Kaja Kallas

Prime Minister Kaja Kallas grew up under Soviet occupation. In an interview with TIME, she says we still aren't taking a tough enough stance on Russian ...

“Every family in Estonia has a history of how they suffered during the Soviet times, due to the deportations, to the killings, to the shelling of towns. But I’ve always thought that I’m of the lucky generation that was born in a country that wasn’t free, because it’s made me really grateful that we are free now.” On March 24, the country increased its defense budget to 2.5% of GDP (from an already relatively high 2.3%), and she would like to see other countries go further not only in their own defense budgets, but in their aid to Ukraine as well. Her thinking is based less on any specific threat to Estonia—Kallas says there has not been any increase in Russian aggression toward the country—than on a deeply held belief, again informed by history, that it is only a robust defense on the alliance’s eastern edge that will contain Putin. “It’s easy to break one finger,” says Kallas. “But it’s hard to break a fist. Since the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, that number has grown (there are currently 1,700 NATO troops in Estonia) and the alliance’s “forward defense” strengthened with U.S. fighter jets. Overseen by Canada, Germany, and the U. K., respectively, this “enhanced forward presence” in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia consisted of roughly 1,000 troops each. Guided by that perspective on the Russian president, Kallas has argued from the war’s beginning for NATO to evolve from being what she calls a “forward presence” in the region to “forward defense,” with more boots on the ground and more fighter jets and ships actively patrolling Europe’s skies and seas. And what I’ve tried to explain within NATO is that it is much cheaper to defend us in the first place than liberate us after we’re attacked.” Occupied by the Soviet Union in the 1940s, the country’s farms were forcibly collectivized and tens of thousands of its citizens deported to Siberia. It was not until 1991, when the USSR was collapsing, that the country regained its independence. “Well, we knew our neighbor then, and we know our neighbor now.” She was a teenager when Estonia became independent, and she remembers growing up before that with empty shop shelves, a passport that would not allow her to travel to countries outside the Eastern bloc, and a chilling atmosphere that kept people from speaking freely outside their homes. NATO responded by creating a cyber-defense center in the Estonian capital of Tallinn.