Can Russia Invade Estonia?

What the social media campaign about the "Narva People's Republic" could mean while Washington is distracted by Iran.

Moscow’s tone on the Iran war is changing. In the early weeks of the American-Israeli campaign, the Kremlin stuck to measured calls for de-escalation and diplomatic settlement. Putin had spent years building relationships with Gulf monarchies, and he was not going to jeopardise them by standing up for the ayatollahs’ regime.

He also had no interest in angering Washington while negotiations on the Ukraine war still seemed possible. That restraint has been quickly dropped. By mid-March, Russian officials started declaring the American “blitzkrieg” a failure, accusing the United States and Israel of unprovoked aggression, questioning the evidence for Iran’s nuclear programme, and warning of nuclear catastrophe from strikes near the Bushehr power plant. Behind this rhetorical shift, Russia appears to have begun providing Iran with intelligence and drones — though only to an extent that maintained plausible deniability.

And, of course, none of this was spontaneous: the Kremlin has no allegiances and treats every international crisis as a transactional opportunity. It is certainly willing to scale back its support for Iran if the United States substantially cuts military assistance to Ukraine or freezes it at current levels. The intelligence sharing, the drones — all of it is on the table and is priced in Ukrainian terms.

So far, the bargaining has produced nothing. Moscow continues to invoke understandings supposedly reached at the Anchorage summit, but Russian commentary increasingly suggests frustration that the “spirit of Anchorage” — the collegial atmosphere between the Russian and American sides — is evaporating. The Americans, occupied with Iran, are not offering the Kremlin what it expected.

One of the consequences of this is the increased pressure on Europe. From Moscow’s point of view, Europe is where Russia faces the most resistance but also where it has the most leverage, especially while Washington is consumed by the Gulf. Trump’s open irritation with NATO allies who refuse to back his Middle East campaign gives the Kremlin additional grounds for optimism. A crack is forming between Washington and European capitals and Moscow is working to widen it.

There are several places where this pressure is becoming apparent.

• First, European navies have been stopping and inspecting tankers they suspect of being part of Russia’s shadow fleet (the uninsured ships that move Russian oil through the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the North Sea). The EU and Britain are discussing expanded legal authority to confiscate these vessels. Moscow has responded by signalling its readiness to deploy naval forces against European shipping. This trajectory, if continued, may lead to a direct confrontation at sea between Russia and NATO member states.
  

• Second, in Karelia, roughly 160 kilometres from the Finnish border, Russia is rebuilding and expanding military infrastructure linked to the possible deployment of a new 44th Army Corps: up to 15,000 personnel, along with air defence and signals intelligence units. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove Finland into NATO, and the Kremlin, rather than recalibrate, has responded with predictable belligerence.
  
  And it doesn’t stop with Finland: an anonymous social media campaign across Telegram, TikTok, and VK threatens the sovereignty of another Baltic NATO state — Estonia — with dozens of posts suddenly emerging to promote the “self-determination” of Narva, the Estonian border city where approximately 87 percent of residents are ethnic Russians. The rhetoric (a “Narva People’s Republic,” appeals to “historical justice,” calls to “protect the Russian-speaking population”) reproduces the Donetsk and Luhansk playbook almost verbatim. The campaign is anonymous, it aligns with Moscow’s interest in destabilising NATO’s eastern flank, and it circulates through pro-Russian media networks.
  

• Third, there is Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania. The narrative of a Western “blockade” threatening the region has circulated since 2022, but Moscow has turned up the volume on this considerably. Official statements now warn that any steps against Kaliningrad will be treated as a direct provocation and could lead to military conflict.

Posts on the Russian social network VK from supposed Narva People's Republic supporters.

Can Putin invade Estonia and Finland? No, not really. The Russian army is grinding through Ukraine and cannot spare forces for a second front. The navy has been losing ships in the Black Sea for two years, and the corps being assembled in Karelia will not reach combat readiness for several more years.

But it’s not what matters here: all the Kremlin needs is European officials sitting in a meeting room for a week, trying to understand whether it could. Demonstrative escalation is becoming one of Moscow’s key levers of pressure on Ukraine’s European allies. The Kremlin seeks to project a readiness for harsher action, including the creation of new flashpoints, even though its actual capacity for such escalation remains limited.

European governments should not wait for Washington to sort out its priorities. The shadow fleet sanctions need visible, consistent enforcement; every tanker that passes unchallenged confirms Moscow’s assumption that Europe lacks the will to act. NATO’s eastern flank needs reinforcement on European timelines, not American ones. And the Narva information campaign needs to be treated as what it is: a test run of the same model that worked in Donbas in 2014.

The war in Iran does not need to end well or badly for any of this to continue. It only needs to keep Washington looking the other way. At the moment, that is exactly what it is doing.