While ordinary Russians pretended to vote in this weekend's mock elections, the Kremlin made what can only be described as very real war preparations on the Narva River against neighboring Estonia, our tiny NATO ally in the Baltic.
Before we get to that, a couple of recent news items that escaped most people's attention but are certainly related.
The first is that — surprise! — Vladimir Putin's United Russia party won the weekend "election" for the Russian Duma, which is basically Putin's rubber-stamp parliament. United Russia got almost 53% of the vote, and the even more nationalist LDPR got about 10%.
The only effective opposition party, Yabloko, was "barred from the election by Russia’s Supreme Court after they made it public that they are against the invasion of Ukraine" and wasn't on the ballot.
But the question analysts started asking in the weeks before the election was what would follow.
"Western intelligence officials believe the Russian leader is laying the ground for a 'stealth mobilisation' after elections this weekend," the Financial Times reported last week, "in which thousands of Russians could be drafted."
The actual number is believed to be 300,000 or more men forcibly drafted. Whether Moscow can actually pull that off remains to be seen. It's impossible to say whether the Russian military even has the training cadres to take on so many recruits in short order.
Mobilization makes sense on paper, but the reality might be a bit more confused. We're only getting started on the stuff that makes little sense, however.
The FT also reported that European leaders "have warned that the Kremlin's hybrid war against the West is likely to intensify."
"Hybrid war" consists of things we've already seen, like damaging undersea communications cables, drone probes of NATO air defenses, hiring locals to bomb European munitions factories, and the like. Moscow has untouchable munitions suppliers in China and North Korea, and would really prefer it if Ukraine didn't have untouchable munitions suppliers across Europe and the U.S.
Basically, small-scale terrorism with plausible deniability. Only more of it going forward, if the analysts are correct. Europe's leadership is certainly attuned — finally — to the threat. French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency all-hands meeting in Paris on Friday to discuss the Continent's deteriorating situation, and reportedly everybody left more or less ashen-faced.
"Maybe if Macron had spent less of his presidency confronting Israel over 'Palestine' and more of it confronting Putin over Ukraine, France—and Europe—would be better prepared for the Russian threat," FDD's Mark Dubowitz posted after the meeting, and I couldn't agree more.
Which brings us to today's news and Estonia, nicely summarized on X by Eric S. Raymond.
"There are intelligence reports that Russia has been building hospital facilities" on the Estonia border, while "Russian border guards have been spotted shoring up the banks of the Narva River in exactly the way you would expect if you thought they were going to throw expedient military bridges across it."
"Russian border guards have also removed a set of buoys in the river marking the Russian-Estonian border, sparking a formal protest from the Estonian government," Eric added, literally muddying the waters between the two countries.
But here's where it gets truly disturbing: "The city of Narva, Estonia, sits at the Russian border, on the Narva river, opposite the zone where the Russians have declared a curfew for its inhabitants and a no-go zone for people who don't already live there."
Narva is 87% ethnic Russian, a result of Russian colonization efforts in the Baltics, both during the Czarist and Soviet era. "Putin has claimed the right to intervene militarily to protect 'oppressed' ethnic Russians in the near abroad," Eric posted. "The invasion and annexation of Crimea [in 2014] was justified on these grounds."
I make zero predictions, none whatsoever, about what comes next.
It seems absolutely insane by most measures for Putin to make warlike moves like these while virtually all of Russia's conventional combat power remains committed to his own Forever War in Ukraine.
But then I'm reminded of a quote attributed to Dwight Eisenhower: "If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it."
Maybe a real test of NATO resolve — and perhaps fracturing the alliance, if Putin can make a joke out of Article 5 — is the Russian leader's way of enlarging the unsolvable problem of Ukraine.
And if NATO resolve is not found wanting?
I'm not sure I want to know, but I'm not the one throwing the dice on the banks of the Narva River.
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