bullet and flak jacket her government has shipped to Ukraine. Her allusion to France hardly seems accidental. Kallas has been an explicit critic of French President Emmanuel Macron's insistence that the West not"humiliate" Vladimir Putin, something she sees as a dangerous non sequitur. In a March 24 op-ed in the New York Times she"I keep reminding my colleagues who want to pick up the phone and talk to Putin," she said, in another unmistakable reference to Macron,"OK, fine — talk to him.
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