Discussions of irresponsible media coverage often lead to the fictional character of Wenlock Jakes. Supposedly the “highest paid journalist of the United States,” this infamous figure features in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel, Scoop, the classic satire of editorial egos and reportorial incompetence. Jakes is hugely influential, despite—or because of—his loose grasp of facts.
Jakes’s misreporting changes the course of history. Having overslept on a train in the Balkans, he gets out in the wrong country. Undaunted by such minor inconveniences, he files a colorful, made-up dispatch, featuring every cliche of his trade: “barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window.”
Other newspapers hurriedly send their correspondents to match this extraordinary story. They find everything quiet, but as Jakes is still filing his daily 1,000 words of “blood and thunder,” they join the pile-on, adding their own sensationalist coverage. The result is a financial crisis, a state of emergency, famine, mutiny—and a real revolution.
Jakes’s ghost is stalking Europe today. Alarmist headlines could all too easily prompt the crisis that they invent. Then as now, lazy coverage and outright scaremongering shape perceptions—and perceptions shape policies and events. But the digital age makes it worse. Search engines, chatbots, social media algorithms, and ordinary human behavior all reflect and amplify the most fashionable take. Type “Is Estonia in danger?” into Google, and the general answer is “yes.”
At minimum, that hurts business confidence, public morale, and political stability—exactly what countries such as Russia like to see in their potential victims. The misconceptions spread by the heirs of Jakes have become a national security priority for countries on Russia’s front line.
Take, for example, “Putin’s next target: Estonia is girding itself for an invasion as its Russian minority grows restless,” an article published by the Economist in June, reported from the Estonian border city of Narva, and promoted on social media since then. Although the text of the piece is more balanced, the catastrophizing headline aroused fury in Tallinn, the Estonian capital; Estonians told me that their anguished requests to editors in London to change the headline were unsuccessful.
It is entirely legitimate, of course, for journalists to ask questions about how NATO’s defense and deterrence are configured to protect Estonia or to examine local loyalties. Russia’s land grab in Ukraine stems from deep-rooted imperialism. Though the Kremlin has not won outright, its decision to change borders by force has been vindicated. So other places could be next. Why not Estonia? It was occupied and colonized by the Soviet Union for decades, leaving linguistic and ethnic divisions that Russia could exploit. In the eastern frontier city of Narva, fewer than half the city’s 50,000-odd residents are Estonian citizens. The main language spoken there is Russian.
Moreover, Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022 hinted—in remarks praising Tsar Peter the Great’s conquest of parts of the then-Swedish Empire—that Estonia’s territory was historically Russian. A glance at the map shows that Estonia, like its Baltic neighbors of Latvia and Lithuania, are militarily vulnerable, with long borders with Russia and its satrapy Belarus, few natural barriers, and a lack of what military planners call “strategic depth”—nowhere to retreat to, in layman’s language.
But given the stakes, such questions should be framed and phrased with precision, and the answers should be well researched and based on facts. There have been dozens of articles in recent years with headlines along the lines of “Is Narva next?” and they reveal a pattern of lazy and simplistic journalism, in both the angles taken and the conclusions drawn.
The problems start with how Estonia is typically described: a “tiny” “ex-Soviet republic” with a “notoriously difficult language” and “serious ethnic and linguistic divides.”
Some countries are truly tiny; Andorra (population 83,000), Liechtenstein (40,000), and Monaco (38,000) come to mind. Estonia has about the same land area as the Netherlands and a population (1.3 million) similar to Cyprus. If it were a U.S. state, it would rank 44th by population and 42nd by area, a third bigger than Maryland. Nobody calls these places “tiny.” The problem is less the inaccuracy than the connotation. A “tiny” country sounds like a joke, a geopolitical quirk like the microstates cited above. It is not a real place worthy of serious engagement. It contrasts implicitly with “great” Russia, the world’s largest country by land area. Why pick a fight with such a behemoth on behalf of a “tiny” victim? The framing of the question already shapes the answer.
Similarly pejorative is the “ex-Soviet” tag. Estonia is “ex-Soviet” only in the sense that the Czech Republic is a “former German protectorate”—which no journalist would use as a contemporary descriptor for the country. Like the other Baltic republics, Estonia was seized by the Soviet Union in 1940, just as the dismembered remains of pre-World War II Czechoslovakia were annexed by Nazi Germany. Estonia’s occupation ended more than three decades ago. Calling the Baltic states “ex-Soviet” today links them to the Kremlin’s imperial sphere of influence. Again, it subtly undermines the idea that these are real, independent countries.
Exoticism is damaging, too. True, Estonian is not an Indo-European language; its closest main relative is Finnish and then very distantly Hungarian. Estonian grammar is tricky: It has 14 cases, including the “adessive” and “translative.” But on the other hand, pronunciation and orthography are strictly regular (unlike English). It is gender-neutral and has only four tenses. I achieved a basic command of it when I lived there. Citing its difficulty is often code for the reluctance of non-Estonians to learn the national language, even when they have been living in the country for decades.
A fourth error is to exaggerate and simplify ethnic and linguistic divisions. It is true that in 1988-91, Russian-speaking pro-Kremlin elements—almost all of them migrants and settlers from the occupation era—resisted the move toward independence in Estonia and Latvia. (Lithuania had separate and much smaller problems with its Indigenous Polish-speaking population.) They also protested about the strict language and citizenship laws introduced when these countries regained their independence.
Since the 1990s, the Kremlin has turned Russian-speakers outside the motherland into a political category: “compatriots” who deserve the protection of the Russian state. This leads to the idea of a “Russian minority” as a monolithic political force with a common linguistic and ethnic identity. But these constructions, to put it mildly, are contentious. One reason is that the Kremlin’s ethnonationalism echoes Nazi German claims about Volksdeutsche—ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, whose existence became a reason for annexation. Another is a moral dimension involving historical justice. Under Soviet rule, Estonians (and Latvians) were an economic, social, and linguistic underclass in their own country; they were forced to learn Russian, also a difficult language, and were largely ruled and administered by migrants from the Soviet interior. Since regaining independence, the tables have turned. These changes are jarring for some. But the grievances of colonial settlers in a post-independence era do not deserve instant, automatic affirmation.
Any mention of Russian-speakers requires precise elaboration. Given the history of occupation and language suppression, every Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian who grew up in the Soviet Union also speaks Russian. What is a native speaker? People may speak several languages in a family context. Most of the Soviet-era migrants to occupied Estonia speak Russian, but they may not be ethnically Russian at all, having come from elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, not least Soviet Ukraine. Some Estonian residents who hold Russian passports do so unwillingly, since they cannot travel back to Russia to renounce them for fear of being conscripted, prosecuted, or arm-twisted by the secret police.
It is not only the definition that is contentious. The cliched contention that Russians in Estonia are “restless” certainly deserves scrutiny. If this were true, it could herald a geopolitical earthquake. But asserted without evidence, it is scaremongering. The truth is that pro-Kremlin sentiment, always small, has withered since the war in Ukraine. There are no politicians championing Putin’s war or opposing Estonian independence, no demonstrations, no court cases, no petitions, no graffiti. “Sporadic grumbling in some small segments of the population with Russian connections” would be closer to the truth. But that makes a less compelling headline.
Scaremongering also affects the credibility of Estonia’s defense: It overstates the likelihood of Russian military aggression and understates the likelihood that it can be deterred and countered. In his book If Russia Wins: A Scenario, Carlo Masala, a professor at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, posits a Russian attack on the Estonian city of Narva and island of Hiiumaa. The result (spoiler alert) is that NATO allies decide that it is not worth risking nuclear war with Russia to defend Estonia.
This scenario is not impossible. The Trump administration’s capricious approach to defense and security has undermined confidence in NATO’s collective security guarantee. European allies lack the weapons stockpiles, intelligence assets, high-tech equipment, and command and control capabilities to fight a sustained war with Russia. At one point in 2022, Russia controlled one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, an area that was larger than the three Baltic states combined.
But a huge number of things would have to go wrong first. A detailed analysis by the main Estonian foreign-policy think tank, the International Centre for Defence and Security, outlines the weakness behind such thinking.
The first point is that an attack on Estonia would not target some exotic geopolitical oddity, which is why the “othering” of Estonia outlined above is so pernicious. It would be an attack on NATO and immediately involve other countries. The British-led NATO battlegroup stationed in Estonia includes personnel from France. Long before NATO’s (and Washington’s) decision-making is involved, regional allies would be reinforcing Estonia to repel the Russian invasion and launching counterstrikes against the invader. The combined active military forces of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and Poland—the countries that would likely be immediately involved—exceed 300,000. Large reserve forces, particularly in Finland, could be ready within hours.
Estonia itself has renowned intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities and a small but highly capable army with well-trained and motivated reserve forces. Following a recently accelerated defense buildup, Estonia also has the ability to respond to any Russian attack. It has South Korean K9 Thunder self-propelled howitzers and U.S.-made HIMARS multiple rocket launchers that allow precision strikes on Russian targets hundreds of miles away. Its army is buying CV90 infantry fighting vehicles. Deliveries of Spike and additional Javelin anti-tank missiles are underway. Estonia’s fifth-generation Blue Spear anti-ship missile system, jointly developed by Israel and Singapore, has a 180-mile range. Estonia’s German-made IRIS-T SLM air defense system will be able to intercept aircraft, helicopters, drones, and cruise missiles at a range of up to 25 miles away.
None of this says Estonia could indefinitely withstand a full-blown Russian invasion. But the idea that it would play its media-assigned role of a “tiny” country by rolling over is unfounded. Masala’s book suggests that “little green men”—similar to the irregular and unbadged forces that Russia used to seize Crimea in 2014—could enter Estonian territory in disguise in advance of an invasion. This is all but impossible. Estonia has closed its borders to Russians, not least in order to block such a scenario.
Estonia is also one of the best-placed countries in NATO when it comes to resisting so-called sub-threshold attacks: subversion, sabotage, and similar stunts. The Economist piece cited above initially claimed that Russian drones “regularly” hovered over Narva’s city museum. To the reader, this implies that Estonian authorities are unwitting of this intrusion into their airspace or unwilling or unable to do anything about it. This is far from the case: Estonia is one of the most advanced countries in Europe when it comes to drone and counter-drone warfare. Moreover, I checked with the Estonian defense ministry, whose spokesperson categorically rejected the suggestion that Russian drones fly over Narva, as did the director of the museum concerned. The Economist has now removed this sensationalist claim from its article.
Similarly, Masala’s book imagines “two Russian brigades” that “invade Narva from the north and the east.” It is unclear how they get there: There is only one land crossing, the bridge that links Narva to the Russian city of Ivangorod on the other side of the river. Later in the book, Masala mentions “speedboats” crossing the river. His narrative assumes that Estonian forces are utterly helpless against the attack and make no effort to push back against any Russian bridgehead. This is utterly implausible. Estonian officials have said repeatedly that they will fight from the first inch against every single invader.
The real question is not about Estonia but about NATO. There are question marks over some aspects of the bloc’s deterrence in conditions of nuclear confrontation, particularly where the United States is concerned. These imponderables have plagued the alliance since its foundation, and we can be sure that in a crisis in the Baltics or elsewhere, the Kremlin will resort to the same sort of nuclear saber-rattling that it used to deter decisive U.S. and European support for Ukraine. At the same time, European NATO members can deliver devastating long-range strikes at targets in Russia using conventional weapons. A military assault on any NATO member remains a huge risk for Putin.
German intelligence chief Bruno Kahl has speculated that Russia will stage confrontations below the level of a full-scale military attack, exposing delay and division in the alliance’s decision-making. That is indeed a danger. But why would Russia try such stunts in Estonia, a country that is palpably willing and able to fight back? A much more tempting target would be countries with weaker security cultures and less awareness of the threat. Sweden, where mysterious sabotage of its infrastructure this year has prompted a singularly clueless official response, would be one such target. Jakes’s heirs may shun such assignments and prefer the easy narrative about Estonia. But real journalists should not.
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