http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/06/...onia-Russia.php

U.S. conressional resolution expresses support for Estonia amid tension with Moscow

The Associated PressPublished: June 5, 2007


WASHINGTON: The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution supporting Estonia amid tension with Russia since the removal in April of a monument commemorating a Red Army victory in World War II.

The resolution, which passed 412-0, expressed solidarity with Estonia and condemned violence in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, and Moscow.

Estonia moved the statue, which many Estonians viewed as honoring their country's forced incorporation into the Soviet Union, from downtown Tallinn to a military cemetery. The move sparked days of riots in which one person was killed and hundreds arrested.

Russia denounced the removal as flagrantly disrespectful and a violation of hallowed ground.

Estonia was forced to close its embassy in Moscow briefly after pro-Kremlin youth groups staged raucous protests. Moscow drew sharp criticism from the European Union and NATO following the violence.

The carefully worded House resolution, which is not binding on U.S. foreign policy, avoided direct condemnation of Russia, but noted Russia's refusal of a request by the Estonian government for cooperation during the crisis.

Speaking on the House floor ahead of the vote, Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, was more blunt.

"Today, we in Congress join our friends in Europe in expressing our strong disapproval of the unjustified and unacceptable Russian attacks against Estonia," he said.

The U.S. Senate also passed a resolution last month condemning the violent reaction to the statue's removal.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/03/opinion/edestonia.php

A cyberblockade in Estonia

Published: June 3, 2007


The small but technologically adept nation of Estonia has raised an alarm that should be heard around the wired world. Last month it weathered what some describe as the first real war in cyberspace when its government and much of its commerce nearly shut down for days because of an orchestrated Internet assault.

The assault on Estonia's virtual society began in April after authorities moved a bronze statue of a Soviet soldier from a central park in Tallinn to a military graveyard farther from the center of the city. For many Estonians, the statue was another reminder of Soviet invaders who took over their homes at Stalin's orders. But Russians and Estonians of Russian descent immediately took to the streets to protest. The statue's move was, for them, a sign of disrespect for Soviets who battled the Nazis in World War II.

The rioting and looting in Tallinn turned out to be nothing compared to what began happening to Estonia's computers. Waves of unwanted data quickly clogged the Web sites of the government, businesses and several newspapers, shutting down one branch of their computer network after another. One minister described it as a kind of electronic blockade, like having the nation's ports all shut to the sea. Estonian authorities charged that the data flood came on orders from the Kremlin. President Vladimir Putin's government has denied any involvement.

In recent years, governments, businesses and individuals have focused on ways to keep hackers or destructive viruses from stealing or destroying sensitive information. But Estonia should put the computer-dependent world on full notice that there can be many offensive forms of information warfare and figuring out how to stop it - and ultimately who is behind it - is essential to all of our security.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,2081438,00.html

Russia accused of unleashing cyberwar to disable Estonia


· Parliament, ministries, banks, media targeted
· Nato experts sent in to strengthen defences

Ian Traynor in Brussels
Thursday May 17, 2007
The Guardian

A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications.
While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted at the end of last month over the Estonians' removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the country has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies

Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences.
"This is an operational security issue, something we're taking very seriously," said an official at Nato headquarters in Brussels. "It goes to the heart of the alliance's modus operandi."

Alarm over the unprecedented scale of cyber-warfare is to be raised tomorrow at a summit between Russian and European leaders outside Samara on the Volga.

While planning to raise the issue with the Russian authorities, EU and Nato officials have been careful not to accuse the Russians directly.

If it were established that Russia is behind the attacks, it would be the first known case of one state targeting another by cyber-warfare.

Relations between the Kremlin and the west are at their worst for years, with Russia engaged in bitter disputes not only with Estonia, but with Poland, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Georgia - all former parts of the Soviet Union or ex-members of the Warsaw Pact. The electronic offensive is making matters much worse.

"Frankly it is clear that what happened in Estonia in the cyber-attacks is not acceptable and a very serious disturbance," said a senior EU official.

Estonia's president, foreign minister, and defence minister have all raised the emergency with their counterparts in Europe and with Nato.

"At present, Nato does not define cyber-attacks as a clear military action. This means that the provisions of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, or, in other words collective self-defence, will not automatically be extended to the attacked country," said the Estonian defence minister, Jaak Aaviksoo.

"Not a single Nato defence minister would define a cyber-attack as a clear military action at present. However, this matter needs to be resolved in the near future."

Estonia, a country of 1.4 million people, including a large ethnic Russian minority, is one of the most wired societies in Europe and a pioneer in the development of "e-government". Being highly dependent on computers, it is also highly vulnerable to cyber-attack.

The main targets have been the websites of:

· the Estonian presidency and its parliament

· almost all of the country's government ministries

· political parties

· three of the country's six big news organisations

· two of the biggest banks; and firms specializing in communications

It is not clear how great the damage has been.

With their reputation for electronic prowess, the Estonians have been quick to marshal their defences, mainly by closing down the sites under attack to foreign internet addresses, in order to try to keep them accessible to domestic users.

The cyber-attacks were clearly prompted by the Estonians' relocation of the Soviet second world war memorial on April 27.

Ethnic Russians staged protests against the removal, during which 1,300 people were arrested, 100 people were injured, and one person was killed.

The crisis unleashed a wave of so-called DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attacks, where websites are suddenly swamped by tens of thousands of visits, jamming and disabling them by overcrowding the bandwidths for the servers running the sites. The attacks have been pouring in from all over the world, but Estonian officials and computer security experts say that, particularly in the early phase, some attackers were identified by their internet addresses - many of which were Russian, and some of which were from Russian state institutions.

"The cyber-attacks are from Russia. There is no question. It's political," said Merit Kopli, editor of Postimees, one of the two main newspapers in Estonia, whose website has been targeted and has been inaccessible to international visitors for a week. It was still unavailable last night.

"If you are implying [the attacks] came from Russia or the Russian government, it's a serious allegation that has to be substantiated. Cyber-space is everywhere," Russia's ambassador in Brussels, Vladimir Chizhov, said in reply to a question from the Guardian. He added: "I don't support such behaviour, but one has to look at where they [the attacks] came from and why."

Without naming Russia, the Nato official said: "I won't point fingers. But these were not things done by a few individuals.

"This clearly bore the hallmarks of something concerted. The Estonians are not alone with this problem. It really is a serious issue for the alliance as a whole."

Mr Chizhov went on to accuse the EU of hypocrisy in its support for Estonia, an EU and Nato member. "There is a smell of double standards."

He also accused Poland of holding the EU hostage in its dealings with Russia, and further accused Estonia and other east European countries previously in Russia's orbit of being in thrall to "phantom pains of the past, historic grievances against the Soviet union and the Russian empire of the 19th century." In Tallinn, Ms Kopli said: "This is the first time this has happened, and it is very important that we've had this type of attack. We've been able to learn from it."

"We have been lucky to survive this," said Mikko Maddis, Estonia's defence ministry spokesman. "People started to fight a cyber-war against it right away. Ways were found to eliminate the attacker."

The attacks have come in three waves: from April 27, when the Bronze Soldier riots erupted, peaking around May 3; then on May 8 and 9 - a couple of the most celebrated dates in the Russian calendar, when the country marks Victory Day over Nazi Germany, and when President Vladimir Putin delivered another hostile speech attacking Estonia and indirectly likening the Bush administration to the Hitler regime; and again this week.

Estonian officials say that one of the masterminds of the cyber-campaign, identified from his online name, is connected to the Russian security service. A 19-year-old was arrested in Tallinn at the weekend for his alleged involvement.

Expert opinion is divided on whether the identity of the cyber-warriors can be ascertained properly.

Experts from Nato member states and from the alliance's NCSA unit - "Nato's first line of defence against cyber-terrorism", set up five years ago - were meeting in Seattle in the US when the crisis erupted. A couple of them were rushed to Tallinn.

Another Nato official familiar with the experts' work said it was easy for them, with other organisations and internet providers, to track, trace, and identify the attackers.

But Mikko Hyppoenen, a Finnish expert, told the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper that it would be difficult to prove the Russian state's responsibility, and that the Kremlin could inflict much more serious cyber-damage if it chose to.

as usual bfme (bold for my emphasis), also sp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,,2094223,00.html

Europe shivering in the new Cold War

Tensions are rising between Moscow and the West as the Russian giant flexes its muscles again in the old territories of the Soviet empire. In Estonia, one of deepest faultlines of the confrontation, the conflicts of the past are throwing a shadow over hopes for the future

Jason Burke in Narva
Sunday June 3, 2007
The Observer


At the end of Europe yesterday afternoon, a man in a straw hat warmed up to go jogging, a father and teenage son in matching jeans and denim jackets shared a packet of cheap cigarettes, a small girl made sandcastles and two border guards strolled under the narrow single-span bridge over the swift-flowing Narva river. To their left lay Estonia, to their right, on the other bank, Russia.
'We are not too worried about politics here,' said one guard, fiddling with his holstered handgun. 'We prefer sitting drinking beer with friends on a bench in the sun.'

Yet the bucolic scene and the border guard's insouciance seem increasingly out of place. For the slightly dilapidated, calm streets of Narva, Estonia's third largest city, are now at the centre of geopolitical tensions not seen in the region since the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly two decades ago. Some analysts are calling it 'the new Cold War'.
The concern spreads far beyond Narva and the frontier. Estonia, known in Britain largely for the bars and pubs of its capital city, Tallinn, has been hit by riots linked to the tensions. New disputes pit states that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union throughout much of Eastern Europe against their former overlords. And there is an international crisis setting Moscow against the European Union and against Washington.

'I suppose we are in the eye of the storm,' said Gregor Ivanov, a former factory worker, sitting on a bench in the sun on Narva's Puskini Street. 'It's a shame... everything was going so well.'

The storm is large and potentially very dangerous. Locally, Russia is blamed for stoking riots in Tallinn last month in which one died and 153 were injured, for the roughing up of Estonian diplomats in Moscow and for a massive 'cyber-attack' on the infrastructure of the small Baltic state.

According to Andres Kasekamp, director of Tallinn's Foreign Policy Institute, the Russian government is mounting a deliberate attempt to destabilise former Soviet republics. 'This strategy is intensifying as Moscow's attitude to the US, the UK and the EU becomes more aggressive and assertive,' Kasekamp said. 'They are seeing how far they can push us, the European Union, Nato, the Americans, everybody.' Some Estonians even fear Moscow may be searching for a casus belli. At the international level the Russian testing last week of an inter-continental ballistic missile led to an extraordinary diplomatic spat between the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - who deplored Moscow's 'missile diplomacy' - and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who attacked American 'imperialism'.

For the UK, already strained relations were put under new stress when the dispute with Moscow over the poisoning in London of Russian dissident and British citizen Alexander Litvinenko six months ago took another turn for the worse. Last week the prime suspect, whose extradition has been demanded by Britain and refused by Russia, surfaced on Wednesday in Moscow. Andrei Lugovoi told TV cameras that the British secret services were behind Litvinenko's murder.

Then there are profound disagreements over the future of Kosovo and policy on Iran, a row over the rights of major British commercial investors to parts of the massive Siberian gasfields, harassment of British officials and diplomats in Moscow, and a series of apparently state-encouraged propaganda pieces in the Russian media against the West. Analysts are talking of relations between Moscow and London being at a 25-year low.

'This is a delayed confrontation between the Soviet past and the European future,' Igor Grazin, an Estonian MP, told The Observer. And his country, home to 1.3 million, is in the middle.

Narva is 130 miles from Tallinn. There is a huge difference between the depressed north-eastern old industrial town and the booming Estonian capital with its stunning medieval architecture, new industries, strip clubs and groups of drunken British stag-nighters staggering through the narrow streets in fancy dress, football strip or matching T-shirts saying 'Well in in Tallinn 07' or 'The Tallinn Job'.

It is at the gleaming new 9,000-seat Lilleküla stadium on the outskirts of the capital that the England team will play their crucial qualifying European Cup match against Estonia on Wednesday night. The stadium is sold out.

'Of course, all the tickets have gone,' said Jan Sepp, a newspaper seller near to the ground. 'Beckham is coming.' In fact, the Los Angeles Galaxy's new star signing is not the only cause of the recent Estonian enthusiasm for football. As with so much in Estonia - such as the recent riots - the Baltic state's complex and painful history plays a part. For decades the favoured local sports were volleyball and basketball. There was no national team and soccer was identified with the Soviet Union and thus with repression and occupation. The result, analyst Kasekamp explained, was that, when Estonia formally won its independence from the collapsed USSR in 1991, football surged in popularity. Estonia's membership of the European Union, finalised three years ago, merely confirmed the trend.

'Now people look to the Premier League, the Italian teams, the European championship; soccer symbolises Europe and the new Estonian future,' Kasekamp told The Observer

This turning towards the west is repeated in almost every field. The ruling coalition in Estonia, returned to power after elections in March, has continued the fiercely Thatcherite-Reaganite economics of its recent predecessors. A single flat income tax of 22 per cent, low business taxes and cheap, weak welfare provision have, government supporters claim, led to a spectacular annual economic growth of more than 10 per cent and negligible unemployment - outside the poorer industrial and agricultural areas. Even in and around relatively poorly off Narva, unemployment has dropped from 30 per cent 10 years ago to 8 per cent now - with a drop of 2 per cent in the past six months. Money is coming from the West too. The overwhelming majority of foreign investment originates in Finland and Sweden or Western Europe and less than a tenth of trade activity involves Russia. Huge numbers of Estonians now work in Finland, Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Britain.

In foreign policy, Estonia tilts towards the Atlantic. Its tiny army has deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where one was wounded fighting alongside the British in the south last week. 'We are successful, democratic, economically liberal, pro-American, pro-EU. We are everything that the Russians are not,' said Raimo Poom, political editor of the major Esti Paevaleht newspaper. 'It's no wonder they don't like us.'

For James Nixey, of Chatham House - the Royal Institute of International Affairs, based in London - Russia's recent broadside against Estonia is part of a wider vision of the region. 'It seems that Russia feels that those countries around it which are democratic and have liberal attitudes are a threat and those that are illiberal and autocratic are not,' he said last week.

So Moscow's relations with Latvia and Lithuania, which joined the EU three years ago with Estonia, are frosty at best, those with Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan warm, and those with Alexander Lukashenko, the repressive leader of the former Soviet republic Belarus, depend on how vehemently anti-Western the latter's rhetoric at any given moment might be. Moscow, Nixey pointed out, similarly supported hardliners in Ukraine.

Analysts and diplomats are working to decipher the logic behind Russia's hardening stance. The missile test last week was partly provoked by American plans to install an anti-missile defence system in Eastern Europe. 'The most explicit message from Moscow was that Russia is the main strategic partner for America,' said Thomas Gomart, of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris. 'It's a way of marginalising the Europeans and other emerging powers.'

But domestic factors are also important. With parliamentary and presidential elections within the next year, Putin is playing to the crowd and strengthening the position of his possible successor, the Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov. 'To an extent it's theatre,' said one UK-based diplomat. 'And it is logical that Estonia has a key role.'

Part of the reason is simple pride. Estonia was ruled by Russia throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Kadri Liik, director of Tallinn's International Centre for Defence Studies, said it was 'very difficult for Moscow to accept that a part of the former Russian empire is now part of the EU'. That resentment has recently crystallised around one issue: a memorial to Russian soldiers killed in the Second World War, known as 'The Bronze Soldier'. It was the relocation of the memorial from the centre of Tallinn to a military cemetery on the city's outskirts that provoked the riots last month.

The riots were clearly orchestrated. The question is by whom and for what purpose. No one is sure of the answer. 'Reports that there were Russian state agencies involved in some capacity are credible,' said one Western diplomat in Tallinn. Others talk of SMS campaigns, secret networks, even money changing hands. Yet Moscow vehemently denies any involvement.

But, even if there was some outside interference, the demonstrations around the memorial and the riots were a powerful reminder to Estonia's government not to forget the country's ethnic Russian minority.

The road from Tallinn towards Narva follows the flat coastline of the Finnish Gulf, slicing through thick pine and birch forest, farmland and wide, empty marshes before reaching the open, windswept industrial heartland of the plains before the Russian frontier. Though some sections have been recently widened with some of the massive European structural aid now pouring into the country, along much of its length the road is little more than a rutted single carriageway running between the fields, old mines and historical memorials.

The drive reveals Estonia's chequered history - and explains why feelings still run so high that the relocation of a statue can cause chaos. 'The statue is just a trigger, the issue has profound roots in recent and in ancient history,' said Nixey.

After declaring its independence from Russia in 1918, Estonia was forcibly and bloodily incorporated into the USSR in 1940. A year later it was wrested from the Russians by the Germans. Just before Narva, war memorials and tombs line the Tannenberg Hills where German SS divisions held back a Russian onslaught for six months in 1944.

Over the four and a half decades that followed, after a period of massive purges, violence and emigration, the Soviet Union ran Estonia with an iron grip, settling hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians in the small country, most of whom stayed after independence in 1991. Integrating this minority into a new Estonian nation has not been easy. Narva is considerably closer to St Petersburg, physically and culturally, than to Tallinn.

'This is a country in permanent transition,' said Professor Rein Raud, chancellor of Tallinn University. 'Its biggest challenge is to create political space for minorities and to engender loyalty to the Estonian state while allowing those that want it to maintain their traditions.'

This bloody history explains why issues such as The Bronze Soldier can be so easily exploited. But though the Russian minority, concentrated in the northeast, is still poorer and less educated than most of the population and about 140,000 still do not speak enough Estonian to qualify for citizenship, the economic boom has meant that the chronic unemployment and hardship of the immediate post-communist time is almost gone. 'It's better now,' said 63-year-old Tamara Yevchenko, a flower seller in Tallinn. 'It's still tough, but it's better. Before, I wanted the USSR to come back, but now I am happy with the way things are.' And though HIV levels and drug use remain high and male life expectancy remains low, Grazin, one of seven MPs (out of 101) of Russian origin, plays down ethnic tension, dismissing recent claims by international human rights organisations of massive discrimination against Estonian Russians as exaggerated. 'There's work to do but a lot of progress has been made,' said one Western diplomat. Suggestions by others that the Russian minority should be 'sent home' are 'ludicrous', according to Poom.

But even if this particularly problematic legacy of Estonia's bloody past is slowly being resolved, the drive to Narva exposes other dark elements of the past of a country that many like to paint simply as plucky, outnumbered democrats who have always stood up to brutal, conquering communists. The German soldiers resisting the Russians included many Estonians - and local police battalions guarded the forced labour camps where tens of thousands of Jews from all over Eastern Europe were worked to death. The process of coming to terms with that history continues. Last month a new synagogue opened in Tallinn, replacing those destroyed by the Nazis.

At the new synagogue, near the docks in Tallinn, Chief Rabbi Shmuel Kot said antisemitism in the region was 'more or less' a thing of the past. 'I feel safer here than in London or Paris,' Kot said. 'I can't say for sure, because the Estonian way is to keep things hidden, but in general we feel safe.'

But last week such confidence in an entirely untroubled future was not necessarily that widespread. On Wednesday the G8 nations will meet for three days of talks at the German Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm. Estonian leaders are looking to the EU nations present to make their anger at Putin's strong-arm tactics known. They may be disappointed. The leaders of the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Japan will debate climate change, efforts to stop uranium enrichment by Iran, aid to Africa, currency exchange rates and global growth. Emerging economic powers such as China, Brazil and India are there as non-members. Diplomats hope that it will be a chance to calm angry tempers, not fuel fires.

Foreign Office spokesmen were conciliatory last week. 'There are areas such as the rule of law and human rights where there is not a meeting of minds and we raise our concerns frankly with [the Russians] there,' said one. '[But] Russia has to be part of our policy... we have to engage.'

For Liik, the Tallinn-based analyst, there is a longer-term concern. She says it is important to focus on the sentiments of 120 million Russians, not just the rhetoric of their leaders. 'Putin is telling the Russian people what they want to hear and doing what he thinks they want him to do. That says some very worrying things about Russian society and does not bode well for the future,' she said. 'What sort of a generation are coming through now who have been raised on all this aggressive, belligerent propaganda?'

Few believe that the calm at the border crossing over the River Narva is anything but surface deep.