Estonia Launches New Channel to Win Over Its Russians
TALLINN — On Monday, ethnic Russians in Estonia will wake up to a new television channel created expressly for them, a move by the Estonian government to reach out to its Russian minority and counter what Western governments have described as the Kremlin’s infowar.
Although ethnic Russians make up a quarter of the former Soviet country’s 1.3-million population, they are often cut off from ethnic Estonians by media, language and geography. The new government-funded Russian-language channel is aimed at bridging those divides.
The channel’s launch also attests to the concerns of politicians in the Baltic countries that after Russia’s meddling in Ukraine under the pretext of protecting ethnic Russians there, ethnic Russians living on their soil could be stirred up by Russian propaganda to undermine stability.
In interviews for this article, ethnic Russians in Estonia dismissed that idea but complained about their treatment by school systems, employers and the government.
“Everything comes down to language: If you don’t know the [Estonian] language, you aren’t a person,” said a Russian bus driver, Alexander, 33, who asked for his surname to be withheld from print. Most ethnic Russians interviewed for this article made the same request.
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