Putin’s a bigger deal than EU election in Europe’s frontline states

5 months ago 3

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VÕRU, Estonia — The signs of a creeping militarization are easy to detect.

In this small town 23 miles from the European Union’s border with Russia, trucks painted army green trundle over the cobbles of the main street. In a bar near the central square, off-duty U.S. servicemen watch basketball and soccer on dueling TV screens. Across a placid lake, a patch of forest is being cleared for the expansion of a military training area.

“When the training ground is operating, you know about it,” said Kratmar Muursepp, a waiter working the counter at the central Mantelahi Cafe. “It’s all boom, boom, boom, and the windows shake.”

When officials in Brussels and other European capitals talk about the risk of an escalation in the conflict with Russia, this is the part of the Continent they’re talking about.

But for the people living here, the niceties of EU policy seem remote. Instead, they’re overwhelmed with the constant day-to-day reminders of Russia’s aggression and the perpetual air of fear.

“They say we should have petrol in our cars all the time in case we need to flee, and I try to have that,” said one 33-year-old Võru resident who asked not to be named, because she feared drawing attention to her family.

“But I have grandparents here, I have friends here, I have everything here. How can I just go?”

A new ‘Iron Curtain’

Estonia, a NATO member country, has supported Ukraine in its resistance to their shared neighbor, Russia, since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. NATO’s priority since then has been defending Europe’s eastern reaches.

From the northern tip of Norway to the coast of the Black Sea, through Finland, the Baltics and Poland, a new iron curtain in the form of barbed wire and fencing is descending. Unlike the southeastern leg of these borderlands through Ukraine, this stretch of territory is increasingly an area of so-called gray zone conflict. Aggression in the form of cyber attacks, abduction and sabotage by Russia has been intensifying for more than a decade.

And while that is on most residents’ minds, the central nervous system of the EU in Brussels is not.

Few were aware the EU election was even happening.

There is a broad appreciation among locals of this sleepy town when it comes to Europe’s efforts to restrain Russia but there’s much less desire among the 12,000 residents to discuss the bloc’s bureaucratic slog to support Ukraine.

After the Soviet collapse, a lively exchange of goods and services developed between the citizens of Russia and the regions on the European side, with a steady stream of travelers crossing the border at the Luhamaa post in both directions.

Towns like Võru and Alūksne owe some of their early development to their convenient locations on road and rail trading routes between Russia’s imperial capital city of St. Petersburg through Pskov to Riga and beyond.

But the emergence of gray zone aggression over the past decade has sent a chill through Russia’s European neighbors. An Estonian security official was grabbed by Russian agents in woods near Võru in 2014 and later traded for a convicted Russian spy. Russian and Belarusian authorities have for years been sending undocumented migrants over Finnish, Baltic and Polish border crossings in an attempt to sow chaos. Cables and pipelines under the Baltic Sea have been damaged in a series of mysterious incidents, and in April, commercial flights into Estonia’s eastern Tartu airport were canceled after GPS signals were disrupted, allegedly by Russian systems.

Today, the once bustling border zone is eerily quiet and the main highway to Russia is almost entirely empty, in part because of Western trade sanctions on the Kremlin, and in part because of restrictions imposed on Russian tourists seeking to enter Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in late 2022.

Compared with the violence in Ukraine, the gray zone incidents are clearly small in scale and impact, but local leaders are taking them increasingly seriously as a harbinger of a future escalation and they are now ramping up their physical border defenses in response.

Rather, most residents are focused on their own safety — and futures.

“Interest in the EU election is pretty low,” confirmed Võru’s Deputy Mayor Sixten Sild. “There will be election posters here in town, but people here aren’t excited about it.”

Just south of Võru, over the Latvian border in the town of Alūksne, 40-year-old office administrator Liva Bulina said that she had taken a step back from reading every twist and turn of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

“You see the army trucks and you hear the military aircraft and you feel this pressure on you,” she said. “It’s heavy.”

She said constant reminders of the threat were all around her without her seeking out more.

Poland campaigns on defense

Still, politicians are seizing upon the anxiety of frontline residents, hoping to convince them they’re the ones to vote for in the coming days.

Near the lakeside spa town of Gołdap in northeastern Poland, a few miles from the Russian border, ice cream vendor Romuald Atkielski said he hoped the recent change in government would bring relief to the area.

In December former European Council president Donald Tusk returned to power overturning eight years of rule by the conservative, nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS).

This part of Poland is widely seen as a stronghold for right-wingers who styled themselves as Euroskeptics, such as Tusk’s predecessors in PiS.

While the party lost control of the government in last year’s national elections, nearly half of the people in this region supported Tusk’s opponents. In the run-up to the European election, PiS has focused on issues of national security and Russian interference. Tusk’s government and his counterparts across the EU, in contrast, have focused on Poland’s essential role in frontline defense, walking the diplomatic tightrope between east and west. Domestically, both Tusk and the opposition have seized on the idea of a Russian threat in the run-up to the EU vote, accusing each other of harboring pro-Moscow sentiments.

“Fear can unite people, but for how long? Besides, Kaliningrad is not Moscow. We can’t blame these people for what Putin decides thousands of kilometers away,” Atkielski said, referring to the Russian exclave across the border that sits on the Baltic Sea surrounded by NATO members and EU countries.

The government has just unveiled plans to spend €2.4 billion to fortify the northeastern border, while PiS has been talking up its record on defense, including plans to build a border barrier with Kaliningrad, playing on the air of fear on this side of the fence.

Atkielski blamed the previous nationalist government for creating an atmosphere of fear in the region in recent years, and especially in the run-up to last October’s parliamentary elections, which the party lost.

Among the few visitors to the spa town in May, a Polish MEP from PiS, Karol Karski, casually dressed in a slightly oversized suit, strolled around holding an ice cream cone. A two-man camera crew followed.

Karski, who is number two on the right-wing party’s regional list for the EU election, declined to say what brought him to Gołdap when asked by POLITICO.

“I have an official meeting at the border,” he said.

When the spa receptionist realized who he was, she scolded him for not saying hello when he walked in earlier to use the bathroom.

A few days later, Karski released his official campaign video, where he single-handedly stopped a supposedly Russian tank from speeding through a forest.

“We have stopped evil many times before, we will stop it again. For this we need a stable and strong base, that’s why I’m going to the European Parliament,” Karski says to the camera.

The spa receptionist, who declined to give her name, said she would not be voting for Karski.

“I’m tired of this constant fear-mongering,” she added.

Atkielski, the ice cream vendor, agreed. He’s voting for candidates from the coalition of pro-EU parties led by Tusk, adding that many people in the northeast might do the same, shunning the traditional right-wing loyalties. He complained the fear-mongering in the region was hurting the locals’ livelihood.

That broader region has a name to conjure with: the Suwałki Gap, long cast as one of the most dangerous potential flashpoints of a war between Russia and the West. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, some analysts suggested this part of Poland would be the next target. Dotted with sparsely populated villages, rolling green farmland and yellow rapeseed, it is a key strategic bridge to Kaliningrad.

“All this talk about the Suwałki Gap is scaring away potential tourists,” Atkielski said. Three years ago, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he started construction on several hotels and since has had to put the project on hold after noticing a sharp drop in tourists.

Memories of World War II, when the Polish army surrendered the region without a fight to advancing Soviet troops, remain vivid.

Under communist rule, Poland’s northeast had almost as many military bases as towns. They began to close in the early 2000s, but have been revived since Russia’s enduring military activity over the past decade. Suwałki’s own base has expanded, and NATO troops conduct frequent exercises in the area, to the point where locals like Karol Szulc have begun to notice the effects.

The idea of tanks, even allied ones, rolling through the peaceful countryside has kept visitors away, said Szulc, a local tour guide and amateur historian.

Not a single tank, Russian or otherwise, was visible that day, despite signs on the roads that crisscross the hilly countryside warning cars to give way to armed convoys.

‘We have no shelters, and nowhere to go’

When Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas visited the Estonian-Russian Luhamaa border post to discuss security in April, discussions afterwards with locals at the Võru Culture House quickly became heated.

Kallas has long been one of the Kremlin’s fiercest critics and has called loudly for NATO to do all it can to help Ukraine beat back Russia, but attendees at the meeting raised the expansion of the military training area near Võru and said it made them a Russian target.

“We have no shelters, and nowhere to go,” one attendee complained, according to local media.

At the same time, the government had left them vulnerable through a lack of air defenses, some grumbled.

Kallas’ office did not respond to a request for comment on the Võru meeting.

When asked, locals largely shrugged, saying they hadn’t thought about who they would vote for in June.

Sild, Võru’s deputy mayor, said he expected campaigning for the Estonian candidates to likely be muted and voters widely uninterested because they felt that the outcome of the vote would be unlikely to have a dramatic impact on their lives.

Sild said he never felt any ill will toward the “average Russians” who used to visit his corner of Estonia to enjoy its spa resorts and its lively restaurants and bars.

But the Russians’ unquestioning obedience to their leaders has overshadowed any fondness they might have had for their Baltic neighbors, he said.

“If President Putin tells them to do something, they will just do it,” he said.

For local residents, the hopes of normal cross-border relations with Russia have disappeared with the Russian-registered cars that were once commonplace on the streets of Võru.

More mundane political business like the build-up to a local debate about the EU elections slated for later May risked getting lost in the back and forth about the town’s ongoing militarization.

At the Mantelahi Cafe in the center of Võru, Muursepp, the waiter, was busy serving three groups of young American men who had just zipped into town on electric scooters during some downtime on the army base.

“It’s nice to keep busy,” Muursepp said. “But it is also nice when life is quieter here too.”

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