The Baltic port business, according to some sources, is handled by Russian entrepreneurs, Andrei Katkov and Evgenii Malov. In the 1990s they were releated to Kirishineftorgsintez chemical company and to its subsidiaries which exported petroleum products to the Baltic States through St. Petersburg. A reminder: President Putin was in charge of supervising foreign commerce in St. Petersburg city hall at the time. As Russian Focus magazine wrote in 2004, Messrs Malov and Katkov were well acquainted with Putin.
Under protection of NATO and EU, and with full backing of the United States Estonian democracy flourished. Here is an example of daily life in free Estonia. That’s a typical real estate ad in a location where some 30% of population is Russian .
A selective democracy is hardly a democracy at all and a «state» where one third of population is disenfranchised on a whimsical technicality can hardly be considered either democratic or free. As I know both societies intimately well I can say with a degree of confidence that most Russians (or modern Americans, Austrians, French or Germans) cannot comprehend what it is like to be of wrong ethnicity and live under state tyranny in an ethnocracy. A friend of mine was born in Estonia from parents who were also born in Estonian SSR in the 1950s.