NARVA, Estonia — Guards manning the famous border crossing between this small city on NATO’s eastern flank and Russia are vigilant about what counterintelligence officials here describe as an increasingly aggressive campaign by Moscow to recruit spies.
Since Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russian operatives have reverted to KGB-style tactics reminiscent of the Soviet era, says Harrys Puusepp, who serves in Estonia’s Kaitsepolitseiamet internal security service, commonly known as the “Kapo.”
Kapo investigations have found Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) — the primary successor agency of the Soviet KGB Russian President Vladimir Putin once served in — has gone so far as to outright threaten and coerce people into spying on Estonia.
“Since the full-scale war and the movement of refugees and other migrants coming from Russia, clearly what we saw is quite aggressive recruitment,” Mr. Puusepp, who heads Kapo’s bureau for strategic communications, told The Washington Times in a recent interview.
Estonia has responded with its own aggressive campaign aimed at crushing the Russian operation. Most notably, authorities here are enthusiastically publishing research and investigations on Russian influence, and consistently prosecuting anyone found to be cooperating with Moscow.
The Kapo is also promoting an open-door, “come to us first,” policy to potential assets, Mr. Puusepp told The Times.
Estonia has publicly processed and prosecuted far more individuals than any other European Union or NATO member nation on charges of cooperating with Russian security services since the start of the Ukraine war.
Among cases that have made international headlines was one involving Pavel Kapustin, a Russian citizen who was living in Narva, when authorities arrested, charged and subsequently sentenced him last year to six and a half years in prison for spying and sanctions violations.
Another involved Viacheslav Morozov, a Russian citizen who taught at the prestigious Estonian University of Tartu, about 100 miles south of Narva. He was found guilty in 2024 of spying for Russian military intelligence as part of a campaign of sabotage, electronic warfare and information gathering that Estonian officials blame on Moscow.
But a slew of other cases have involved lower-profile individuals — a reality underscoring the Kapo’s belief that Russian operatives are engaging in increasingly ham-fisted recruiting tactics.
“We’re not talking about long term, looking into these people as they are, how could they use them; but rather just … threatening them, treating them like garbage,” Mr. Puusepp told The Times.
He added that aggressive public transparency on Russian intelligence activities and recruitment operations targeting those who have been forced into the service of the FSB is yielding results.
The tactic of having an open-door policy for individuals who have been approached by Russian intelligence has also become an effective deterrent when balanced with the threat of prosecution.
“Sometimes, simple things work quite well,” said Mr. Puusepp. “This sort of understanding that you should come to us first, we can help you, it doesn’t have to end with you in jail.”
Foot traffic only
The border crossing itself is relatively calm on most days in Narva, a city of roughly 50,000 people.
Authorities currently have a policy of allowing no vehicle traffic at the crossing, allowing only for people to walk across the now ironically named “Friendship Bridge” that connects Estonia to Russia over the Narva River.
So-called Dragon’s Teeth vehicle barriers bar the road in front of a small shipping container that’s been turned into a comfortable guard shack for Estonian border security.
From an area near the container, a lone Russian guard can often be seen standing in a cramped, Soviet-era booth on the other side of the bridge.
Known as a “budka” in Russian, the stone-faced guard’s little shack betrays a much more robust network of security cameras, intelligence apparatus and security service facilities further down the road into Russia.
Russian intelligence isn’t just targeting individuals who have security clearances or special access to the Estonian government or military.
Mr. Puusepp said Moscow’s tactics combine old and new approaches and include a focus on recruiting more of the local population through blackmail and coercion, while paying ideologues with non-Russian citizenship to conduct sabotage or smuggle dangerous items into Estonia.
The multi-fanged approach has resulted in a kind of shadow war that carries with it the implication of a conflict that could suddenly widen at any moment.
“We don’t want to be like this frog in the pot,” Mr. Puusepp said. “We don’t want to lose our ability to notice these changes.”
More overt tactics
Recent years have seen wider Russian hybrid warfare operations in Estonia, and other nations of NATO’s eastern flank feature elusive threats by Russia’s military.
Incursions into Estonian airspace last fall by Russian fighter jets caused Estonia to call for a consultation with NATO allies on the issue of whether Estonian sovereign territory had been violated or threatened.
Moscow ultimately issued a formal apology for the incursions.
But Estonian government officials remain wary of what they describe as ongoing Russian subterfuge aimed at sowing discord and division, both within and among NATO member nations.
The Russians “have invested, throughout the decades, billions and billions of dollars to first and foremost break us up from within,” Marko Mihkelson, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Estonia’s parliament, said in an interview. “Russians are out there to break up the alliance in order to achieve strategic dominance, at least in Europe.”
Mr. Mihkelson emphasized the need for countries to respond to even minor incursions by the Russians. Doing so is the foundation of deterrence against the hybrid threat from Moscow, he said, adding that “if you show the resolve and readiness to confront them, then they walk back.”
That idea applies to the conflict in Ukraine just as much as at home, according to other officials in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, who say openly that they support bringing Ukraine into the EU and possibly even into NATO.
Ukraine is a very relevant conflict for Tallinn, which has been shaken by the experience of watching Russia use military force to try and change Ukraine’s borders.
A primary concern in the Estonian capital centers on the prospect of the world possibly accepting those changes, and what that could mean going forward for Estonia, a tiny country of only 1.3 million people that shares a long border with Russia.
Jonatan Vseviov, the secretary general of Estonia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says the wider hybrid warfare threat from Russia — consisting of a “grey zone” mix of misinformation, military pressure and efforts to sow corruption within the politics of other nations — is ever present.
“Anyone my age or older remembers what an occupying military smells like,” he said in reference to the Soviet Army’s occupation of Estonia that carried on from 1944 to 1991.
That smell is one that Estonia is now actively fighting from creeping across the border in the 21st century.
At the same time, unease is palpable in Estonia over the prospect that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in a growing no-man’s-land of territory in the region.
“Grey areas on the map don’t sustain themselves,” Mr. Vseviov said. “They’re either pulled to one side or the other.”
Blunt propaganda
In Narva, right next to the border crossing, sits a medieval castle that has become a museum dedicated to the city’s history and the history of Estonia.
Mirrored across the Narva River is a similar Russian fort. On May 9, during a so-called Russian “Victory Day” concert, a stage was erected on the Russian side of the river facing Estonia.
The concert broadcast a speech by Mr. Putin as images of the Soviet era hammer and sickle and references to Russian military campaigns throughout history hung nearby. Some signs read “1945-2026 Victory will be ours!”
A number of Russian-speaking Estonians watched the spectacle from the Narva side of the river.
“They start from 9 o’clock a.m., and they finished this year at 11 o’clock p.m.,” the Estonian museum’s director, Maria Smorzevskihh-Smirnova, said during a recent presentation at the museum. “The message is actually very, very clear: clarification of Russian military power and a symbolic eraser of borders.”
Over the years, Ms. Smorzevskihh-Smirnova has hung banners from the Estonian museum’s walls facing Russia, calling Mr. Putin a war criminal and comparing him to Adolf Hitler — actions that Moscow has apparently noted.
Ms. Smorzevskihh-Smirnova says a Russian court has even taken the step of prosecuting her — without her presence — and sentencing her to 10 years in prison in Russia.
“They say ‘One country, one victory.’ They say it. For us, silence in this situation is not an option,” she said. “I have never been a Russian citizen. Never. I am Estonian. I live in Europe.”
When vehicles were still allowed across the Narva River, a billboard on the Russian side driving into Estonia read, “Russia’s borders do not end anywhere.”
The phrase is shown as a quote, with Mr. Putin and a large, brown bear featured in front of a background of the Russian flag.
In his interview with The Times, Mr. Puusepp recalled a saying describing the pressure Estonia finds itself under, and the immediacy of the threat.
“They say China is like climate change. Russia is bad weather,” he said. “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. We’re doing quite well enjoying our lives here.”
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