“Theday before yesterday I was in Narva, Estonia’s third largest city, right on the border with Russia. The borders are closed, but this is the only one open to pedestrian transit. At the entrance to the bridge I saw the construction site for strengthening the barriers, but also the queue of people heading towards Russia…’.The speaker is Diana Severati, a liberal and pro-European political activist, who tells L’Europeista a fragment of a journey that, in this historical moment, takes on a political and symbolic value.

A city poised between Europe and the Russian sphere

Narva is the last outpost of the European Union before Russia. It lies on the banks of the river of the same name, just over 200 kilometres from Tallinn, and its border bridge leads directly to Ivangorod, a Russian town dominated by a medieval fortress that stands a few metres from Estonian houses. With around 55,000 inhabitants, Narva is a provincial centre where 95 per cent of the population is Russian-speaking. Russian is more often heard in the streets than Estonian, and the brutalist architecture inherited from the Soviet period gives the city a suspended atmosphere, as if time had stopped in the 1980s.

A living but suspended border

‘Here practically everyone speaks Russian,’ Severati continues, ‘ and English is not understood by everyone. One lady asked me for information in Russian: I made her understand in gestures that I didn’t understand. Useless to answer in English…’.Before the pandemic, the border was permeable: mobile phones automatically hooked up to Russian operators and tourist agencies organised day trips to St Petersburg. Today, the connection with Russia is broken: no more telephone signal across the border, Cyrillic signs removed and Russian TV channels blacked out all over Estonia. But the feeling of precariousness remains intact.

Facts and figures: the alert in Eastern Europe

The fragility of this frontier is also measurable. Estonia and Lithuania have decided to raise defence spending to 5 % of GDP, an exceptionally high level in the NATO context and almost double the average of the allies, surpassing even the United States. This effort is accompanied by a special focus on the Suwałki corridor, an approximately 65 km strip of land between Poland and Lithuania that separates the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad from Belarus. For NATO, it is the most vulnerable point on the eastern flank: a possible Russian occupation would completely isolate Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from the rest of Europe. The corridor and Narva represent two different but complementary threat scenarios: the former is the logistical ‘bottleneck’ that could strangle links with the Baltics, the latter is a symbolic and strategic target, where the physical proximity to Russia and the Russian-speaking presence offer Moscow a potential pretext for military action.

Analysis from Narva to Russian strategy

The Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service’s (EFIS) 2025 report confirms that the threat of a direct military attack on Narva or Tallinn, while remaining low in the short term, is far from science fiction: Moscow’s policy towards Estonia remains hostile, and neo-conservatives and power centres in Russia continue to push for plans to revise borders and reduce NATO influence on the 1997 borders. The war in Ukraine, EFIS writes, offers Russia an opportunity to permanently review its military deployment, being able to deploy superior forces near the Baltic borders should conditions be favourable.

The power of Russia’s technological components is booming: the national plan on unmanned aerial vehicles envisages annual investments of around one million euro until 2030, with the creation of 48 research and production centres, a database of experts and the inclusion of drone education in the school system for 75% of schools. The declared goal: to break the dependence on western technology. However, Estonian intelligence reports that production is still partly dependent on components from China(Institute for the Study of War).

Added to this is the danger of the ‘hybridisation’ of the war: targeted sabotage or disinformation campaigns could be instruments chosen to destabilise Estonia without provoking a direct military response. This strategy is also reflected in recent experiences in the Baltic region and Central Europe.

The fear of the East and the silence of the West

In Italy, the tension in the Baltic is not fully perceived: ‘Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians ,’ Severati tells us, ‘ are constantly living in fear of the Russians and Putin. Here everyone knows that Narva could be the next theatre of aggression: if Putin decided to move troops, it would be direct war on Europe‘.

The NATO alert and the first Italian intervention

Confirmation of this came just yesterday, 13 August 2025, when two Italian F-35 fighter jets, deployed in Estonia as part of NATO’s air patrol mission, intercepted Russian aircraft for the first time. “For the first time, two Italian F-35s took off in response to Russian aircraft as part of the Alliance’s air policing mission,” the NATO Air Command announced. The Italian detachment of the 32nd Wing, based at Ämari, is on 24-hour alert, demonstrating its commitment to protecting the Alliance’s airspace.

The Silent Front of Europe

Narva thus becomes a symbol: a place where geopolitics is visible to the naked eye, in the barriers that rise, in the languages that disappear, in the skies watched over by NATO jets. It is a concrete representation of what happens when deterrence and foreign policy meet people’s everyday lives. The EFIS report reminds us that, for Russia, the constant pressure on its western neighbours is not a temporary phase, but a long-term strategy to keep NATO’s eastern flank unstable.

Estonians know that defence is not only measured in kilometres of barbed wire or the number of aircraft in readiness for take-off, but also in the ability to keep the community cohesive, to prevent linguistic or cultural divisions from becoming breeding grounds for hostile narratives. What is really at stake, beyond the military map, is Europe’s ability to protect its sovereignty without renouncing the principles that define it.

And so, walking back along the bridge that joins – and separates – Narva from Ivangorod, one perceives that here every stone, every façade, every glance tells of Europe’s fragility and strength. If this frontier collapses, we do not retreat a few kilometres: an entire horizon of freedom is lost, the very idea of a continent capable of deciding its own destiny is cracked.

It is clear here that the defence of Europe is not an abstract concept, but a daily necessity. Protecting Narva, Estonia and the Baltic means protecting European freedom as a whole. Because if this border collapses, you don’t just move back a few kilometres: you call into question the entire project of a free, united and sovereign continent.