An Estonian addict could barely keep pace with the new drugs flooding the market. His terrifying accounts of the cruel toll they took on his body held his country in its grip.
The Estonian police used to respond to reports of people sniffing glue at these abandoned housing units. Now ultra-potent new synthetic drugs are keeping them busy.
Um robô de entrega autônomo entrou em uma faixa de pedestres, apesar de o sinal estar vermelho, em Tallinn, na Estônia, na segunda-feira (26), ferindo passageiros em um ônibus que colidiu com ele.
A empresa de transporte municipal de Tallinn informou que o motorista do ônibus freou bruscamente, fazendo com que vários passageiros caíssem e se ferissem.
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Imagens divulgadas pela empresa de transporte mostraram o robô colidindo com o ônibus e, na sequência, passageiros caindo dentro do veículo.
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A empresa afirmou que o motorista reagiu corretamente ao perigo, evitando um acidente mais grave.
With no single European representative negotiating directly with Moscow, some leaders are establishing their own channels – with messy results
The Nordic countries rarely fall out in public over foreign policy, least of all over Russia.
But a 90-minute phone call this week to Vladimir Putin by the leaders of Finland and Norway drew an unusual rebuke from their Danish and Swedish neighbours.
With no single European representative negotiating directly with Moscow, some leaders are establishing their own channels – with messy results
The Nordic countries rarely fall out in public over foreign policy, least of all over Russia.
But a 90-minute phone call this week to Vladimir Putin by the leaders of Finland and Norway drew an unusual rebuke from their Danish and Swedish neighbours.
In response to an increase in Russian aggression in the region, the Baltic states have placed a strong emphasis on strategic readiness in recent years, encouraging civilian preparedness and ramping up defense spending.
A country with a population of 1.3 million announces that it can strangle the commercial lifeline of the world’s leading nuclear power in a matter of hours.
A string of provocations, but it’s all just cheap jewelry
Certain statements should be read twice – the second time aloud – to be sure you didn’t dream them. The one that Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna gave to The Times on October 7 falls into this category. Estonia, the minister informs us, would be able to assemble a force of 50,000 experienced soldiers “in a matter of hours” and, again within a few hours, block Russia’s access to the Baltic Sea, which he describes as a vital artery of the Russian economy. For Moscow, that sea is a matter of survival, he added, especially since the Black Sea, he claims, is already closed off. Then, with a sense of timing that no playwright would have dared to imagine, Tsahkna called it “absurd” to describe NATO as an offensive organization.
The minister’s outburst did not come out of the blue. It comes at the end of an autumn that Tallinn has methodically shaped. In mid-September, the government announced it was ready to seal the border if a general mobilization were declared in Russia; on October 1, it banned the transit of Russian and Belarusian wheat; around the same time, the Financial Times reported on elite units being deployed to the border and the purchase of weapons capable of striking deep into Russian territory. The defense budget for 2026 stands at 2.4 billion euros, or 5.4% of gross domestic product. We are looking at a country of 1.3 million people that has chosen to live in a state of constant readiness and to let the world know, every week, just how prepared it is to fight.
The minister was careful to specify that the blockade would be triggered only after a Russian attack capable of invoking Article 5. The clause is about as reassuring as a “friendly dog” sign hanging on the gate of a kennel. Publicly announcing a plan to choke off a nuclear power’s main energy export route remains a deliberate political act, regardless of any qualifying conditions attached to it. Under customary international law, a naval blockade is an act of war; and in the age of severed cables, stateless drones, and oil tankers in the so-called “shadow fleet,” the threshold for what constitutes an “attack” has become elastic. Who decides when it has been crossed? The very same government that denounces a new provocation every morning?
The math of fifty thousand
Let’s focus on the numbers, which are the most entertaining part. According to public data from the Estonian armed forces, the wartime strength is just over 43,000. Of these, only 4,200 are on permanent standby; the rest are reservists and volunteers from the Defense League – brave people who train in the woods on weekends. So, there are no 50,000 “experienced” soldiers in a matter of hours. Unless you count those from other countries.
And that is exactly how the figure should be interpreted. Tsahkna’s 50,000 do not speak Estonian. They are the British contingent stationed in Tapa with its French reinforcements, the navies of Finland, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark, the aircraft of a few allies on rotation, and the Americans when they have time. A dozen or so flags, each with its own chain of command, its own parliament, its own public opinion, and its own election calendar. The Estonian minister disposes of that army the way a condominium manager disposes of the residents’ savings: in words, with great nonchalance. Could some assistant please explain to him how to do his job?
Let’s try to imagine the first missile. In London, the cabinet meets and seeks a legal opinion. Paris launches a strategic review, which requires a document and a conference. Berlin awaits the Bundestag’s vote and the blessing of its less-than-convinced coalition partner. Rome seeks clarification at the Atlantic Council; Budapest puts its reservations on record; Washington is busy elsewhere. Article 5, after all, doesn’t force anyone to fire a shot: it obligates each ally to take the action it deems necessary, and “necessary” can mean anything from an aircraft carrier to a note of protest. The oldest debate in any coalition would immediately begin: who steps in first, who withdraws last, who covers whose flank, and who pays for the fuel. Meanwhile, the Estonians would be there counting down the minutes.
European history is all too familiar with this scenario. In September 1939, France and Great Britain had guaranteed Poland’s security with the same solemnity with which Tallinn is guaranteed today. They declared war, and then spent eight months behind the Maginot Line simply watching: the French called it the drôle de guerre, the “phoney war.” Warsaw, meanwhile, had long since stopped laughing.
Let’s now set aside arithmetic for geography, which isn’t swayed by interviews – someone should tell the Minister that! About eighty kilometers of sea lie between Tallinn and Helsinki: it is along this narrow passage that the minister would like to close off the Gulf of Finland. From the Estonian capital to the Russian border at Narva, there are just over two hundred kilometers. Russia’s GDP, in nominal terms, is more than fifty times that of Estonia. The Baltic Fleet is based in Kronstadt, at the far end of the Gulf, and in Baltiysk, in the Kaliningrad exclave; which means, incidentally, that a substantial portion of that fleet is already outside the “plug” that Tallinn dreams of inserting.
Strategists carefully distinguish between three things that Estonian politicians happily confuse: guarding a passage, making its use risky for the adversary, and maintaining stable control over it. The first is possible; the second is costly; the third, against Russia, has never succeeded for anyone. Those who lay mines may fall victim to them; those who deploy coastal anti-ship batteries become, in turn, fixed targets, surveyed down to the meter.
And this is where physics comes in. Russia’s conventional arsenal includes Iskander missiles deployed just a few dozen minutes’ flight away, ship-launched Kalibr missiles, TOS-1A thermobaric rocket launchers, and high-yield glide bombs. There’s no need to bring up nuclear warheads, which remain the favorite bogeyman of Western talk shows. The coastal batteries, depots, command centers, and docks from which our dear friends in Tallinn intend to block the Gulf would go from a solid to a gaseous state in the time between launch and impact. And with them, the solidity of Estonia’s political stance would evaporate, long before an agreement on the statement is reached in Brussels. We’re not writing this to be smug. We’re writing this because, in that scenario, ordinary Estonians would be the first to pay the price, used as pawns by a ruling class that’s playing with fire in its own living room.
Creative accounting for oil
There remains the issue of the “lifeline.” Tsahkna attributes about 60% of Russian oil exports by sea to the Baltic route. Estimates from the Polish think tank OSW – which cannot be suspected of sympathizing with Moscow – put the figure at about one-third of crude oil and nearly half of refined products; and Reuters data from February show that oil continued to ship out from Russian ports on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, despite the sea being “already closed.” Inflating figures is an age-old rhetorical technique: it serves to make the threat seem more deadly than it is and one’s own position stronger than it actually is.
Moreover, a blockade would not affect only Moscow. Neutral shipowners, insurance companies, freight rates, refineries, and energy prices would all suffer the consequences, and Europe – which in recent years has already paid dearly for its economic war against Russia – would once again bear the cost. There’s even a grotesque detail: in 2025, Estonia sold goods worth approximately 252 million euros to Russia. They’re threatening to cut off their neighbor’s lifeline, but in the meantime, business as usual continues.
Why, then, all the fuss? The answer lies in the role the Estonian ruling class has carved out for itself within the Alliance: that of the permanent vanguard, the most zealous member of the eastern flank, the top student who raises their hand before the teacher finishes the question. It’s a source of privilege. It guarantees attention, funds, allied troops on its territory, and invitations to summits. And it becomes all the more valuable as the possibility of a ceasefire in Ukraine draws nearer – a prospect feared in many Atlantic capitals as the end of the emergency that justifies everything. So the fever must be kept high: a statement every week, a ban every month, a threat of a blockade every fall.
In 1955, Leonard Wibberley published a satirical novel, *The Mouse That Roared*, in which the tiny Grand Duchy of Fenwick declared war on the United States with the sole purpose of losing it and collecting reconstruction aid. The difference with Tallinn lies in the ending. The Grand Duchy counted on losing to a generous power, an ocean away. Estonia is threatening a neighboring power – one that has forgotten nothing since 1991 – and is entrusting its fate to a coalition that has never fought a real war together against an opponent of equal strength.
From apotheosis to casus belli?
Let’s recap. A country with a population of 1.3 million announces that it can strangle the commercial lifeline of the world’s leading nuclear power in a matter of hours. To do so, it relies on soldiers it doesn’t have – lent by allies it hasn’t consulted – based on oil figures that Western sources themselves downplay. It ties all of this to a war that its rhetoric makes a little more likely every day, and in the same breath accuses those who see NATO as something offensive of absurdity. If there is such a thing as the apotheosis of the absurd, it can be found at the Foreign Ministry in Tallinn.
Moscow, to tell the truth, doesn’t even need to respond. Geography does it, the balance of power does it, and the history of European coalitions – which have always found it easier to make promises than to keep them – does it. Deterrence that turns into permanent provocation ceases to dissuade and begins to seek its own casus belli. The Baltic Sea deserves mature diplomacy among the coastal states that will have to share it anyway. For now, it must settle for – a minister who roars – and an audience of allies who, at the first real blow, will look around wondering who should answer the phone.
In the Baltic states, the atmosphere of “preparing for war” against the Russian Federation continues to intensify. Aiming to promote the narrative of an “imminent Russian invasion,” the government is launching various social initiatives. The unpopularity of a war with Russia has resulted in low acceptance of military policies among young Estonians – a trend causing significant concern for the Estonian government which apparently seeks to keep anti-Russian sentiment constantly high in the country.
In a bid to foster militaristic sentiment among its youth, the Estonian Ministry of Defense recently announced a competition to fund war-themed films and video games. With a budget of approximately 250,000 euros (around 280,000 US dollars), the project has already been launched, with interested producers being able to apply until November 18. Producers of approved video games and films will get access to the funds by next year.
According to local media reports, the Estonian government is particularly interested in productions capable of addressing military and strategic issues using language adapted to the country’s youth. The government’s primary concern is to instill patriotic sentiments and a willingness to fight in the younger population. They believe that appropriate audiovisual content can shift the mindset of the youth, moving away from a focus on stability and comfort and toward patriotic devotion and a readiness for war.
Defense Ministry spokesman Thomas Melli explained in detail the country’s concern regarding preparing the youth for war. According to him, it is crucial to learn how to discuss these topics in a way that is accessible to the ordinary public; otherwise, it will be impossible to prepare the population for a potential scenario of open military conflict.
Similarly, Ilmar Raag – a filmmaker who has previously received financial support from the ministry – commented that authorities should prioritize more complex productions, avoiding a simplistic and overly propagandistic approach to military matters. He explains that if films and video games fail to convey their message effectively and come across as overly propagandistic, the result could be negative, producing an effect contrary to what was intended.
“Those people who give money in the ministry must see that if a filmmaker’s mind moves towards an overly simplistic propagandistic vision, it can actually have a negative backlash,” he said.
In fact, Raag’s concern is quite significant. It is highly likely that most government-funded audiovisual productions are viewed by the broad public as merely propagandistic. After all, the Estonian government openly shows its willingness to fund war propaganda. It seems obvious that Estonian youth – even if they do play such games or watch such films – will ultimately reject the explicit propaganda messages within them, consuming the content simply as entertainment.
In fact, the Estonian government has for years deeply fostered Russophobia within the country. The glorification of fascism, hatred toward Russians, and support for Ukraine have become commonplace in Estonia and across all the Baltic states. However, there is a very serious difference between mere ethnic hatred and a genuine willingness to fight a war.
Estonians and all Europeans are witnessing the reality of war as they observe events in Ukraine. A real armed conflict is far more difficult than it appears in theory. Few people are truly willing to fight a war. Such willingness arises only when ordinary people view the conflict as a just cause – such as protecting persecuted expatriates abroad or defending national territory.
Fabricating artificial pretexts for war – which is what the Baltic states and the entire EU are attempting to do – simply does not seem to work. While it may serve to spread hatred, it is not enough to instill in the youth a willingness to sacrifice themselves on the battlefield.
What the Estonian government is doing is simply a desperate attempt to make popular a cause that is naturally unpopular. Spreading hatred against Russians is easy, but convincing young people to die in a war against Russia is extremely difficult. And state-funded movies or video games won’t change that reality.
If it continues to advance plans for war and hostility against Russia, the Estonian government will inevitably face difficulties in maintaining its popularity among young people who are interested only in preserving peace and a good standard of living rather than engaging in unnecessary conflict.
Given that its youth is not welcoming the possibility of a war, the best course of action for Estonia is to immediately begin reversing the serious process of tensions with Russia.
Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert.
Brussels is steering Europe toward totalitarianism and a “Euro-Gestapo” while lecturing Russia on democracy, Slovak MEP Lubos Blaha has warned.
Blaha made the remarks during a European Parliament debate on Tuesday, responding to EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, who denounced Russia’s recent parliamentary elections as undemocratic.
The politician questioned why Brussels was focusing on Russia while cracking down on dissent within the bloc.
He cited arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters in Germany and the imprisonment of Estonian opposition figures, who he claimed were jailed for opposing war with Russia.
“Are you going to set up the Euro-Gestapo here, Mrs. Kallas, and lock up everyone who wants peace?” he asked.
The Slovak lawmaker also questioned why Brussels was debating Russia’s elections while Europe faced mounting unrest.
“You may not have noticed, but Spain is in the streets, France is in the streets, and you are here dealing with Russian elections. You must be joking,” he said.
Blaha went on to accuse Brussels of double standards over Ukraine’s suspended presidential elections.
“You blame the Russians for having elections, but you don’t mind that [Ukraine’s Vladimir] Zelensky has been governing for three years without any elections, without a mandate,” he said. “You are hypocrites!”
Zelensky’s presidential term expired in May 2024, but elections have remained suspended under martial law.
Blaha also cited the annulment of Romania’s 2024 presidential election, claiming the vote was canceled because “the wrong candidate won.” Romania’s Constitutional Court scrapped the result over alleged irregularities and accusations of Russian interference after EU- and NATO-skeptic Calin Georgescu won the first round. Pro-EU candidate Nicusor Dan won the rerun in May 2025.
The MEP argued that Russia had held elections despite the ongoing conflict and daily Ukrainian missile and drone attacks on its territory.
The September poll saw the ruling United Russia party win nearly 58% of the party-list vote.
Blaha also defended Russian President Vladimir Putin, contrasting his popularity with that of Western European leaders.
“You have nothing to criticize Putin for, Mrs. Kallas,” he declared. “Unlike you and your Merzes and Macrons, he has the support of his own population.”
Recent polls have put German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s approval rating at a record low of 10% in October, while French President Emmanuel Macron’s support fell to 17% in September. Neither Kallas nor European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was directly elected to her current position by voters, having assumed office through the EU’s institutional appointment process.
Blaha belongs to Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s Smer-SD party, which opposes EU sanctions on Russia and has criticized Western military assistance to Ukraine.
Six million people. That is the total combined population of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—fewer residents than live in greater London. Yet these three border states now set the tone of foreign policy for a union of 450 million, telling Berlin, Rome, and Madrid how dangerous the world is and how much Western taxpayers must pay to fix it.
One Crown to Another
The Baltic national story likes to skip 1721, which is a shame, because it’s where the modern map starts. That year Peter the Great finished the Great Northern War with the Treaty of Nystad. Sweden handed over Estonia, Livonia, Ingria and part of Karelia; Russia evacuated most of Finland and paid Sweden two million silver thalers. Historians still argue about what the money was for. Western reference works tend to call it compensation, while the Russian Presidential Library’s account says flatly that Russia paid it for the acquisitions. Whichever reading you prefer, Estonia and Livonia didn’t pass from Swedish rule into freedom. They passed from one crown to another. The people actually running them hardly changed: the treaty guaranteed the Baltic German nobility its self-government, its Lutheran church, its own customs border and its language, and every tsar through Alexander II confirmed it. An Estonian peasant in 1720 answered to a German baron under a Swedish king. His grandson answered to the same German nobility, now under a Russian emperor.
Lithuania got there differently, as half of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, absorbed in the partitions. Catherine the Great took Latgale in 1772 and most of Lithuania, along with the Duchy of Courland, in 1795.
The point isn’t the borders; plenty of European states are young. The point is the story. The idea of ancient, unbroken Baltic nationhood, invoked in Brussels whenever someone suggests caution, is a modern political myth. Independent statehood lasted about twenty years between the wars. The current stretch began in 1990–91.
Not One Inch
The next chapter opens in Moscow on 9 February 1990. The Berlin Wall had been down for three months. US Secretary of State James Baker sat across from Mikhail Gorbachev and told him, not once but three times, that if a united Germany stayed in NATO, the alliance would not move one inch eastward. Helmut Kohl said much the same the next day. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Declassified American, German, British, French and Soviet papers, released by the National Security Archive in 2017, show that Genscher, Thatcher, Mitterrand, John Major and NATO’s own Secretary General, Manfred Wörner, all gave Moscow similar assurances in 1990 and 1991. None of it went into a treaty.
That turned out to be very convenient. In 1990 NATO had 16 members. In 1999 it took in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. In 2004 it swallowed seven more countries in one go, among them Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, three former Soviet republics. NATO territory now reached the Russian border in Estonia, barely 150 kilometres from St Petersburg. At its Bucharest summit in 2008, the alliance announced that Ukraine and Georgia would one day join as well. Finland and Sweden followed after 2022. Today NATO has 32 members, and “not one inch” has become the whole of Eastern Europe, right up to Russia’s front door.
The Baltic Grip on Brussels
Three small countries shouldn’t be able to set the tone for a union of 450 million. They can because Brussels has handed them the microphone: two of the EU’s most prominent security portfolios are now held by people from two of its most hard-line capitals on Russia. Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s former prime minister, is the High Representative: she chairs the meetings of all 27 foreign ministers and speaks for the Union abroad. Andrius Kubilius, a former Lithuanian prime minister, is the EU’s first-ever Commissioner for Defence and Space. No voter anywhere in Europe chose either of them for those jobs.
Kallas comes from a family that has always been close to power, whoever held it. Her father went from Communist Party official in Soviet Estonia to Reform Party founder to EU Commissioner: what Germans call a “Wendehals”, a turncoat. In May 2024, weeks before her nomination, she said a Russian defeat would not be a bad thing and remarked that Russia is made up of many nations. Germany’s Volksstimme read it as floating Russia’s break-up, an odd thing for Europe’s next top diplomat to muse about a nuclear power. Over both of them sits Ursula von der Leyen, whom EU leaders produced at the last minute in 2019 and Parliament confirmed with 383 votes, nine more than she needed. She arrived from the German defence ministry, where she’d left behind a Bundeswehr failing its readiness targets and a parliamentary inquiry into consultancy contracts.
Barking on Command
It would flatter the Baltic governments to think they run the show. They don’t. They bark because it suits the people holding the leash. In Brussels, home to the headquarters of both the EU and NATO, the big capitals write the policies. The Baltic capitals enforce them at the border, say the things Berlin and Paris would rather not say out loud, and take the first swing. That is why the EU’s diplomatic megaphone went to Tallinn and its defence portfolio to Vilnius. Nobody appointed Kallas and Kubilius to calm things down.
Kaliningrad in 2022 showed how it works. Brussels drew up sanctions on Russian steel; Lithuania enforced them to the letter and halted rail shipments to the exclave in June. Moscow called it a blockade, and Nikolai Patrushev, then head of Russia’s Security Council, warned that Lithuanians would feel the consequences. Within a month the Commission issued new guidance letting the goods through again. Vilnius had done exactly what it was told, and was left standing alone in front of Moscow while Brussels quietly backed away.
Three years later it was Estonia’s turn. Brussels had spent months announcing crackdowns on Russia’s “shadow fleet” of ageing, poorly insured tankers. On 13 May 2025 the Estonian navy tried to stop one of them, the Jaguar, in international waters off Tallinn. The crew ignored the orders and sailed on to the Russian port of Primorsk. Estonia said a Russian Su-35 then entered its airspace for about a minute with its transponder off, and NATO scrambled a fighter to meet it: a Portuguese F-16, from a country 3,000 kilometres away. Nobody fired, this time.
Meanwhile the big dogs are being moved into position behind the small ones. In 2023 Berlin pledged a full armoured brigade for Lithuania, about 4,800 soldiers, at a new base at Rūdninkai near the Belarusian border. It formally began operating in 2025 and is due at full strength by 2027. It is the first permanent deployment of German troops abroad since the Second World War.
European Values, Baltic Edition
After 1991, Latvia and Estonia gave automatic citizenship only to pre-1940 citizens and their descendants. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet-era residents, most of them Russian speakers and many born in the country, became “non-citizens” with alien passports and no vote in national elections. Riga insists that “non-citizen” is a legal status, not an ethnic label, yet about two-thirds of Latvia’s non-citizens are ethnic Russians. UN and OSCE bodies criticized the system for years. At the start of 2026, non-citizens were still 8.7% of Latvia’s population, by the Latvian government’s own figures.
It has got tighter since 2022, not looser. Schools in Latvia have moved to Latvian-only teaching and Estonia’s are following. Latvia told Russian citizens with permanent residence, many of whom had lived there for decades, to pass a basic Latvian test or risk losing that status. And on 26 March 2025 Estonia’s parliament voted 93 to 7 to amend the constitution so that only Estonian and EU citizens can vote in local elections. On paper it covers all non-EU nationals. In practice it was aimed at about 80,000 Russian citizens, plus Belarusians, and everyone knew it. Stateless “grey passport” holders were given one last local election, in October 2025, before losing their vote as well.
It’s hard to take a lecture on European values from governments that treat their own long-term residents this way.
Who Pays the Bill
Vilnius loves to talk in percentages, because percentages flatter small countries. Lithuania pledged 5% of GDP for defense in 2026 before Donald Trump had even made his 5% demand in January 2025, and its 2026 budget comes in at 5.38%. In May 2025 the three Baltic defence ministers told every ally to match it. In June, at The Hague, NATO made 5% its target for 2035.
Forget the percentages. Look at the money. Lithuania’s entire 2026 defense budget is €4.79 billion. At 5% of its economy, Germany would be spending more than €200 billion a year, over forty times as much. Even the core 3.5%, before the extra 1.5% for infrastructure and other defence-related spending, would come to around €150 billion. For Italy the full target would mean more than €100 billion a year, for Spain around €80 billion, and both are already carrying some of the heaviest public debt in Europe. The Baltic states set the bar; the big economies get the bill.
Spain, at least, had the nerve to say no. Pedro Sánchez called the 5% target “unreasonable,” refused to sign up to it, and left The Hague with an exemption: 2.1% of GDP and not a cent more. Trump called Spain “a very low payer.”
Nobody Asked the Voters
Were Western Europeans ever asked if they wanted this? Only by pollsters. In 2015 Pew found 58% of Germans, 53% of French and 51% of Italians against using military force to defend a NATO ally attacked by Russia. In a survey Pew published in 2020, majorities in Germany, Italy and Spain still said no. Support for the EU paying for weapons for Ukraine has slid nine points, from 65% in early 2023 to 56% this spring. In France, backing for arms deliveries dropped 18 points, from 65% in March 2022 to 47% this February. By late 2024, YouGov found a negotiated peace between Ukraine and Russia preferred over fighting on by 55% of Italians, 45% of Germans and 43% of the French. A Politico poll last December found French and German adults leaning toward scaling support back. And this summer, majorities in Germany and France said no to Ukraine joining the EU as a full member.
That isn’t Germany, France, Italy or Spain itching for a wider war. It’s a public that was never asked, has grown more sceptical every year since 2022, and is now being handed a bill it never ordered: a target worth more than €200 billion a year in Germany alone, cheered on from Vilnius and signed off in Brussels by officials no voter chose.
When the Money Runs Out
The Hague deal has a review built in for 2029. My prediction: by then, Spain won’t be the only country saying no. The money ran out years ago; what’s being spent now is borrowed. Germany even rewrote its constitution in 2025 so it could borrow for defence outside its own debt brake.
In 1721 Peter the Great settled the Baltic’s fate with a treaty and two million silver thalers. Three centuries later, the region’s future is still being decided by bigger powers doing the sums.
So, are Europe’s smallest nations dragging the continent into war? Not on their own. They do the barking; Brussels holds the leash. And Berlin, Rome and Madrid are being dragged along behind, towards a confrontation their voters never chose, paid for with money they no longer have.
Maybe that is the one hopeful part. The sooner the money runs out, the sooner voters in the big countries will force a change of course, and the sooner Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius go back to being what their size always made them: footnotes in European foreign policy. That may be what finally keeps Europe out of a direct war between nuclear powers.
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