For the past three weeks, Estonia, a small European country that is a member of both NATO and the European Union, has been under assault from neighboring Russia. The offensive is of a new kind: cyber-warfare. Computers serving Estonian government ministries, banks, schools and media have been vandalized via the Internet. Some of the attacks have been traced to Russian government servers, including that of the president’s office in the Kremlin. For a country that depends heavily on electronic commerce, the threat has been very serious; the Estonian Defense Ministry has asked for and received help from NATO’s fledgling cyber-warfare unit.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been betting that this flagrant if novel aggression against a peaceful state — which Moscow officially denies — will be shrugged off by Estonia’s relatively new partners in NATO and the EU. A key element of Russia’s increasingly belligerent foreign policy has been to drive a wedge between Western European governments such as France and Germany and members of the Western alliance that once were part of the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. In addition to its cyber-war on Estonia — nominally prompted by the moving of a statue of a Soviet soldier — Russia has banned meat imports from Poland and blocked oil exports to a key refinery in Lithuania.

Putin was clearly hoping that instead of defending their allies, Germany and France would blame them for causing trouble with Russia. Instead, at an EU-Russian summit in the Russian city of Samara Friday, Western leaders stood up to the Russian bully. At a news conference with Putin, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso forthrightly declared that “we had occasion to say to our Russian partners that a difficulty for a member state is a difficulty for the whole European community. … The Polish problem is a European problem. The Lithuanian and Estonia problems are also European problems.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel then tartly reprimanded Putin for suppressing a demonstration by Russia’s democratic opposition movement in Samara. “I hope they will be given an opportunity to express their opinion,” she said of the dissidents led by former chess champion Garry Kasparov.

In all, it was a refreshing show of principle by the European leaders, one that just might get some relief for Estonia, Poland and Lithuania. It also contrasted sharply with the visit to Moscow this week by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who seemed intent on minimizing U.S. reaction to Putin’s recent provocations — which have included publicly comparing the United States to Nazi Germany.

At her own news conference in Moscow, Rice said the administration’s priority was to concentrate on “the considerable degree of cooperation that we have on a number of issues” with Russia and seek “a lowering of the rhetoric.” She said she had discussed Russia’s domestic politics with Putin, and she elliptically referred to “scars” Russia has from the breakup of the Soviet Union. But, she added, “I don’t want the considerable degree of cooperation that we have on a number of issues to be lost.” Reasonable words, perhaps — but not much comfort to a Russian dissident or to a NATO ally under cyber-attack.

The Washington Post