Estonia’s Tough Voice on Ukraine Urges No Compromise With Putin

Kaja Kallas, 44, grew up in the Soviet Union, which had annexed her country, Estonia, after World War II.

She remembers the Soviet occupation and a visit to East Berlin in 1988, when she was 11; her father told her to “breathe in the air of freedom” from West Berlin. She remembers the stories of 1949, when her mother, Kristi, then a baby, was deported to Siberia in a cattle car with her own mother and grandmother and lived in exile there until she was 10 — part of Moscow’s effort to wipe out Estonia’s elite.

So it is perhaps little wonder that Ms. Kallas, now Estonia’s prime minister, has become one of Europe’s toughest voices against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. She warns that Russia, which annexed Crimea in 2014, wants to do the same in southern and eastern Ukraine.

“Peace can’t be the ultimate goal,” she said. “We had peace after the Second World War, but the atrocities for our people started or continued then.” Read more

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