Russia raises tensions even further with its neighboring NATO allies. Estonia denounced this Thursday that the Kremlin is threatening to also redraw the borders they share on the Narva River, just one day after launching a project to extend its maritime boundaries in the Baltic, which affects Finland, Lithuania and Poland, and which has caused great concern in the Atlantic Alliance. The incident with Tallinn is another step in Moscow’s moves to destabilize the European Union and NATO allies on the continent, with cyberattacks, sabotage and influence operations. It also comes a few weeks after several Alliance allies accused Moscow of interfering with airline GPS over the Baltic Sea.
“Russia uses border issues as a means to create fear and anxiety,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas launched this Thursday at a press conference in Tallinn. “We will approach this incident in a sober and balanced manner and, if necessary, also in communication with partners and allies,” she said. The small Baltic country, with 1.3 million inhabitants and which has been denouncing Russian destabilization operations for years, is going to treat what happened as a “provocative incident.” Kallas has been claiming for weeks that Russia is in a “covert war” with Europe.
Tallinn assures that in the early hours of Wednesday to Thursday (at 3:00), Russia took away 24 of the 50 buoys that had been placed in recent days – after being renovated – and that helped mark the river boundary between both countries. “The Russian Border Guard unilaterally removed the light buoys placed by Estonia to demarcate the border with Russia on the Narva River,” the Estonian Foreign Ministry denounced in a statement. “This action by Russia, carried out in the shadow of night, fits well into the broader pattern of its provocative behavior,” they added.
Another hybrid operation
Lithuania has also denounced the Russian plan to extend its maritime borders — which was published on the Defense Ministry’s legal portal on Tuesday night and removed, without explanation, early Wednesday afternoon, when it had already been breached. the alarm—as “another hybrid operation” by Russia. The project seeks to declare inland marine waters – that is, Russian national territory – a part located east of the Gulf of Finland and another area close to two cities in the Kaliningrad enclave.
Russia has long disputed with Estonia over its river borders on the Narva. Earlier that year, Moscow complained that it did not accept the location of more than half of the buoys — luminous floating markers used primarily to help ships navigate without detouring into Russian waters — that Tallinn had proposed.
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What happened now adds fuel to the fire of the enormous crisis between NATO and Russia, which erupted more than two years ago with the large-scale invasion of Ukraine and which continues to flare up. In recent weeks, the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland have denounced sabotage and Russian operations to undermine them, as well as the unity of the EU. Furthermore, intelligence sources assure that the Kremlin is embarking on an increasingly active hybrid war with the countries of the Alliance and that it plans new operations through its espionage network and in collaboration with criminal organizations, coinciding with a super yearelectoral in Europe: from June 6 to 9, European Parliament elections will be held and citizens in Belgium, Croatia, Austria, Lithuania, Romania and the United Kingdom will also go to the polls.
Separately, on Wednesday, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that his security forces had arrested nine people suspected of attacks and arson and who they suspect are in the pay of Russia.
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