Looking back, Estonian officials are confident that they handled the May 2024 buoy incident about as well as it could be handled. Estonian border guards caught the Russian theft on video: a handful of uniformed men in patrol boats moving slowly up the river between the two countries, systematically removing 25 of the 50 buoys laid down by Estonia to mark the frontier. “Moscow is testing our reaction,” director general of the Estonian police and border guard Egert Belitšev tells me as we watch the tape. “When we don’t react, they go further.”
A tiny country of 1.4 million, formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, Estonia has long seen itself as the front line between Russia and the West, and Estonians are used to the so-called “hybrid” aggression that has been escalating elsewhere in Europe in recent months. The day after the buoy incident, the foreign minister summoned Moscow’s top diplomat in Tallinn and told him in no uncertain terms that the theft was unacceptable. Will that be enough to deter similar sabotage this year? Belitšev shrugs off the question. “We couldn’t follow the provocation,” he explains. “We do not enter Russian territory. Our job is to keep Estonians safe, not provoke World War III.”
It has taken the rest of Europe several years to recognize the growing challenge posed by Moscow’s shadow warfare. But with the provocations increasingly frequent and increasingly menacing—not just cyberattacks and disinformation but bomb threats, arson, and a foiled assassination attempt last year—officials across the continent are wrestling with how to react.
Western countries’ commitment to the rule of law generally prohibits responding in kind—what separates us from the Russians, after all, if not our commitment to a rules-based international order? But it’s not clear that the tools we have at hand are enough to deter Moscow from further aggression. In Western Europe, as in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin believes might makes right, and the civilized world has been largely unable to come up with a counterargument.
