Russia has launched a new international multimedia information agency Sputnik that plans to broadcast in 30 languages including Estonian and Latvian.  In 2015, Sputnik intends to broadcast over 800 hours of radio programming a day, covering over 130 cities and 34 countries.

Estonia has summoned the Russian ambassador over what the Tallinn government says is the cross-border abduction of an Estonian intelligence officer operating on the Estonian side of the Russian border. The Estonian Foreign Ministry says the security officer was seized Friday by unknown gunmen and taken into Russian territory.  Moscow says the man was operating on its side of the border and is suspected of being a spy.

On a recent spring day in Rugodiv auditorium in Narva, a city on Estonia’s eastern border with Russia, 280 children are singing: “This is what I hear/ This is what I see/ This is what I feel/ This is my homeland.” Standing shoulder to shoulder, they all sing in Estonian, a surprise in this Russian enclave of 58,600 on the dividing line between the European Union and the Russian Federation. 

The United States plans to carry out small ground-force exercises in Poland and Estonia in an attempt to reassure NATO’s Eastern European members worried aboutRussia’s military operations in and nearUkraine, Western officials said Friday.

Estonia may not show up on Americans’ radar too often. It is a tiny country in northeastern Europe, just next to Finland. It has the territory of the Netherlands, but 13 times less people—its 1.3 million inhabitants is comparable to Hawaii’s population. As a friend from India recently quipped, “What is there to govern?”

Estonia’s capital seems a peaceful place. Tallinn’s cobblestoned streets are lined by medieval walls and towers, and tourists stroll amid churches and coffee shops. But Estonians live in a rough neighborhood; their eastern neighbor is Russia, which has never fully accepted that Estonia prefers the company of EU and NATO countries.