STRATFOR -- Russian state press outlet RIA Novosti ran a story Sept. 3 about two farms in northeast Estonia, a former Soviet republic, that reportedly have declared independence.

According to the article, the two farms have joined to form an “independent Soviet republic” and would no longer “live in bourgeois Estonia, where nobody cares about the common people … with raging unemployment and corruption, and where everything depends on NATO and the Americans.” The article notes that the farms had formed a police force and were warning that relatives of World War II Estonian Nazi collaborators were en route to attack them.

The veracity of the report is dubious — “bourgeois” is not exactly common vernacular beyond the world of Soveit propaganda — but that is not the point. Roughly one-third of the Estonian population is either ethnically Russian or linguistically Russophone. In the recently released Medvedev Doctrine, MOSCOW restated a plank of Russian foreign policy that has been used for centuries: namely, that Russia will intervene diplomatically, politically and militarily to “protect” Russians abroad.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia demonstrated MOSCOW ’s will and ability to rearrange geopolitical relationships. Knocking around Estonia — a NATO state that, simply put, would be difficult to defend via conventional means — would go a long way toward trumpeting Russia’s rise and demonstrating the deeply cherished Russian hope that NATO security guarantees are a sham. Tried-and-true Russian tactics for doing this include generating, or fabricating if necessary, a crisis in which Russians are being attacked or otherwise persecuted to justify a Russian intervention. Such a tactic was used in Georgia just three weeks ago: South Ossetian forces under Russian sponsorship shelled Georgian villages, and when Georgian forces retaliated, Russian forces poured forth to repel the “attacking” Georgians.

At this point, Stratfor is not saying whether the RIA Novosti report is genuine or fabricated by the Russians to justify action against Estonia. There is a lot of noise, much of it intentionally generated, throughout the former Soviet space these days as all sides attempt to shape public and international opinion for the struggles to come.

What we are saying is that this is how bigger things start.

Reprinted with permission of STRATFOR .

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