There has been a long history of domination, occupation, and all sorts of abuse from the Russian empire and the USSR, which has led the local populations to become sensitive to any potential risk. The more recent decades during which Russian authorities have interfered into their neighbors’ affairs through economic sanctions, threats, fake news or destabilisation attempts, accentuate this sense of risk. Such worries can only be addressed by a robust economic and military dissuasion policy involving NATO and Baltic neighbours such as Finland and Sweden.

'The reason for writing this piece comes from the lack of visibility of the Baltic situation in France and other French-speaking countries (e.g. Belgium, Canada)', explains Landes. He pursues 'Russian narrative and interests are very present in the public sphere. For instance, three French presidential candidates have had financial ties with Russian authorities or explicitly supported Putin’s claims (e.g. about redrawing 1991 boundaries). The problem is that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are far away, often misperceived as being ‘Slavic’ and therefore belonging to Moscow’s ‘natural’ sphere of influence. Thus, I wanted to redress some of those misrepresentations, exposing the historical, cultural and linguistic specificities of the region, but also reminding the readers about the Baltic sufferings and fights for independence throughout the 20th century. Moreover, I show how some of the disinformation tactics at work in Ukraine and elsewhere have been experimented for years by the Baltic populations, e.g. in Estonia in 2007.’