This comment was posted by Cicero on the previous thread and given a good account of the mood in the baltic states which I reproduce here in full.

A must read to understand what’s going on

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“I attended a business conference at a hotel in Tallinn last night, and afterwards we were having a coffee in the hotel lobby when the Putin speech came on CNN.

The Estonians and Georgians in our party were very grim faced indeed. This is no longer about Ukraine.

Essentially Putin´s angry and rambling discourse showed that Putin demands that all places previously under Soviet rule should return to the the Kremlin. In his demented world view, any resistance will be proof that NATO is protecting their “puppets” and therefore Russia has the right to unleash attacks directly against any NATO state, and not just the eastern members.

The spectacle of the tyrant lecturing his henchmen (at a 10 metre distance) was so sinister as to be almost comical, but not one of us was laughing. It is as we feared, the demands of the Kremlin regime can only lead to war.

I was talking to a friend, the editor of one of the major newspapers here. Putin is serious, but he is also mad. He will use all the resources at his disposal, including nuclear in order to recreate the disaster of the past, which in his mind is “Soviet glory”. A fair estimate of the victims of Communist terror is over 20 million dead, and the tortured and maimed in body and spirit includes more or less anyone who endured Soviet power, including, of course runty little mad Vova from the wrong side of the tracks in Leningrad. In Estonia the population fell by a third from the beginning of the Soviet occupation in 1940 until the 1960s. Women and children in their thousands were put on cattle carts and sent to the camps, many of the men were simply shot. My friend like others whose family were taken, was very shaken. There is no ambiguity about what the tyrant now wants, and thousands and even millions of people are going to die because of it.

This is no longer about sanctions. If we are to stop this, we actually have to fight. Economic sanctions, no matter how crippling, will not work. We must now recognise that the defeat of Ukraine must be prevented by all means possible. The war is coming to us, whatever we do, so far better that the Russian forces are defeated in Donetsk than Dresden or Dover. The Russian naval exercise off Ireland is to cut the subsea communications cables, an attack that could cost trillions. Kremlin planning includes this, and this is NOT about just Ukraine.

The diplomats amongst us pointed out that both the UK and France, the current EU President, have been playing a well coodinated good cop/bad cop process, but, as they said, that only works when dealing with the sane. The calls for restraint made by China were greeted with some approval, “at least the Chinese are rational”.

Neverthless we were a very sombre party. I have not slept well.

We are very scared, but determined. My friends in the Militia are expecting call ups and if it comes to it, the Baltic will fight to defend themselves, together with the NATO allies based here.

“Deliver us from Evil””