Why the Russian minorities in Latvia and Estonia aren't going to take it anymore.
A link to the Burn Baltics, Burn article by Mark Ames in the Exile magazine

Estonia has recently joined the EU and the NATO, two supposedly democratic institutions, but it practices apartheid on the scale that would put old South Africa to shame. Estonia has disenfranchised one third of its population because of their wrong ethnicity and for years has been doing its best to rehabilitate Nazi war crimes and its perpetrators. The US and the EU and other so-called democracies prefernot to pay any attention to the mischievous antics of their naughty Baltic protégé.

As Delfi reports, Latvian State Language Center is to double its efforts to punish use of Russian, to raise fines and to effect a two fold increase in the number of language inspectors deployed in combatting use of Russian language…

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 .

Alar Pink the head of Tallinn-based Kalev confectionary company applied for registration of Pronkssodur (Bronze Soldier) and the image of the gravesite monument as trademark through his Mosaic venture. If trademark is granted, the now demolished gravesite memorial could be used for marketing of four distinct categories of products — from distilled spirits and beer to school supplies.

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.

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.

Recent events in Tallinn did not yet raise the question on the limits of  European hypocrisy which seems to be boundless. News of police assault against demonstrators reminded of reports from a warzone. It was indeed very much like war zone reportage. Brutal beatings of tens and hundreds, mass detentions in a facility that was so poignantly similar to a concentration camp did not get even slightest symbolical condemnation from the European Union officialdom or from America’s ever vigilant Department of State. In his time Victor Yanukovich got so scared tha the decided against employing force to disperse Orangist demonstrators, gripped with justified fear that the humanistic West would accuse him of all mortal sins. We have a saying that human blood’s color is the same all over. Well, it’s not so in the West.

Estonia is a parcel of land which can potentially control the passage in the Gulf of Finland in the same way as Iran’s controls the world’s most important oil artery — the Strait of Hormuz. Until today two factors restricted this control — 12 nautical mile territorial limit and lack of armed forces of any significant strength on Estonian territory.

In case of Russia’s excessive response, both limitations could easily be removed, the Gulf of Finland will then be divided between Estonia and Finland, and in case if Russia attempts to forcefully resist the measure, as a member of the NATO alliance Estonia would get a justification to invoke the NATO charter and ask for help, and there can be no doubt that the help would be forthcoming immediately.

This could lead to two possible scenarios: either a full scale world war or Russia’s return to the times of the Peace of Stolbovo of 1617 under which terms Russia lost all access to the Baltic sea.