How a fake Russian story became a real problem for Estonia

How a fake Russian story became a real problem for Estonia

A sprawling fraud trial involving former premier Joseph Muscat lays bare the costs of 12 years of gangbuster growth.

By EVA HARTOG
in NARVA, Estonia

Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO

Mayor Katri Raik says she’d rather speak about almost anything else.

Spiking gas prices, how to revive an aging region, the danger of stray Ukrainian drones — anything but the online chatter that her city, Estonia’s third-largest, is about to break away from the rest of the country to create a Russia-friendly “Narva’s People Republic.”

In recent weeks, a cluster of anonymous Russian-language social media accounts has been posting memes and messages calling for the takeover of Narva and the surrounding Ida-Viru county, and describing it as “Russian land.” 

The campaign — which echoes the information operations that preceded Russia’s incursions into Crimea and eastern Ukraine — has fueled international speculation that the Kremlin might seize the opportunity to test NATO’s eastern flank.

But for Raik, and many others in Estonia, the episode points to a different risk: A handful of Russian trolls dreaming up a destabilizing scenario and pushing it into the mainstream, with very real consequences. 

Mayor of Narva Katri Raik is pictured in Narva on January 16, 2026. | AFP via Getty Images

“It’s a totally fake story, complete nonsense,” Raik says, visibly frustrated, speaking in a spacious, wooden-floored chamber in Narva’s city hall. “I’m scolding everyone who’s made a big deal out of this and telling them: Now I’m stuck with a problem, not you.”

‘Is Narva next?’

It’s not hard to see why the troublemakers picked Narva as their target. 

Perched on Estonia’s northeastern border, with just a 100-meter river separating it from Russia, the city lies closer to St. Petersburg than Estonia’s capital Tallinn.

Ninety-eight percent of Narva’s 50,000 residents are Russian-speakers. More than a third hold Russian passports and a third are pensioners, many of whom are openly nostalgic about the time when, under Soviet occupation, the region was an industrial powerhouse.

The city has flirted with secession in the past. In 1993, three years after Estonia declared independence from the Soviet Union but before Russian troops had fully withdrawn, Narva’s City Council staged an impromptu referendum on autonomy.

Of the roughly half of residents who showed up, 97 percent voted in favor. Estonia’s Supreme Court, predictably, ruled the outcome illegal and Moscow, distracted by its own internal turmoil, didn’t intervene. Narva remained part of Estonia and, since 2004, also the EU and NATO.

That history was still fresh in the minds of both Russian propagandists and Western observers when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

Raik recalls how, in the aftermath of the annexation, journalists descended on the city with a now-familiar question: “Is Narva next?” 

“I had to tell them we had no little green men here,” she said, referring to the troops without insignia sent by Moscow to foment unrest in Ukraine. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, prefers to keep his neighbors on their toes. At a meeting with scientists and entrepreneurs in June 2022, he praised Czar Peter the Great — an 18th-century ruler he has described as a role model — for expanding into the territory that includes present-day St. Petersburg and Narva. 

“It seems it has fallen to us, too, to reclaim and strengthen,” Putin said at the time.

‘NATO won’t come’

The first to draw attention to the Narva online campaign was the Estonian anti-propaganda website Protastop.  

In a detailed article published halfway March, it detailed how Russian-language accounts on TikTok and Vkontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, had for weeks been reposting messages and memes from a Telegram channel promoting a takeover of the region by a militia.

The EU, Estonian and NATO flags fly backdropped by the Ivangorod Fortress in Narva, on January 15, 2026. | AFP via Getty Images

The group shared the design for a flag, an anthem and even a timetable for the unspecified day Narva would be seized. Wake-up would be at six, breakfast at eight, followed by the “storming” of Narva an hour later. A celebratory concert and fireworks would cap it all off.

Much of the content was clearly designed to shock and entertain. Animals, especially cats, featured heavily. One doctored post showed a small dog with the flags of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia on its forehead, its mouth covered by a large hand. “NATO won’t come,” the caption read.

Underlying the flippant tone, Protastop warned, was a deliberate message that “normalizes the rhetoric around secession and separatism.”

A week later, journalists from the Estonian outlet Postimees had managed to infiltrate the central Telegram channel. They concluded the accounts were “nothing more than a poorly executed information operation,” with only some 60 followers.

By then, however, the story had snowballed, making headlines abroad and seeping into online conversations. Pressed to comment, the country’s senior politicians made an effort to put the story to rest. 

Estonia’s prime minister Kristen Michal called it “an information operation created by Russia to sow discord.” And in a post on X, Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna dismissed the reports as “a cheap way to provoke confusion and outrage,” urging people to “stay calm, stay informed!”

Narva is and always will remain an Estonian city. These little attempts at creating confusion and weakening social cohesion are basic and nothing new.

We’ve seen these tactics by and from Russia before, in Estonia and elsewhere — a cheap way to provoke confuision and outrage.… pic.twitter.com/U83ysXzWzs

— Margus Tsahkna (@Tsahkna) March 16, 2026

Harrys Puusepp, head of bureau at Estonia’s Internal Security Service (KAPO) told POLITICO there was no evidence linking the campaign to the Russian government.

Instead, he said it appeared to have been the brainchild of several adherents of a fringe ultranationalist movement inside Russia called “The Other Russia of E.V. Limonov.”

“The way this works is bottom-up, people trying to make themselves look important,” Puusepp said. “It’s a virtual reality campaign.”

The difficulty, he noted, lay in disproving a narrative once it has already spread. “How can you prove that something does not really exist?” 

In a response to POLITICO, the group denied that it was connected to the Russian ultranationalist movement. It did answer a question asking whether it was based in Russia.

‘Russia starts there’

In 2022, Narva embraced its frontier status with a new motto that branded it  as the place “where Europe begins.” 

If that slogan holds true, then technically, Europe begins exactly halfway down the 162-meter Friendship Bridge connecting Estonia and Russia. 

“Democracy ends here, Russia starts there,” says Erik Liiva, head of Estonia’s Eastern Prefecture border guard, pointing out the demarcation line on a spring day. Tall and bearded, he cuts the figure of someone ready for battle.

Since 2022, the bridge has been closed to vehicular traffic. On the Estonian side, the crossing has been fortified with “dragon’s teeth,” anti-tank obstacles wrapped in coils of cutting wire, set up in response to Russian efforts to facilitate illegal border crossings in late 2023. 

Anti-tank barriers known as “dragon’s teeth” and barbed wire are installed on the border bridge as pedestrians pass in Narva on the Estonian-Russian border on January 15, 2026. | AFP via Getty Images

Along a fenced-off pedestrian lane, a steady trickle of people carrying bags and pulling small suitcases moves in both directions. The bridge now sees about 1,600 people cross each day, roughly one-tenth of the traffic it handled on a busy day before the war.

And yet it is anything but quiet. By midday, a long queue has formed outside the border crossing point, mostly of young Russian speakers and the occasional foreigner. On the Estonian side, the wait stretches to two or three hours — far longer than across the border in Russia, according to a Spanish tourist returning to Barcelona after visiting a friend in St.Petersburg.

Liiva explains that every piece of luggage is thoroughly searched to make sure travelers aren’t violating European sanctions by crossing into Russia with currency or dual-use components that could be used to manufacture weapons, such as drones. 

It wasn’t always this fraught.

Liiva recalls a time, before the war, when Estonian and Russian border guards worked together, jointly placing navigation buoys to mark the separation line in the river, sometimes even traveling in the same vessel.

Then, in May 2024, Russia, without an explanation, suddenly removed the buoys, erasing any visible sign of a border.

Asked whether the online campaign around the “Narva’s People Republic” adds extra strain to his work, Liivia sneers: “Russia has always tried to influence us, it’s nothing new. For me, this is just a regular Thursday.” 

If Moscow tries to send little green men, “we’d see them coming, swimming, flying,” he boasts. “What happened in eastern Ukraine, that will never happen here.”

‘This is my place’

For most people in Narva, however, the real worry isn’t an imminent land grab. It’s being branded a pro-Russian backwater and marginalized by Tallinn and Brussels because of it.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, the Estonian government has doubled down on efforts to curb the Kremlin’s influence, blocking Russian state television channels and removing dozens of Soviet-era monuments. 

In late 2022, the government passed a law to phase out Russian-language schools entirely by 2030. Non-EU citizens, including Narva’s Russian passport holders, have been barred from voting in local elections. Moscow has seized the opportunity to brand the measures being taken by Estonia as “Russophobic.” 

Every year, on May 9, the day marking the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, Russia fans the tension with a bombastic and military-themed concert on the riverbank of Ivangorod, facing Narva. 

The Russian flag flies on Ivangorod fortress, Narva, on January 17, 2026. AFP via Getty Images

Last year, Narva’s central museum, housed in a medieval castle on the riverbank, responded by putting up a giant poster depicting Putin as Adolf Hitler and calling him a war criminal. Russian authorities reacted by sentencing the museum’s director in absentia to 10 years in prison for spreading “false information” about the Russian army and “rehabilitating Nazism.”

Many in Narva, however, resent being forced to pick a side. The May 9 concerts typically draw a crowd of Narva residents, especially older ones. Countless satellite dishes clinging to apartment blocks testify to the staying power of Russian television shows.

“For years we lived together without any problems,” said Svetlana, a pensioner sitting on a bench looking out over the river, where, in a mirror image, Russians on the other side could be seen enjoying the springtime weather, walking along a promenade and sitting on a pair of swings.  “Everything was good. There wasn’t any discrimination.”

She accused politicians in Tallinn and Brussels of scaremongering and fueling tensions among Estonians.

“There is no threat, Russia is not a threat,” her husband Gennady, agreed emphatically, wondering aloud why in Switzerland, where he studied and worked, having multiple languages wasn’t seen as a problem..

Although he held Russian citizenship he didn’t express any desire to live in Russia, and neither did his wife, an Estonian citizen. “We don’t belong there. We are just Russian-speaking Estonians. I will live here until I die. This is my place,” Svetlana said sadly. “But I feel worried for my children’s future here.” 

The two declined to give their full names or ages or be photographed, out of concern that would put them on the radar of Estonia’s security service. 

‘A great success’ 

In Estonia, the hype around the “Narva People’s Republic” campaign has sparked a painful internal debate, with much of the heat aimed at  Propastop and the media for spreading the group’s message to an audience of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people.

The group itself has reposted comments from senior politicians and media articles, thanking them for the “free advertising.” Since it was first written about in Protastop, its primary Telegram channel has gained hundreds of new followers. 

The Narva online campaign and other hoaxes, such as a spate of false bomb threats in autumn 2025, deflect attention from real Russian interference,  said Puusepp, the Estonian intelligence official.  

“It strains our resources, promoting this narrative that the mighty Russia is attacking us, while it should be treated like spam,” he said.

In its annual report published on Monday, KAPO wrote it had detected a record number of Russian collaborators in 2025.

Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. | AFP via Getty Images

In written comments to POLITICO, Protastop defended its approach, stressing the need to “expose hostile activity at as early a stage as possible.”

“If there is an elephant in the room that everyone sees but no one talks about, does that make the elephant disappear?” the outlet wrote.

Marek Kohv, a political analyst at the Tallinn-based International Center for Defense and Security, called it “a difficult and complicated situation.” 

“From the Russian perspective, it’s a great success,” he said. But he disputed the alarmist narrative, enforced by Western think tanks, that Estonia is vulnerable to an invasion. Unlike Ukraine in 2014, he argued, the country is a member of NATO and the EU and has a well-protected border. 

Meanwhile, Estonia is increasingly facing the risk of spillover from a real conflict. More than a dozen Ukrainian drones have entered its airspace in recent weeks, with one striking a smokestack at a power plant near Narva. Russia’s Ust-Luga oil port, just 25 kilometers away, is close enough that residents were able to to see smoke rising after it was hit by Ukrainian drones.

The Kremlin has accused the Baltic states of enabling such attacks and threatened “corresponding measures.”

In Narva, the drone incursions have underscored residents’ real struggles: their safety, and high energy prices, which have tripled in only two years, Raik says.

The attention surrounding the online campaign made the lives of Narva’s residents even harder by deflecting attention from their concerns and feeding political friction. 

“Russia has always been good at its propaganda,” Raik adds. “And it really gets on my nerves when people don’t get that.”