Nobody's Republic

Before the cameras arrive, a people's republic needs a square. In Donetsk, on the first of March 2014, the square in front of the regional administration was filled with people, many holding Russian flags, and the tricolour went up on the building, so the flag came with the square. It needs a crowd that comes back, and a council in a building: on 6 April around a hundred people broke away from a rally Reuters counted at more than a thousand and stormed the regional administration, and the next day, in the European Court of Human Rights' account of the facts, the separatists inside declared a Donetsk People's Republic. It needs a vote, which came on 11 May at polling stations that did not use the state's voter register, where journalists reported one person filling in several ballots. And it needs men who cross the border, on the word of the man who led them: Igor Girkin, who took fifty-two men from Crimea to Sloviansk, said that November that "if our detachment had not crossed the border, in the end it would all have ended as in Kharkiv, as in Odesa".

Each item can be checked against Narva, because American intelligence put a limited Russian attack on the calendar from this autumn, and a think tank then drew one, notionally, in Narva. On 7 August the Wall Street Journal reported, in the text as republished by To Vima, US intelligence assessments that Putin "could try to test NATO's resolve with a limited assault on an allied country" in a window "between this fall and 2029", with threats running from a cyberattack through "sending unmarked armed groups to occupy territory" to a limited incursion, whose likelihood "is low, but gets higher as time goes on". On 21 September the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, published the concrete version: in its own summary, "Russian agents already in Narva seize the Narva Museum and Town Hall and declare the Narva People's Republic", drones from Russian soil cover them, and the scenario, ISW says, "is notional" and "is not an assessment or forecast". In the sentence Stars and Stripes quoted, "a number of NATO states will likely be very hesitant to invoke Article 5 over a limited incursion".

My reading is that the cast is missing. The case for a limited Russian move against a NATO member is stronger than a sceptic would like. But ISW's republic is declared by agents, and none of the relays through which the report reached me attributes to it any local crowd, council or vote. The nearest thing to a cast this year was a closed chat the daily Postimees got a reporter into in March, and besides her it held three people at most: an administrator who, by the paper's reading, does not live in Estonia, a port worker from nearby Sillamäe and one potential fighter from Tallinn, with no Narva resident, councillor or politician named as a supporter. Donetsk had a crowd at its door. Without one, the scenario is a raid with a name borrowed from 2014, and a raid by armed men on a NATO member's town hall is an attack on a NATO member with extra steps, which sends the question back to the alliance's answer, and above all to Washington's, the one part I cannot price. I cannot rule the raid out; I can say what it would find on the Estonian bank; and ISW itself, in the passage Stars and Stripes quoted, judged Putin "very unlikely to choose military options against NATO that badly undermine his efforts in Ukraine" unless he were confident such action would destroy the alliance or end European support for Ukraine.

In July, in Not Tomorrow, I judged the invasion question, the tripwire at the allied base in Tapa and the seventy-seven years in which Russia and the Soviet Union have never invaded a NATO member. That essay gave the small grab one paragraph, which pictured "A sliver around Narva" and called it "Done in a few days and then frozen, with a nuclear threat stapled to it and a bet that the alliance argues rather than dies for it." This one is about the word in the middle of the name, the people, and whether Narva has them.

The strongest version of the warning

On 25 August the CIA's director flew to Moscow, and a person familiar with the matter told Politico the meeting was "primarily to warn Russia against any escalatory action against the Baltic states". The Europeans have their own collection, and it points the same way. Denmark's Defence Intelligence Service wrote on 24 September of "a low but growing risk" that Russia will launch a limited military attack on NATO countries bordering Russia, possibly "in the coming months", by "a limited number of military forces, possibly without national insignia" or a false-flag attack with "Ukrainian-made drones". Poland's prime minister told the Sejm on 17 September that, by intelligence assessments, Russia's plans include strikes "accidental" in name and "intended to paralyse or at least weaken the resolve of NATO states to invoke the relevant NATO provisions". Slovakia's prime minister supplied the hesitation ISW models, the same day: "I don't want Slovakia to be part of an armed conflict because of some Article 5", in Novinite's translation.

And Washington has said it out loud. On 31 March, the day after Spain closed its airspace to US military aircraft attacking Iran, the US defence secretary was asked to reaffirm collective defence and answered that "that's a decision that will be left to the president"; the next day the president, asked whether he was considering leaving NATO, said "Oh, absolutely without question. Wouldn't you do that if you were me?", the context, in the New York Post's account, being allies' refusal of bases and airspace for the Iran war. NATO's own secretary general said on 22 September that "Article 5 is deliberately ambiguous, so we will never exactly tell anyone when Article 5 is exactly triggered or not". A planner in Moscow reading those sentences would not conclude that a few streets are obviously worth a nuclear crisis to every capital that would have to agree.

At the river itself, from 16 to 26 September the FSB restricted its own bank: no night movement outside settlements in a five-kilometre strip, no firearms, no small boats on one stretch of the river, which Estonia's border guard said it "does not consider such restrictions extraordinary". The false flag Denmark describes would use Ukrainian-made drones, the kind already straying into Baltic airspace, and Moscow has a story ready for them: on 6 April Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman, accusing the Baltic states of letting Ukrainian drones use their airspace, said that if their "regimes" had enough sense they would listen, "if not, they will have to deal with a response".

Put together, I find that a serious case, and I have not softened a word of it: a hostile power, a window, a method built to blur the trigger, and an alliance whose resolve some of its own leaders have questioned in public. What it does not contain, anywhere, is a Narva resident, and ISW's own summary, quoted above, has its republic declared by agents: the quiet concession inside the loud document. A think tank's motive for modelling a dramatic scenario is no evidence either way about its soundness. Whether the part of the script that needs a population has one is the thing that can be checked.

The ground Donetsk stood on

The square, the crowd, the council, the flag, the vote and the men were what a camera could see. Underneath them Donetsk required a state that could not move: Oleksandr Turchynov, acting president in spring 2014, said in 2016 that at the start "there were no Armed Forces in the country". It required police who stood aside: the UN's monitors reported that in the east "in most cases, local police did nothing to prevent violence, while in some cases it openly cooperated with the attackers". It required no treaty, because Ukraine had none.

And it required a local base. The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology asked eight southern and eastern regions in April 2014 whether their region should secede and join Russia: 27.5 per cent in Donetsk and 30.3 in Luhansk said yes, certainly or rather, against 16.1 in Kharkiv, 7.2 in Odesa and in Mykolaiv and 6.9 in Dnipropetrovsk; 18.1 and 24.4 per cent in Donetsk and Luhansk supported the armed seizure of buildings. Roughly a quarter to a third, then, in the two regions that became republics, and that is the number I carry across to Narva.

With all of that in place, the republic still needed Russia. The court that eventually weighed the evidence found the separatists "completely dependent on military, political and economic support" from Russia, "a mere instrument of that State". I take that finding as the floor of the whole argument: a republic with a real local base still needed a neighbouring state to carry it. The local base gave the men who crossed the border a crowd to stand in front of, and a state with no army and no allies could not take the buildings back.

The older case in Georgia had its passports in place first: the EU's fact-finding mission found that in South Ossetia and Abkhazia "a vast majority of the population" carried Russian passports, and that the large-scale fighting of 2008 began with the Georgian armed forces' shelling of Tskhinvali, "only the culminating point of a long period of increasing tensions, provocations and incidents".

The cities that kept their buildings

In Ukraine, the same spring as Donetsk, the template failed in at least three cities. Kharkiv got as far as a declaration: on the evening of 7 April a body calling itself the council of the Kharkiv territorial community declared a "Kharkiv People's Republic", to take effect after a regional referendum, at a session held, Ukrainska Pravda reported, in the vestibule of the regional administration because police were blocking the way in. The next morning an interior ministry unit cleared the building "without a single shot" and about seventy were detained. In Mykolaiv the same evening about 300 people came to the regional administration to get inside and found the entrance blocked by police; by late evening the hundred or so who remained had been encircled and had fled. In Dnipropetrovsk seizures were attempted in March and none succeeded, and by 22 April the region's defence staff said rewards of ten thousand dollars each had been paid for eight captured "saboteurs" and that eleven suspects, "all citizens of Russia", had been brought to checkpoints.

So the yardstick, named before I measure anything: a republic has been made where a quarter to a third of the residents wanted it, the police stood aside, the state had no army and no treaty, and armed men arrived from outside to keep it; and it has failed where the base was under a fifth, the police held a line, and the occupiers were arrested or the outsiders handed over for a bounty.

Narva as the record shows it

Narva had 51,411 residents on 1 January 2026, about a quarter fewer than at the 2000 census, and at the 2021 census 87 per cent were ethnic Russians and under 6 per cent Estonians. At the same census it split three ways by passport: 50.3 per cent Estonian citizens, 34.6 per cent Russian citizens and 13.2 per cent persons of undetermined citizenship, the holders of the grey passport. On those numbers alone I can see why a planner would draw the circle here.

The money runs the other way. Estonia's average old-age pension has been 860 euros a month since April; Russia's Social Fund put its average old-age insurance pension at 27,224 roubles a month in July, about 283 euros at the Bank of Russia's rate for 30 September, a third of the Estonian figure.

Russia stages its own show, and the crowd that watched it is the nearest thing to a crowd the record has. On 9 May 2025 a Victory Day concert on the embankment of Ivangorod, the Russian town on the far bank, opened with the emcee greeting his "dear friends" in Narva, and Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that residents packed their own riverbank, clapping and waving back, while the Estonian government's Europe Day concert by the town hall, about 200 metres away, drew a much smaller crowd. I count that evening as the strongest single piece of evidence against my reading. Moscow has said what it thinks the city is: in June 2022 Putin said of Peter the Great's war that "he was not taking away anything, he was returning" and that "the same is true of the western direction, Narva and his first campaigns". I take that as a claim about the land; whether the people on it want to be returned is what the record below can test.

Across every poll I could check there is no Narva-specific line on Russia, the war or secession, and no regional line on secession at all; anyone who tells you what percentage of Narva wants Moscow is, as far as I can find, guessing. What exists is county-level and national. In the defence ministry's 2025 survey, support for NATO membership in north-eastern Estonia, which is to say Ida-Viru county, where Narva sits, was about 55 per cent against about 79 in Tallinn, and nationally 70 per cent of residents of other nationalities said Estonia must resist an attack by arms. In the Government Office's monitoring of September 2025, among residents of other nationalities, 53 per cent condemned Russia's war, 10 per cent supported it and 37 per cent would not or could not say. The Integration Monitoring of 2023 put 32 per cent of the residents of other nationalities it surveyed in Ida-Viru county in its worst-integrated cluster, the highest share of any region, and 35 per cent there in the cluster it calls locally integrated patriots. That is alienation, and in the integration figures the number that helps me sits next to the one that does not.

The state has fed some of it. The ladder of language requirements is real, and I described it in The Wall and the Ladder. From 1 August this year kindergarten assistants have needed B2; Narva had counted 206 assistants last October, of whom 79 met the requirement, and on 4 August it ended 108 contracts, which the head of the city's culture department called "unfortunately nothing unexpected". The school reform's first year was a mess by Estonia's own account, worst in Narva, and the city's Soviet T-34 tank monument was taken away; both are in The Passport and the Person. The local vote was taken from Russian citizens, and Narva lost more voters than anywhere else, its electorate falling from 42,743 to 27,240, 36 per cent, a change I argued over in The Verb They Chose. Notice what all of that measures: the war, Tallinn, the language, the lost vote. The scenario needs something else, secession, which is a different question with its own record.

The nearest Narva has come to the question

Narva has never been asked the secession question outright. The record comes near it four times, and the first cuts against me: in March 1991, when the question was whether Estonia should restore its independence, only about a quarter of Narva voted yes. That was a vote about leaving the Soviet Union, and a generation has turned over since, but it is still the one ballot in the record where most of those who voted in Narva did not vote for an independent Estonia, and I print it so that a reader does not have to find it. In 1993 the city council resolved to ask residents whether they wanted Narva to have "the status of a national-territorial autonomy within the Republic of Estonia", inside the state even then; the Chancellor of Justice declared the vote unconstitutional before it was held, the council reported 97 per cent yes, international observers recorded fewer than half of residents voting and irregularities, and the Supreme Court struck the resolution down that August. In April 2014, nineteen days after the Crimean vote, RFE/RL's reporter in Narva found that "few say they want to follow the example of Crimea", though "many" supported the annexation.

The fourth time was last October, at a real ballot box: the largest list, with 35.2 per cent and 12 of the 31 seats, was Mihhail Stalnuhhin's, and Koos, the one party built for Moscow's case, took 556 votes, 4.0 per cent, and no seat. Stalnuhhin is the man who in September 2022 called the government, over the monument removals, "ordinary rank-and-file fascists", in Postimees's rendering of his Russian. Koos's co-founder was convicted of treason in December 2025, a conviction upheld on appeal in April and now pending before the Supreme Court, a case I described procedurally in Not for His Opinions. So the city's largest vote went to the man who called Tallinn fascists, and still not to the party built for Moscow, and I think that pair of facts is the hinge of the whole question.

An answer to a pollster about the war and a vote for a party measure different things. Grievance is not secession. Narva has the first, in the numbers above, and since 1991, every time the record has come near the second, it has stopped short. The scenario needs the two to be one thing, and I can find no point in the record where they were.

The cast that turned up

On 11 March the volunteer counter-propaganda blog Propastop reported accounts on Telegram, VKontakte and TikTok promoting a "Narva People's Republic": a channel created in summer 2025, active since February, with roughly 60 to 70 subscribers, a flag and a map of the region captioned "From Narva to Püssi stretches Russian land". On 30 September the channel was still up, with 1,950 subscribers, describing itself as a movement for reforms and an autonomous Ida-Viru county.

Three Estonian officials spoke, and they did not say the same thing, so I keep them apart. The prime minister, at the end of his opening remarks at the 12 March press conference and unprompted, said that in the security agencies' assessment this was an information operation originating from Russia, and named the precedents himself: groups like it after the occupation of Crimea in 2014, and in Latvia over the Latgale region. The next day the director general of the Foreign Intelligence Service called it "basic noise" and said "It seems that the Russian government is not behind this activity", while the spokeswoman of Estonia's Internal Security Service (KAPO), in the same report, called it "a simple and cheap method to provoke and intimidate society"; on 24 March KAPO told Postimees that the operator is from Russia and that the effort looks like an isolated attempt rather than part of a definite state plan, and the same report found that Estonian residents, at least visibly, had not joined in.

Five days before that, Postimees had done what I would do with a claim about a crowd, and counted it, in the closed chat its reporter joined. The moderators themselves told the Narva paper, anonymously: "Our horizon is autonomy. We are not preparing for direct conflict with the authorities"; they described themselves as Russians of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Russians from "the mainland" and friends further afield, which is to say not a Narva crowd; the paper left its readers to judge how far to trust an anonymous group, and so do I. What the record holds, then, is a channel with a flag and an anonymous team that says it wants autonomy.

One thing about the episode cuts against me. A former State Department adviser argued at Jamestown that the hoax works even after exposure, because discrediting the people who raised the alarm casts doubt on the very idea of a Russian threat. That is a real mechanism. It still puts nobody in the square. A story with someone behind it is easier to hold than a story in which nobody came, a habit of mind I described in The Phone Isn't Listening, and the record here is the second kind.

A raid dressed as an uprising

I take the scenario as its authors wrote it, as far as the relays carry it. In Postimees's account of the report, agents already in the city take the museum, the town hall and the buildings next to them, claim Russian citizenship and ask Moscow for protection; Russia undertakes to protect its "citizens" with drones and air defence from its own territory; and an effective Estonian answer, the paper notes, would require strikes on Russian territory. That is a raid. The men are in it, already inside the city in ISW's telling, and so is the name. The flag belonged to the accounts Propastop found. The square, the crowd, the council and the vote are supplied by nobody.

Strip the name off and what is left is armed men holding municipal buildings in a NATO country while drones on the far bank threaten anyone who tries to take them back. I think the name is there to change the question a reader asks. A people's republic invites the question of what the people want; armed men in a town hall invite the question of what the alliance will do, which is the question ISW's sentence on hesitation is really about.

That raid would land on the Estonian bank. The river section of the eastern border has surveillance and no fence: the first five radar masts went up on the river in spring, and a drone-surveillance system now covers about a third of the river border, with the rest due next year. The Baltic Defence Line had twenty-eight bunkers installed by June and a strongpoint established in the north-east, and a Postimees photo gallery that month showed the first bunkers near Narva, though no source I opened places one in the city itself. The British contingent, an armoured battlegroup of about 800, becomes a mobile anti-armour force of about 1,200 from April 2027, and the American unit that rotated out in the spring is to be replaced in November by one the defence ministry calls "equivalent in size and capability". That is a watched river and a tripwire that spent the summer thinner than before. None of that is a wall. It is what a raid would meet before anyone in Brussels or Washington had decided anything.

The agents have a record. KAPO's annual review says the FSB's border service looks for recruits among Russian-speaking residents of the border regions and regular cross-border workers, and its pages on agents apprehended list seven people convicted of intelligence activities, six of them linked to the FSB, and more expelled. The agents are a real category, and the visible ones end in court or on the way out of the country.

The drones have a record too. On 25 March a drone that had entered from Russian airspace struck the chimney of the Auvere power plant in Ida-Viru county; KAPO's director said the wreckage indicated a Ukrainian drone, and the defence forces' commander said Russian electronic warfare had probably pushed it off course. Since then NATO fighters have shot down stray drones over Estonia in May and over Latvia in June and August, and none of these incidents produced an Article 4 request. The same Danish assessment supplies the tell-tale and the condition: Russia would likely first build up regular forces near the border to handle NATO's answer, a build-up its analysts expect to take some months and to be hard to hide, and it would attack only if it judged that NATO would not answer as one, "especially if Russia assesses that the United States cannot or will not support the European NATO countries".

The variable that sits in Washington

Denmark's condition names one capital, and that capital has spent fifteen months saying two things. On the plane to the NATO summit in June 2025 the president was asked whether he would honour Article 5 and said "Depends on your definition. There's numerous definitions of Article 5"; the next day he said "We're with them all the way". In July this year, at Ankara, he joined a declaration that calls the commitment "ironclad" and says "An attack on one is an attack on all". On 27 August, two days after his CIA director's visit to Moscow, he told Axios "I am not concerned ... at all. There is no problem" and said in the Oval Office that "he's not going to be attacking a NATO territory". That sentence reads two ways, as a man who thinks the threat unreal or as one who has been told Moscow will not try, and I cannot tell which from here. The Czech prime minister said, in an interview reported on 29 September, that if Russia attacked a Baltic state "we have to send two of our mechanized brigades"; Slovakia's answer is above.

I cannot price this. Whether one man, under a nuclear threat, would take his country to war over a museum and a town hall is not knowable from Narva or from this desk, and I argued in Not Tomorrow why that question carries the weight it does. The sober answer from Tallinn has been the one Susan Lilleväli, head of the foreign ministry's communications department, gave on the ISW paper on 23 September: "We must not turn possible scenarios into facts".

A verdict with its test attached

Taken as the relays carry it, ISW's Narva People's Republic is a raid by agents with a name borrowed from Donetsk, and the name is doing the work no resident has done. On the yardstick of 2014, Narva has the grievances and, as far as the record goes, none of the rest: the state can move, the agents who surface end in court, the treaty exists, and the base that Donbas showed at a quarter to a third has never been measured here at all. What has been measured, as set out above, is that the one list built for Moscow's case took 4 per cent of a real ballot, on a roll that no longer held the city's Russian citizens, and that the closed chat held, besides the reporter, three people at most. What I cannot rule out is the raid itself, a false-flag drone, or a leadership in Moscow that miscounts, and what a raid would test is the alliance. My verdict is narrow on purpose. It says what the scenario needs that Narva does not supply, and it says nothing about how one government in Washington would answer a raid, which is the part that would decide what follows.

The check has dates. The Foreign Intelligence Service's annual report has come in February in recent years, and this year's said that "Russia has no intention of militarily attacking Estonia or any other NATO member state in the coming year" and that the service was "likely to reach a similar assessment next year"; I expect it to. The election to the Riigikogu, Estonia's parliament, is on 7 March 2027. By that date I expect that no armed group, marked or unmarked, will have held a building in Narva, and that no list on that ballot will be campaigning in Narva for union with Russia. A building held without a crowd would be the raid I cannot rule out, which this verdict already allows for. What would show me wrong is a crowd of Narva residents, counted by the police or the press in the hundreds, in the square by the town hall to back a people's republic or union with Russia. I do not expect one, and I have written down what it would look like so I cannot move the line later.

On the Estonian bank the bridge takes people on foot from seven in the morning until seven at night, and takes no cars. On the water, the buoys that would mark the border have no agreed positions, and the border guard advises anyone in a boat to carry a GPS, because the control line drawn on Google Maps is in the wrong place, and some of the illegal crossings the border guard has counted were made by people following that line.