“You have to understand the Estonian State, the government is not in the business of sorting out which Russians are good or bad. This has very little interest for us. We are concerned with protecting our security. We are primarily interested in supporting Ukraine at the moment. For the sake of them winning this war.

 

I'm sorry to say that this may be so, but in my generation there is no longer any confidence in Estonian policy that Russia will become a normal country, a normal neighbor for Estonia in the coming decades. And basically, we want you to lose this war.

 

We want to weaken your military capabilities for the next decades. We don't want to see you rebuild your economy. We want the opposite. The sanctions that the West has imposed, they're already starting to work. We see that they are already affecting the Russian Federation’s ability to fight, they will work even more and more.

 

We will give up Russian energy. We absolutely do not care whether Russian tourists come back or not. What the Estonian Foreign Minister said: "We are not waiting for them here."

 

So this is a completely different game. We feel like Israel, which at one point saw itself surrounded by Arab countries which wanted to destroy Israel. Because we look at what your government is doing, and we listen carefully, we read not only Putin, but Patrushev, Gerasimov, your Medvedev, all these representatives of Russia and in whose name they are now fighting, killing people of Ukraine say. That's our position right there.

 

To tell you the truth, we don't really care which Russians living in Russia are good or bad. This is not our business.”