Like almost all Estonians of his generation, what drives [Estonian special forces Colonel Riho] Uhtegi is intensely personal, and tends to be tied up in the history of his country.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all had one grandparent that remembered independence,\u201d said Uhtegi, speaking of growing up during the Soviet occupation, \u201cand they filled our heads with stories of it.\u201d He shifts his very blue Estonian gaze back from the distance. Unspoken is the fate of all the other grandparents\u2014the ones who were executed by the Russians or died somewhere in a gulag. Wartime casualties aside, more than 10 percent of Estonia\u2019s population was deported before Stalin\u2019s death in 1953.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cYou know why the Russians didn\u2019t take Tbilisi in 2008?\u201d Uhtegi asked me. \u201cThey were just up the road, 50 kilometers or so, and nothing was stopping them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having spent many years in Georgia, I knew the answer to this one: because Georgians are crazy. Uhtegi barked a laugh. \u201cYes. Exactly. Georgians are crazy, and they would fight. The idea of this unwinnable asymmetric fight in Tbilisi was not so appealing to the Russians.\u201d<\/p>\n
He continued: \u201cThere are always these discussions. Like, yeah. The Russians can get to Tallinn in two days. …\u00a0Maybe<\/i>. [The Estonian capital is about 125 miles from the Russian border.] But they can\u2019t get all of Estonia in two days. They can get to Tallinn, and behind them, we will cut their communication lines and supplies lines and everything else.\u201d That dead-eyed Baltic stare fixes me again. \u201cThey can get to Tallinn in two days. But they will\u00a0die<\/i>\u00a0in Tallinn. And they know this. \u2026 They will get fire from every corner, at every step.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Read the whole, fascinating thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While Trump plies his wiles trying to get the feckless Germans and Dutch to pay their share of defending their stagnating continent, at least part of free Europe doesn’t need reminding of the consequences of not standing up for their own freedom. The Poles need no reminding about keeping their defenses strong. And to their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,131,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-war-and-peace","category-western-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67422"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67426,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67422\/revisions\/67426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}