We are not dealing with a new Cold War ...

The Big Chill: 

The Battle for Central Europe

by Peter Pomerantsev

After most Central European states joined the EU and NATO, it seemed that the last page of Cold War history had been turned. But reports of the death of conflict in the region turned out to have been greatly exaggerated. Russia is on the move again, aiming to show the world that NATO has feet of clay, that the EU is a geopolitical weak sister and the transatlantic alliance a myth. 

The US might be slowly waking up to the challenge of Vladimir Putin’s evermore expansionist Russia, but it still considers the issue a “regional” problem. The Kremlin’s objective is not to send tanks into Tallinn, however, but to compromise the White House.

The Kremlin knows it is weak and must rely on the jujitsu of an “asymmetric” approach in which it uses the West’s own openness as a weapon. 

Nowhere is the new approach felt more keenly than the Baltic states, where large ethnic Russian populations are courted by Kremlin-funded compatriot NGOs while being fed a diet of propaganda by Russian television. 

In Estonia, for instance, the “Russian” part of the population lives in a different reality from the rest of the nation—a reality manufactured by Moscow and filled with hostility. While most ethnic Estonians (and all historians) recognize that Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, Russian media and NGOs claim Estonia “voluntarily” joined the USSR, a thesis that fifty-six percent of the Russian population in Estonia agrees with. In April 2007, when a Soviet memorial statue, the Bronze Soldier, was relocated from a city square to a cemetery, there were street riots by local Russians who were organized, according to Estonian officials, by Russian compatriot NGOs run by the Russian secret services. It’s not an unlikely thesis. Back in 2004, Konstantin Kosachev, then chairman of the Russian Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, stated: “[Russia] cannot explain the purpose of its presence in the post–Soviet Union . . . The West is doing this under the banner of democratization, and one gets the impression we are doing it only for the sake of ourselves . . . Our activeness is following too openly Russian interests. This is patriotic but not competitive.” Soon after, the Kremlin began creating its own “banners,” such as Russkiy Mir—an organization “aimed at forming the Russian World” for Russians in the near abroad. According to Alexander Chepurin, then head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for Compatriots Abroad, “the Russian diaspora abroad provides social and humanitarian support for the implementation of the interests of the Russian Federation in post-Soviet countries.” If the Western conception of “soft power” is based on making democratic societies attractive, the Russian vision sees it, in Putin’s own description, as “a matrix of tools and methods to reach foreign policy goals without the use of arms but by exerting information and other levers of influence.”

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Read more: worldaffairsjournal.org