The court of Pskov sentenced to 15 years an Estonian official seized a year ago. A European citizen who worked for the internal security of a European country. Today no one is safe from the Russian security forces. Neither you.
It happened again. The FSB has taken a European citizen, a police officer, and imprisoned him in Russia, where authorities have mounted yet another show trial. Just like Nadiya Savchenko, just like Oleg Sentsov.
Eston Kohver was arrested a year ago. A year of diplomatic pressure from Europe and the US that rebounded on the deaf machine of Russian selective justice. Kohver was sentenced last week by a court in Pskov. He will spend the next 15 years in a Russian prison on the basis of an accusation based on circumstantial and very controversial evidence.
But this time it is not the case of a prisoner abducted from an illegally annexed peninsula or a war zone. This is the case of a European Union citizen arrested while doing his job in his own country. It means that, if they want, the FSB can take you too. And no one can do anything about it.
Details
Eston Kohver was arrested by the Russian secret service on September 5, 2014 in a military operation with the use of stun grenades and radio jammer. He was on a mission with the KAPO, the internal security service of Estonia. He was investigating the smuggling across the Russian-Estonian border at Luhamaa. He was supposed to meet an informant in a forest near the border. He reappeared the next day on Russian TV, hooded between two FSB agents in handcuffs.
The border police of the two countries immediately investigated the arrest of Kohver, issuing a joint report that agrees on everything, on the presence of 50 cm craters caused by stun grenades, on the fact that he was wearing a pistol, 5,000 euro in cash and a recording device, and on the presence of a breach in the border. But the Russian and the Estonian versions do not agree on the most important detail: on which side of the border Kohver has been arrested. The Russians say they have found him on their territory, while preparing for a spy mission. For this reason, they ostentatiously showed on TV the Taurus pistol, the cash and the recorder. Estonians have noted that it is the basic equipment for a service agent who goes to meet an informant in the woods. Kohver colleagues were covering the operation, but jammers that disturbed radio communications blocked them. It remains to understand what sense would make the use of stun grenades if Kohver was arrested in Russia.
Bullets
“Is this the beginning of something or a one-off? Time will tell. You can’t draw a line until you have two points,” President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves told the New York Times. The fact is that there is already plenty of points to link and make the Kremlin’s line more than evident. The arrest of Kohver came just two days after Obama’s visit to Tallinn, where the US president told the Baltic that America is watching their back. The Russian response had the sound of flashbang bombs.
Moscow has reserved Estonia the same regard used with its other neighbors, from Ukraine to Georgia. Because, after all, within the walls of the Kremlin too many are convinced that the former Soviet republics are little more than vassal states of Russia. If they start messing around with Europe and NATO, it’s time to show them who’s the boss.
There are already enough points to draw the line between Russia and the Baltic States: last year’s customs war, repeated airspace violations, the recent threats to review the legitimacy of their independence (as done with Crimea), the recurrent allusions to the large Russian community living there.
Russia has not (yet) intention to invade Estonia nor Lithuania or Latvia, but at the same time cannot stomach their independence, NATO at its doorway, the thorn in the side between Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg. It wants just to remind it from time to time, with a permanent tension, with a goad meaning “hey, do not relax too much with us here”; but also with skirmishes that put a strain on the system of NATO intervention. After all, what to do? Bite the bullet or make war to a nuclear power for Eston Kohver?
@daniloeliatweet
The court of Pskov sentenced to 15 years an Estonian official seized a year ago. A European citizen who worked for the internal security of a European country. Today no one is safe from the Russian security forces. Neither you.
