The reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s death, on 8 April at the age of 87, has been predictably enormous. Internationally she has largely been lauded, certainly in Central and Eastern Europe where she is viewed as sharing, with...

Gazprom has long enjoyed the title of Russia’s “national energy champion,” but in a race to meet rising energy demand in Asia, Moscow’s shifting gas strategy could enable the rise of alternative gas producers Rosneft and Novatek,...

The last forecast was written against the background of general instability in Russia that caused a degree of uncertainty regarding the developments in the Russian military. However, several trends and events that were deemed...

As part of its mission to sharpen strategic thinking and inform public debate on issues of critical importance to the security of Estonia and the Euro-Atlantic community, the International Centre for Defence Studies is pleased to...

Estonia’s draft new national defence development plan detailing the country’s defence capabilities and activities for the next decade was officially unveiled on December 12. The new development plan reflects contemporary...

As NATO has evolved from a strictly military alliance directed against a particular territorial threat into a broader regional partnership based on shared values, its security concerns have widened and deepened accordingly. No...

In a December 7 article in the Estonian daily Postimees, Evelyn Kaldoja* quoted energy analyst Matthew Hulbert of oilprice.com as saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the start of construction of...

Previously confined to a narrow audience of specialists, the issue of the gas market in Estonia and the Baltic states has recently garnered broader attention. Numerous articles have appeared in the Estonian media discussing the...

Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attack that killed him and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, Ambassador Chris Stevens documented his concerns about safety there. He made two separate requests for increased security that...

Extensive environmental and security analysis is a prerequisite for yet another pipeline project.

The ever strengthening Russian intelligence services have clearly stepped up their efforts on the Estonian front during the last 20 years.

The total population of the Nordic and Baltic region amounts to 32 million people, which makes up only 6% of Europe’s population. Hence the region holds a fairly modest position in Europe in terms of population size. At the same...

Ankara aims to elevate Turkey’s geopolitical importance by attracting natural gas from the Kurdish region of Iraq (KRI) into the Southern Corridor, and elevate Turkey’s strategic significance as an energy transit hub for Europe,...

For the first time in modern history, the Baltic states can rely on their own actions to attain energy security. By implementing the European Union’s reforms aimed at creating a unified European energy market, the political...

The European Union’s antitrust investigation of OAO Gazprom (OGZD), announced this month, is a landmark case. It shows a new EU resolve to crack down on rent- seeking by Russia’s natural-gas behemoth and, at long last, to heed...

Tony Lawrence contributed an article about Estonia’s position on ballistic missile defence to a Ukrainian project that explored various European views on the issue.

With its new law on state language policy, the pro-presidential Party of Regions (PR) has cloaked a radical effort to redefine the basis of Ukrainian statehood and society under the guise of human-rights concerns.

We need to engage in a calm and sober debate on whether or not and how Russia threatens us and on the real meaning of its vicinity and our common history to us.

While markets in Europe and the United States breathed a collective sigh of relief with the victory of the sober Antonis Samaras and his New Democracy Party in last Sunday’s Greek parliamentary elections, the absence of a...

The thousands of Europeans who descended on Azerbaijan this week for tomorrow’s finals of the Eurovision Song Contest are likely to suffer from one of two common caricatures of the host country.

This was the fifth time that the survey to gauge opinion on the Estonian Defence Forces was conducted among conscripts and reservists. The survey covers questions about the attitudes towards the Estonian Defence Forces and...

There are limits to free speech in free societies too.

The Middle Eastern revolutions still lack a clear political agenda.

China’s role in global affairs is becoming increasingly important. This article offers an analysis of EU-China relations, including political and economic challenges that this relationship faces. Diplomatic relations between the...

The assessment of possible developments in the Russian Armed Forces and defence sphere given in the previous edition of this symposium may be considered partially correct.

China’s enhanced international status heralds its transformation into the most significant geopolitical factor in the first half of the 21st century.

Considering the last one hundred years of Sweden’s political history, a slight shift to the right in society’s political preferences can be only beneficial. It will also stimulate serious self-reflection and internal reforms on...

Since 1991, the Baltic states have been continuously learning how to be independent states capable of providing for security of their people and warding off various security risks, threats and challenges. In that process, 2004...

Kaarel Kaas: Since the mid-1990s there have been numerous attempts to reform and modernize the Russian military. All these efforts remained on paper, faded, or resulted in minor reorganisations like merging or splitting different...

For Europe’s governments, reducing defence expenditure is an easy response to times of economic hardship. Few immediate effects are felt by the population – compared, for example, with cuts in education or welfare spending – and...

Tomas Jermalavicius: On August 6th, Bronislaw Komorowski will be sworn in as a new president of Poland. As a candidate of the ruling party “Civic Platform”, he defeated Jaroslaw Kaczynski – a former Prime Minister, leader of the...

When five years ago Estonia as well as its two Baltic neighbours, Latvia and Lithuania, joined NATO, it märked the fulfilment of one of the greatest strategic ambitions of our small countries. And it opened a new era, in which...

ICDS researcher Maria Mälksoo launched her new book The Politics of Becoming European: A Study of Polish and Baltic post-Cold War Security Imaginaries in the Routledge New International Relations series on 17 December 2009. This...

ICDS researcher Maria Mälksoo has published an article, “The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe” in the December 2009 issue of the European Journal of...

Living in a complex and dynamic world always comes with a great deal of uncertainty. It always haunts us and often pushes to the brink of extreme anxiety in turbulent times. We do not know even in times of peace and tranquillity...

At the moment, Russia is holding large-scale Zapad-2009 and Ladoga-2009 military drills right next to the Baltic states. Moscow insists that they are conducted for anti-terrorism purposes, yet the forces deployed and the priority...

22.09.2009

ICDS researchers published three articles in a recent special issue of Akadeemia (9/2009) that focuses on security matters. In her article, Riina Kaljurand, Deputy Director of ICDS, analyses NATO’s opportunities and...

Yesterday US Vice President Joseph Biden visited Georgia, sending a strong signal of the new administration’s continuing support to the territorial integrity of Georgia in a narrower sense and to statehood as such in a wider...

More than twenty key opinion leaders and former and current top politicians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) sent an open letter to the Administration of Barack Obama, President of the United States, in order to highlight...

On Sunday evening, champagne corks popped open in many places around Lithuania when the preliminary results of the presidential elections were declared. As expected, the EU commissioner for budget and financial programming Dalia...

Russia talks about the need to modernise its armed forces, but the state has actually no finances – and its plants do not have sufficient production capacity – to implement this plan, writes Kaarel Kaas from the International...

The Russian-Georgian conflict, which had been going on for years, escalated into a full-scale war in August 2008. The Five-Day War was, and still is, remarkable and significant in many different ways.

Book review: Pille Petersoo & Marek Tamm (eds.), Monumentaalne konflikt: mälu, poliitika ja identiteet tänapäeva Eestis (Tallinn: Varrak, 2008), Journal of Baltic Studies 40(1): 163-165.

When Estonia and its two Baltic neighbours, Latvia and Lithuania, joined NATO five years ago, it marked the fulfilment of one of the greatest strategic ambitions of these small countries and opened a new era for us by way of...

Maria Mälksoo has published a book chapter titled as „Liminality and Contested Europeanness: Conflicting Memory Politics in the Baltic Space“ in an edited volume on identity and foreign policy by Eiki Berg and Piret Ehin, the...

Ever since the era of inter-state wars was quite naively pronounced dead after the end of the Cold War, members of the Western military have been cast and recast in new roles. From humanitarian interventions and stabilisation...

The ICDS researcher Maria Mälksoo's attempt to map the Baltic security imaginaries along the modernist-postmodernist axis was recently published in The Estonian Foreign Policy Yearbook 2008 (Tallinn: Estonian Foreign Policy...

The article is an extended version of the speech given by the author at the Engelsberg seminar "On Russia," organized by the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation on June 12-14 2008. The same text is about to be published...

Following recent events in Georgia, the West is once again faced with a conflict between interests and values in its relationship with Russia. The question is how flexible are Western values this time around so as to make it...

As we communicate with Ukrainians, we get to know the background of the region and are more able to make suitable foreign policy decisions concerning the East.

Russia’s war against Georgia should make even the most hardened sceptics and the most optimistic flower children realise that today Russia and the West are pursuing essentially conflicting aims and employing divergent strategies...

If memories of the Second World War were de-Stalinised, the different interpretations of history in Russia and Estonia could, to a large extent, be united and harmonised.

In relation to the recent recession that has hit the EU, but left Germany less affected than others, an economic analyst has noted that the Germans don’t “party” as hard as the British or the Americans, but their “hangovers” are...

Both Estonia and NATO as a whole need constantly updated and reliable intelligence information to make adequate decisions.

By now, it is abundantly clear that Russia started a full-scale military aggression against Georgia at the end of last week. The significance of this fact is, however, much greater than the further fate and fortune of a small...

30.06.2008. Kaarel Kaas

Postimees

At the beginning of June, a cluster bomb went off in Russian military circles, causing a series of medium-sized explosions that affected personnel policy. The first so-called blast came when...

June 2008, Kaarel Kaas

This article was published in the 2007 Yearbook of the Estonian Ministry of Defence.

Russia and NATO are partners in the war on terrorism – this is what Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, said to Lord...

Germany’s Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has recently released a security strategy ‘white paper’, in which it outlines the conservative’s vision for a German security reform. Though it has sparked an...

The NATO operation should be considered a failure, if no actual progress is made in all areas of life.

An article by ICDS director Kadri Liik, The “Bronze Year” of Estonia-Russia relations, appeared in the 2007 Yearbook of the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was issued for the 90th anniversary of the Republic of...

A unified concept of outreach would give greater cohesion to foreign and security diplomacy.

Download: Book Review: Ryan C. Hendrickson, Diplomacy and War at NATO.

(Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006) (PDF)

An era of instability awaits Europe. Decisive action is required.

The snap parliamentary elections in Ukraine will indicate whether the country will advance in the direction of reform and whether such reforms will be successful. The cabinet which will be formed after the elections will have an...

Download: Estonian Lessons Learned of NATO Accession. Presentation to the MOD of Macedonia (PDF)

The politics of history pursued by Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga is not another manifestation of a pathology unique to Eastern Europe, but a phenomenon typical of the current stage of the post-colonial identity construction process of the...

Robert Schumann, the French Foreign Minister whose declaration to the international press in Paris, on 9 May 1950, is celebrated as the start of the process that would lead to the European Union, was clear of the purpose behind...

Download: "Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto", Security Dialogue (PDF)

11.2006, Merle Maigre

Diplomaatia

Democratic control of national defence is a much more difficult challenge than generally recognised. Membership of NATO or the European Union does not automatically guarantee success.

Estonia,...

The fundamental convictions of the current Russian leaders and of the West as well as the basic interests deriving therefrom are completely incompatible by now. This is why the West has to redefine its approach to Russia.

Should a member of the armed forces be permitted to publicly criticise his or her government’s security and defence policy? From the viewpoint of democratic civil-military relations the answer is, simply, no. The basic...

Download: "From Existential Politics Towards Normal Politics? The Baltic States in the Enlarged Europe", Security Dialogue (PDF)

Juuli 2005, Maria Mälksoo

Download: "Shifting the Balance? The US, the EU and "New Europe"", Cambridge Review of International Affairs (PDF)

Download: Enabling NATO Enlargement: Changing Constructions of the Baltic States (PDF)