[LINK] "Putin 21-Year Quest to Be Russian Guardian Began in Estonia"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg's Ott Ummelas makes the case that, as early as 1993, Putin was involved in promoting Russian separatist movements in neighbouring Estonia.

Two decades before seizing Crimea, Vladimir Putin showed his willingness to challenge the post-Cold War order in defense of Russians in Estonia, a country now bracing for the possibility he may go even further.

In 1993, as the St. Petersburg official running foreign affairs, the former KGB colonel helped the Russian majority in the Estonian border city of Narva approve a referendum on autonomy that was later struck down as unconstitutional, according to Vladimir Chuykin, who then headed the city council.

A unit of pro-Russian Cossacks, who once policed the tsarist empire by horse, had amassed on the Russian side of the Narva River before the ballot. Its organizers, who wanted a “clean” referendum, feared bloodshed if they were allowed to cross, Chuykin, 62, said in an interview.

“I held talks with Putin about the need for Russia to close its border so these guys couldn’t come here,” Chuykin said. “I knew Putin and his boss, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, and they arranged a meeting for me with basically the KGB. We agreed that no ‘third forces’ would be allowed to interfere.”

Unlike Crimea’s vote to join Russia and Putin’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula, which the U.S. and the European Union declared illegal, the Narva initiative didn’t have the backing of the Kremlin, so there was no outside pressure to grant Russians greater autonomy, Chuykin said. That experience may have helped shape Putin’s approach to helping Russians throughout the former Soviet Union, which became a foreign policy priority after he was elected president in 2000.