Another Nail in the Coffin of Putin’s ‘Russian World’ -- Russians in Estonia Denounce His War

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 31 – One of the most destructive ideas which inform the thinking of Vladimir Putin is the supremacy of ethnicity over citizenship, a view that the world rejected when it was asserted by Hitler but that the Kremlin dictator has revived as a justification for his invasion of Ukraine.

            But for those who are attentive, it is obvious that Putin’s claims are not as valid as he and his propagandists insist. Many ethnic Russians who live in Ukraine are fighting against his invasion, and at the same time, many ethnic Russians in places that once legally or not were part of the USSR are equally opposed.

            In Estonia, for example, the ethnic Russians who are members of Tallinn’s city council voted unanimously to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and those who support that crime and also to insist that Moscow has no right to establish a sphere of influence in the former Soviet space.

            Their action makes a mockery of Putin’s claims to be acting on behalf of ethnic Russians everywhere and shows that the ethnic Russians in Estonia, a country that Moscow has routinely denounced for its hostility to Russians and Russia, are far more fully integrated there and share the views of its people.

            Not surprisingly, this has prompted a squall of complaints by pro-Moscow activists in Estonia, who argue that the vote of the Russian deputies in the Estonian capital does not reflect the views of the ethnic Russians in Estonia but rather the “propaganda campaign” of the Estonian government (sovross.ru/articles/2249/56535).

            Indeed, in Orwellian terms, they argue that the ethnic Russian vote against Putin’s war is evidence not of the fact that for ethnic Russians in Estonia citizenship is more important than ethnicity but rather of what they claim is the continuing and even intensifying repression of ethnic Russians by the Estonian “ethnocrats.”

            Such “arguments” should be dismissed for the nonsense they are. At the same time, the vote of the ethnic Russian deputies in Tallinn should be remembered for what it demonstrates: the integration of ethnic Russians into Estonian life and the integration of Estonians, ethnically Estonian or Russian, into the West, something Putin says is unthinkable and impossible.