[Webstral]

The Russians are an interesting group of people. They have a set of circumstances not very much like ours. They will react to perceived threats based on their criteria, not ours. Then there’s Putin, whose needs will be a variation on what we might call Russian needs.

As everyone knows, the Russian economy underwent a drastic change after 1991. The Soviet Union made almost everything, though not always well or cost effectively. When the former Soviet industries were exposed to the global marketplace, they experienced massive failures. The modern Russian economy is underpinned by sales of energy. I seem to recall a post on this topic within the last week, so I won’t reiterate my colleague’s material here.

The population of ethnic Russians has been contracting for some time. This is an enormous problem. The labor pool is shrinking, as is the pool of military manpower. One of the potential benefits of the invasion of Georgia was the absorption of 100,000 ethnic Russians in Abkhazia. Many other populations of ethnic Russians lie outside the borders of Russia. Bringing them back into the fold is more important than it ever was. Ethnic Russians comprise a quarter of Estonia’s population of 1.3 million. We might not consider the acquisition of 300,000 people of a specific ethnicity worth going to war over, but it’s not up to us to decide how the Russians see things.

People more in the know than I am have pointed out that the contraction of Russia’s borders (vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and her Eastern European ramparts) creates a security situation that they may find intolerable. For instance, St. Petersburg is now less than 200 miles from the nearest NATO member nation. For a people who are accustomed to seeing themselves as vulnerable to invasion, this situation cannot help but make them twitchy. They may act based on what they consider to be a situation that makes them vulnerable regardless of whether an invasion is in the offing.

I believe one of the reasons NATO has not moved significant forces into Eastern Europe is that the Russians are twitchy about being invaded. They might not see the presence of several non-Polish heavy divisions in Poland as a defensive measure. To Russian eyes, such a force might appear as an invasion force waiting for the right moment to strike. NATO has shown a surprising sensitivity to this possible Russian perspective. While I hope that Russians as a whole perceive NATO exercises as a defensive demonstration of support for Estonia, there is a non-negligible chance that they will see it an effort to intimidate them. Putin could exploit this. I hope he will be sensible and realize that our lackluster response to events in the Ukraine is no indicator regarding Russian designs on Estonia. We’ll see, I suppose.