This Is the NATO Nation Russia Will Attack First

Vladimir Putin is escalating, and this time, it is the nations of the NATO alliance in his crosshairs. It has been nearly four years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, nearly four years since the time that NATO realized that a continental war in Europe was still a possibility in the modern day. Ever since, NATO leaders have been warning their people that this day could come, that Russia might finally choose to issue a direct challenge to the alliance and find out, once and for all, whether it would stand united against a new era of conquest. But now, it seems that day has arrived far sooner than expected, in a moment when Europe has only just started to re-arm, and Washington is looking less reliable than ever. Russian drones are swarming Polish airspace, Russian fighter jets thunder over the Baltics, and unexplained acts of sabotage, infiltration, and cyberattack have rocked the European continent at higher rates than ever. Across the entire NATO alliance, there is one nation where Russia will set its sights first, one nation that presents a more appetizing target than perhaps any other in Europe. That nation is Estonia, a highly developed, highly cosmopolitan society with no ability, and no desire, to ever pose a threat to Russian sovereignty.

Key Takeaways

• Estonia’s small size, geographic encirclement by Russia and Belarus, and limited military hardware make it highly vulnerable to a rapid invasion.
• The city of Narva, where nearly 90 percent of residents are ethnic Russians, presents a primary target for a ‘Narva Scenario’ or separatist movement.
• Russia has maintained a consistent pressure campaign against Estonia, including 2007 cyberattacks, airspace violations, and the abduction of an Estonian security officer in 2014.
• Rather than a full armored assault, Moscow might utilize unmarked ‘little green men’ to quickly overwhelm Estonian defenses while retaining plausible deniability.
• Estonia is countering the threat by investing over five percent of its GDP in defense, adopting a ‘porcupine’ deterrence strategy similar to Taiwan.

The Geography of Encirclement and Vulnerability

That reality does not matter to the Kremlin, because Estonia is a member of NATO. If Russia is going to prove that NATO’s major European powers will abandon their own allies when Russia comes to collect, then that test will have to come at a NATO nation’s expense. Right now, Estonia is in the crosshairs. In the event that Russia decides to launch a direct attack on a NATO member nation, not just against empty territory but against the entirety of a nation and its people, then unfortunately for the citizens of Estonia, it appears that theirs is the nation most likely to draw Moscow’s wrath. The same principle that would make any patch of land more valuable applies here: location. Estonia is a part of the small region of Europe known as the Baltics, three sovereign states nestled on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Alongside Estonia in the north, the Baltics include Latvia, in the middle, and Lithuania, in the south. Travel to the western shores of those three countries, and the Baltic Sea touches nations like Sweden, Finland, Poland, and Germany, before wrapping around Denmark and Norway, and opening up to the Atlantic Ocean. But travel in the opposite direction, toward the eastern edge of the Baltics, and, in Estonia’s case, you find the Russian border. Looking a bit closer at the map, it quickly becomes clear that from Estonia’s perspective, Russia is all around. Estonia’s northern edge is a seashore, looking out at the Gulf of Finland, a small body of water that stretches to the massive Russian city of St. Petersburg, and is host to all sorts of Russian military bases that would seem to be able to assert quick control of the gulf. To the east, Russia makes up Estonia’s entire border; to the southeast, past Latvia and its own Russian border, is the Russia-friendly nation of Belarus, while in the southwest along the Baltic coast, lies the Russian exclave territory of Kaliningrad. Between the exclave and Belarus, the territory of NATO member Lithuania touches the territory of NATO member Poland through only a narrow stretch of territory, a roughly sixty-five-kilometer or forty-mile line that is the only land bridge between the Baltics and the rest of NATO. Worse yet, Estonia isn’t just encircled; it’s positively dwarfed by its Russian neighbor. To illustrate the size of the gap, a few key metrics are essential. Estonia has a population of slightly under 1.4 million people, while Russia has over a hundred times as many, 146 million. Estonia’s total GDP in 2025 was the equivalent of 45 billion US dollars; Russia’s was over forty-six times larger, at a bit over two trillion dollars. Although land area does not really matter for any practical purposes, the disparity is still quite stunning. Estonia stretches across 45,000 square kilometers, while Russia spans over seventeen million square kilometers, about 380 times Estonia’s physical size.

Military Disparity and the Ethnic Russian Narrative

While many NATO member nations boast a fairly impressive military even by themselves, Estonia is one of those countries that practically requires the protection of the NATO alliance. As of 2025, the entire Estonian military was made up of fewer than eight thousand active-duty troops, backed up by a force of reserve troops that stand in permanent or rapid-response readiness, numbering a bit under 39,000. Estonia is home to over 230,000 reservists in total, by its own official numbers, but only around a third of those reservists have actually had any military training. On land, Estonia boasts a grand total of zero main battle tanks, forty-four infantry fighting vehicles, less than sixty combined French and South Korean howitzers and American HIMARS multiple-rocket launchers, and practically no air-defense systems to speak of, except anti-aircraft cannons and shoulder-fired missiles. In the air, Estonia claims precisely zero armed combat aircraft, and all of two trainer aircraft that could conceivably be retrofitted to carry weapons. On the water, Estonia sails three minesweepers, three small patrol boats, and a pollution control ship, which will be quite useful to ask that Russian battlecruisers stop spewing out smog while they are shelling Estonian positions. For the Russian military, Estonia’s on-paper capabilities are hardly more threatening than a light breeze. Then, there is the rhetorical side of things, where, although the nations of Europe would disagree that Russia has any reason to invade anybody, Estonia offers Moscow some very convenient opportunities to build a narrative around the idea of a rightful conquest. Similar to what Russia did in Ukraine, before and during its full-scale invasion, Russia can emphasize Estonia’s relatively large population of ethnic Russians, estimated to comprise about 286,000 people at the time of writing, or around twenty-one percent of the entire Estonian population. Similar to the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine’s Donbas region, Estonia’s ethnic Russians are relatively geographically concentrated, particularly in and around the city of Narva on the Russian border, and on and around the shores of Estonia’s largest body of water, Lake Peipus, which is also split by the Russian border. Many of those ethnic Russians are not Estonian citizens; after the fall of the Soviet Union, Estonia only recognized those who were descended from families who had lived there before Soviet occupation. In order to become naturalized citizens, ethnic Russians have to pass a language test that Russia has long criticized for being too difficult, and swear loyalty to Estonia, despite the fact that those ethnic Russians are also citizens of the Russian Federation by default. Only about five to seven percent of Estonian residents aren’t citizens, only a third as many people as there are ethnic Russians in the country, but Russia has continued to express its outrage toward Estonia over that situation. Worse yet, ethnic Russians in Estonia live mostly at the low end of the socioeconomic ladder, and are greatly overrepresented in Estonia’s populations of prisoners, injecting drug users, and homeless, among other systemic issues. Taken together, that situation represents a golden opportunity to present the same sorts of narratives that Russia presented in Ukraine: ostracization, targeting, ethnic assimilation, and even genocide against the Russian-speaking population.

Historical Context: Ideological Friction and Cyber Warfare

In a much broader sense, Estonia represents a bit of a sore spot for Russian nationalists. Estonia used to be a socialist republic under the Soviet Union, making it a place that leaders like Putin believe that they can lay claim to, but Estonians have chosen to go in the opposite direction. They have joined the European Union, they have joined NATO, and they have rejected what many Russians would call their rightful place in Moscow’s sphere of influence. Modern Estonia has become everything that modern Russia is not, and it has achieved everything that modern Russia never could, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Estonia has an advanced, high-tech economy, it is one of the least corrupt places on Earth, individual incomes are high, and press freedoms, human development, and quality of education are among the best of any global nation. Estonia even left religion behind, with over seventy percent of people either non-religious or spiritually unaffiliated to any organized religious body, at a time when Russian orthodoxy is of paramount importance to Russian nationalists. For Russia, Estonia is a next-door neighbor with a completely, diametrically opposed worldview, and in Russia’s eyes, Estonia’s treatment of its Russian population would seem to reveal a deep resentment of the people, and the way of life, just across the border. Ever since Vladimir Putin consolidated his power in Moscow, Estonia has been among his primary targets, even before the annexation of Crimea in 2014 had become a clear objective for his government. All the way back in 2007, Russia-based hackers launched a massive cyberattack against Estonia to punish the removal of a Soviet war monument from the Estonian capital city of Tallinn, hammering Estonia for three weeks straight. Starting in 2014, Estonia began to log regular airspace violations by Russian military aircraft, and in that same year, Russia abducted an Estonian security officer at gunpoint before trying and convicting him for espionage on Russian soil. In 2022, Russian hackers launched another wave of cyberattacks after Estonia removed a Soviet monument in that Russian border city, Narva. In 2023, a Chinese container vessel believed to be operating in support of Russia dragged its anchor across the BalticConnector gas pipeline and data cables, running between Estonia and Finland. In that same year, Russia and Estonia expelled each other’s diplomats. Since 2024, Estonia has been subject to GPS jamming that is believed to be due to Russian interference. Also in 2024, Russia declared Estonia’s then-Prime Minister Kaja Kallas and its State Secretary Taimar Peterkop as wanted in Russia, for, quoting the Kremlin, ‘hostile actions against historical memory’—that is to say, getting rid of Soviet monuments. This year, Estonia banned non-EU-citizen residents from voting in local elections, essentially barring non-citizen ethnic Russians from the local votes they had typically been a part of. Finally, less than a month ago at the time of writing, Russia flew three armed MiG-31 fighter jets through Estonian airspace for no fewer than twelve minutes, during the current period of extremely heightened tensions with NATO.

The Tactical Threat of Asymmetrical Invasions

Russia’s sights have been set on Estonia for some time, and Russia has long built a narrative of grievance toward Estonia, and defense of ethnic Russians, that mirrors the narratives it has used to justify invasions of other countries in the recent past. Despite the official protections of the NATO alliance, Estonia cannot repel a Russian invasion with the military personnel and equipment at its disposal. Furthermore, Estonia is a more appetizing target for Russia than even the other NATO members that Russian troops could easily reach. Finland and Poland would put up very stiff resistance, while Norwegian territory in the high north is practically empty and would not send anywhere near as strong of a message. In the Baltics, Lithuania is too easily reinforced by Poland and has a far smaller ethnic Russian population. Latvia is far less vulnerable from the sea than Estonia, and an attack there could give NATO time to blockade the Gulf of Finland, and thus the city of St. Petersburg. If Russia is going to attempt an overt act of territorial capture against a NATO member nation, then it is going to target Estonia. At the same time, Russia will need to consider a couple of important constraints as it measures a potential course of action. Estonia is a small country, with a capital city that is about a three-hour drive from the Russian border, but it is not a particularly easy place to invade. Its eastern territory, in particular, is quite hilly, dotted with over 1,500 lakes and thousands upon thousands of rivers and streams, all feeding into muddy boglands that are known for swallowing even NATO-standard heavy fighting vehicles. Four American soldiers died in Lithuania’s peat bogs just this year, when their armored vehicle sank into the mud. While the main thrust of a Russian invasion could travel along two major highways and zero in on the capital, Tallinn, and possibly even break through in an all-out initial assault, it would be far more difficult to reinforce the country rapidly once it is captured. Perhaps Russia could take Estonia in a single-day blitzkrieg before NATO can agree to respond, but if, one week later, NATO agrees to launch a counteroffensive, it is unlikely that Russia would be able to move enough military equipment to enough points to defend all of Estonia’s territory on short notice. An outright invasion and capture of Estonia through a formal, traditional military assault might not be Russia’s wisest course of action, and if it does attempt such a thing, it might as well just break through the more easily defensible Suwalki Gap between Poland and Lithuania, and take the entire Baltic region. If Russia is going to focus an attack strictly on Estonia, it will probably take a different tack. Back in June of this year, German foreign intelligence chief Bruno Kahl explained one method that Russia could leverage in Estonia: so-called ‘little green men,’ sent to protect supposedly oppressed Russian minorities. The phrase ‘little green men’ hearkens back to Russia’s soft invasion of Crimea in 2014, and the Donbas region of Ukraine shortly afterward. There, Russia dispatched thousands of masked men, wearing unmarked uniforms and body armor, who were quite clearly soldiers from an organized military, and who Putin later admitted had been sent from Russia directly. Made up of paratroopers, special operators, and Wagner Group mercenaries, among others, this force of little green men took over the Crimean isthmus in what was a bloodless invasion, while giving Russia just enough plausible deniability that Russia could get away with taking control of that territory.

Implications of the Narva Scenario and Autonomous Zones

Russia duplicated the Crimean strategy in the Donbas regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where the little green men organized the creation of two autonomous People’s Republics, puppet governments that quickly requested that they be annexed by Moscow directly. The risk that little green men could show up in Estonia has been a core concern for many Western security analysts since 2014. Tactically, a light, unmarked invading force like this could be a good deal more effective than a full armored assault, potentially even using civilian vehicles like vans and pickup trucks to easily navigate smaller roads, spread throughout the landscape asymmetrically, and travel fast and wide enough that they can encircle and overwhelm Estonian defensive positions if Estonia puts up a fight. Estonia’s active-duty military is tiny, and it is also very inexperienced, a force that might struggle with a few thousand experienced Russian operators. Those Russians would also be able to leverage the same consumer-grade drone technology that has been so effective in Ukraine. If necessary, they could engage Estonian fighters in urban battles much quicker, and with much less destruction, than Russian artillery units could achieve. In an ideal situation, little green men could move so quickly that Estonia is unable to muster much of a response, and the invasion is relatively bloodless. Russia can even use a combination of little green men, plus a possible larger force sent to mass on Russia’s own border, to put Estonia and NATO in an impossible situation. In that world, Russia can point to the unmarked troops already moving across Estonia, and point out that these little green men are asserting order quickly, cleanly, bloodlessly, and without destruction. It could then gesture to a much larger armored force, potentially bordering Estonia or the entire Baltic region, and ask whether NATO wants to do this the easy way, or the hard way. Russia’s objective in invading Estonia would not be to start a continental war with NATO, but instead, to prove that NATO will not defend its own member nations, thus clearing the way for Russia to attack other NATO members without fear of a collective response. This mirrors a strategy that has long been favored by the Russian Federation, and also by its predecessor, the Soviet Union: building and propping up autonomous zones of ethnic Russians or other groups with Russian loyalties, in areas where the population is otherwise distrustful of Moscow. Ukraine got the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in 2014, the nation of Georgia is home to the autonomous regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Moldova has the region of Transnistria, Azerbaijan hosted the breakaway Republic of Artsakh until recently, Uzbekistan has the Republic of Karakalpakstan, and Tajikistan has the Badakhshan Mountainous Autonomous Region. Estonia, meanwhile, has a region that is just perfect to play host to a brand-new, Russian-aligned autonomous zone, or even a separatist movement. That movement would seek to protect the rights and interests of ethnic Russians, and would only organize local militias for self-defense, disregarding that many of those militiamen bear a very close resemblance to Russian troops.

Air Provocations and NATO’s Strategic Dilemma

If Russia were to attempt creating an autonomous zone, it would almost certainly be located in the eastern regions that are home to the most concentrated population of ethnic Russians, centered on the city of Narva, which would probably become the new autonomous capital. Home to about 52,000 people in 2025, Narva is Estonia’s third-largest city, but less than half of its residents are Estonian citizens, while more than one in three are citizens of Russia. Nearly ninety percent of the city’s residents are ethnic Russians, and they live in a border city, with direct road and rail lines to Moscow. How much territory Russia would try to secure is an open question; they could take just the pocket of land around Narva, or a larger zone that includes the shores of Lake Peipus, or they could conceivably push all the way to threaten the city of Tartu toward the south, and all the way to the Route Five highway, roughly half the distance between Narva and the capital city of Tallinn. Alternatively, Russia could use road and rail networks to saturate the area immediately surrounding Narva with tanks, air-defense batteries, and heavy artillery, making it so that any fight over the city would be a costly one for the NATO alliance. In that situation, Estonia would have no choice but to request NATO intervention, but NATO would be attacking a city saturated with Russian defenses, inhabited by ethnic Russians, and guarded by Russian troops who aren’t pushing further westward. NATO would sacrifice lives and costly warfighting equipment, over little more than the principle of collective defense. Since 2014, this potential Russian action has been discussed openly in NATO as the so-called Narva Scenario, and it was even explained to NATO by French President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, who famously asked: ‘Would the US really risk New York for Narva?’ Russia’s options are not constrained to boots-on-the-ground assaults against Estonian territory. Estonia could become the target for precisely the kind of air attack that Russia would seem to be building toward, first by swarming unarmed drones into Poland, then by flying an armed drone over Romania, and finally by dispatching combat jets in a flyover of Estonia itself. Russia has claimed that each of those incidents were merely accidental, and thus far, NATO has declined to respond punitively to Russia, as if any of them were intentional. For Russia, the most obvious next step would be to keep escalating, and see whether there is any point at which NATO would consider an airspace violation to not be an accident. Estonia lacks reliable air defenses, and it is situated far from the most concentrated NATO air defense assets bordering western Ukraine. It also has far less of an ability to retaliate independently against Russia than Finland does, in the north. Some Estonian cities, particularly the southern city of Tartu, are so completely within the range of Russian drones that it would be simple for Russia to launch a coordinated drone assault. Or, the city of Tallinn could be the target, sending a clear message to NATO about what Russia is willing to do, even to the alliance’s capitals. On the low end of the spectrum, Russia could attack with a single drone, or two or three, and then explain that they accidentally crossed the border, perhaps because NATO was jamming their signals during a training exercise.

Strategies for Porcupine Defense and Deterrence

On the more intense end of the spectrum, Russia could launch a full-scale drone and missile attack, ravaging Estonian cities and military bases and daring the alliance to respond to an overt, unmistakable provocation. No matter what option Russia chooses, it can take advantage of Estonia’s small size, and its proximity to the Russian border, to engage in massive troop build-ups on Russia’s own soil. Right now, Russia is believed to possess a growing force of combat-ready troops who aren’t urgently needed on Ukraine’s front lines, numbering in the high tens of thousands or even the low hundreds of thousands. Deploying those troops and the corresponding equipment on Estonia’s border could bring new meaning to any of the provocations mentioned. Position those troops, make it clear that Russia can take over Estonia quickly, and it will add a new dimension to every challenge it issues toward its NATO adversaries. Those NATO nations can intervene if they dare, but they know just as well as Putin does that by the time they can mobilize enough of an army to fight over Estonia, the entire nation will have been overrun by Russian troops. NATO can start nuclear Armageddon, and destroy the world to save the pride and sovereignty of hardly a million people; it can sacrifice its forward-deployed combat aircraft and warships in what will be a losing battle anyway; or it can stand by, accept Estonia’s fate, and remember what it is like to live in a world where might makes right. The primary step for the entire alliance is to make sure that the situation cannot escalate that far. When Russia probes with its easily deniable, murky provocations toward NATO, it is looking to find out where it meets resistance. If it does not meet resistance, it escalates further, but if it does meet resistance, it typically backs down and considers a change of strategy. Giving Moscow problems that it will have to deal with before working its way up to the possibility of invasion ensures it will take Moscow far longer to get to that part of its plan. From there, Estonia can also work to build up its own deterrent against Russia. Similar to Taiwan and the prospect of a war against China, Estonia does not have a chance of defeating Russia in a head-to-head fight, but it can make it clear that it will be a very painful place to invade. Estonia can prioritize urgently procuring drones and strike missiles, potentially holding nearby St. Petersburg hostage. Estonia is on track to spend over five percent of its GDP on defense by 2029, a record in the NATO alliance, and its upcoming defense allocations can be funneled into a proper porcupine defense in the Taiwanese style. On the home front, Estonia can train more of its listed reservists, put an armed and reasonably dangerous civilian behind every tree, and along the banks of every river. It can organize them into local self-protection forces, and empower those small forces to react as they see fit in a time of crisis. Meanwhile, NATO knows about this possibility, and while it stationed about 2,200 troops on Estonian soil in 2022, it would be wise to rapidly increase those numbers as soon as possible. Russia knows full well that if it is going to test NATO, it must happen soon, before NATO grows more powerful and Russia loses its strength.

Frequently Asked Questions

How strong is NATO vs Russia?

NATO is significantly stronger than Russia, with the alliance having a collective military strength that far surpasses Russia’s capabilities, making it unlikely for Russia to take on NATO directly, despite recent fighting talk from Vladimir Putin.

What are the tensions between Russia and NATO?

The tensions between Russia and NATO are high, with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and subsequent aggression sparking fears among NATO member states, particularly Estonia, which is seen as a potential target for Russian aggression, putting the entire NATO alliance at risk.

What happened with Estonia and Russia?

Estonia and Russia have a complex history, with Estonia being a former Soviet republic and Russia having a significant military presence in the region, including in the nearby city of St. Petersburg and the exclave territory of Kaliningrad, which has led to concerns about Estonia’s security and its position as a NATO member state.

Did Estonia close its border with Russia?

There is no information available on Estonia closing its border with Russia, but the country has been strengthening its border security and defense capabilities in response to increased tensions with Russia, particularly since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Why can’t Ukraine join NATO?

Ukraine’s bid to join NATO has been complicated by its ongoing conflict with Russia, which has occupied parts of Ukrainian territory since 2014, and the fact that NATO membership requires a country to have stable and secure borders, which Ukraine currently lacks, making it difficult for the country to meet the necessary criteria for membership.

How many times has Russia invaded Ukraine in the past?

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is the most recent example of Russian aggression against the country, but it is not the first, with Russia having previously occupied parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, and the Donbas region, which has been the site of ongoing conflict since 2014.

How long was the Russian invasion of Ukraine?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, has been ongoing for over a year, with the initial invasion phase lasting from February 24 to April 7, 2022, followed by a southeastern front phase from April 8 to August 28, 2022, and continued conflict and occupation of Ukrainian territory since then.

When did Russia originally occupy Ukraine?

Russia’s original occupation of Ukraine dates back to 2014, when Russian forces annexed the Crimean Peninsula and began supporting separatist groups in the Donbas region, leading to ongoing conflict and occupation of parts of Ukrainian territory, which has continued to the present day.

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• Could (and Should) Ukraine Join Nato?
• Strategic Autonomy: Can Europe Ever Defend Itself Without America?
• How Russia Gaslights the World: Putin’s Decades-Long Campaign of Denial and Disinformation

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