NARVA, Estonia – This is where the West looks into Russia and Russia looks back. A bridge over a narrow section of the Narva River, which divides Estonia from its neighbour and former occupier, is the site of a tightly controlled border crossing.
Every day, hundreds of people attempt to cross the border in either direction. Some are trying to visit family; others have business to attend to. For most, the process is far from easy. The wait can be four or five hours, with no guarantee of getting where they need to go. Those turned away often return the next day to try again.
The difference between the Estonian town of Narva and Russia’s Ivangorod can feel paper thin. If the Estonian government gets its way, it could soon get a lot thicker.
Estonia’s “triple alliance” government – comprising the liberal centre-right Reform party, the centre-left Social Democrats (SDE) and the national-conservative Isamaa party – plans to ban non-citizens from voting in local elections, scheduled for October 2025.
Legally, that would affect any permanent resident who came to Estonia from outside the EU. However, the primary targets are Russian and Belarusian passport holders, who number around 83,000. They belong to a Russian-speaking minority that comprises nearly a quarter of Estonia's 1.4 million population.
Most of the Russian-speaking minority have Estonian citizenship and would not be affected.
Local voting rights are enshrined in Estonia's constitution, meaning it would need to be amended. If that happened, only citizens of other EU and NATO members would hold onto their rights.
As it stands, the proposal is a compromise within the coalition. The SDE initially opposed the plans altogether but has since come on board following concessions. The amendment would not affect stateless people living in Estonia, who possess “grey” or “alien” passports. Many of them are also ethnic Russians.
“What we saw was the constitutional amendment will become inevitable, whether the SDE is in or out. That’s why we’ve proposed a compromise where we can at least protect the voting rights of people with alien passports,” Lauri Läänemets, Estonia’s interior minister, tells The Parliament.
The SDE's coalition partners view the amendment as necessary to protect the country’s democracy and weed out Russian influence. It is an old concern that has gained new urgency since February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of another former Soviet possession – Ukraine.
Estonia’s democratic path
The proposal, still in the early stages of the legislative process, has its detractors, who say it chips away at the core values on which the country has built its democracy, having overcome a brutal authoritarian past. Central to that effort was allowing the country’s Russian minority to participate in local governance.
“We saw local communities as autonomous entities who are responsible for organising their environment and their life,” Liia Hänni, who helped write the constitution in 1992, tells The Parliament. “We decided that it would be good to offer it in our constitution – to give the political rights to non-citizens to take part in local elections.”
Should the proposal become law, Hänni says she is “concerned that we will remove some basic principles of democracy from our Constitution.”
As a small, Baltic nation squeezed between bigger empires, Estonia is no stranger to foreign control. It gained brief independence in 1920 from the collapsing Russian Empire, only to be occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
Soviet “liberation” of Estonia proved to be merely a change in totalitarian ownership. During post-war Soviet rule, Estonia lost one-fifth of its population to deportation, execution and exile. The Kremlin's Russification policy resettled thousands of ethnic Russians in Estonia, aiming to spread Russian culture and language while suppressing local identity.
That all ended with the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Since then, Estonia has made the most of its time as a free democracy. It has established itself as a responsive, modern state that often punches above its weight in geopolitics.
As a share of GDP, Estonia is a top donor to Ukraine’s defence. The country’s former prime minister, Kaja Kallas, is now the EU’s chief diplomat. As some of eastern Europe’s other former communist countries have backslid on democracy, Estonia has remained its outspoken defender, unafraid to call out Russian sabre-rattling.
“We Estonians, and other nations in eastern and central Europe, were often considered paranoid because of that shadow of history with the USSR. But on the day of the full-scale invasion, we were proved right,” Läänemets says.
More than an ID
Estonia has been both an EU and NATO member since 2004 and is among a small group of countries that extends local voting rights to non-EU nationals.
When Estonia declared independence from the USSR, ethnic Russians faced a choice: Those who were citizens during the interwar period, along with their descendants, could have their Estonian citizenship restored. Those who arrived later, largely via forced Russification, could naturalise if they spoke intermediate Estonian.
In either case, they had to surrender their Russian passports, as dual citizenship is generally prohibited. Those who failed to meet these criteria received the grey passport, making them essentially stateless. As a result, many chose to retain their Russian papers.
More than 30 years since the end of the Cold War, and facing a revanchist Russia, supporters of the constitutional amendment are less inclined to extend a welcoming hand. As they see it, Russian passport holders had their chance to join Estonia’s future in the EU.
“It was an act of goodwill by Estonia at the time, considering the circumstances,” Grigore-Kalev Stoicescu, the chair of Estonia’s parliamentary defence committee, tells The Parliament.
For some ethnic Russians in Estonia, a passport goes beyond the political. It is symbolic of a culture, distinct from the Estonian national one, that is shared by fellow Russians.
“Young Russians miss a Russia that they’ve never known,” Irina Suursild, a Belarusian living in Tallinn, tells The Parliament. “But they are dreaming of something they have no idea about.”
As a Belarusian passport holder married to an Estonian, Suursild would also be affected by the proposal. For Belarusians like her, it risks a double resentment: Getting cut off from a sense of Estonian belonging while being grouped with Russians, a separate national group.
“I and many of my friends, both Belarusians and Russians living in Estonia, understand the proposal and believe that it's fair and timely,” Dzmitry, a Belarusian scientist in Tartu, a city in southeastern Estonia not far from the Russian border, tells The Parliament. “But since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Belarusian citizens who live in Estonia are always equalised with Russians. We believe this is unfair.”
Dzmitry left for Estonia following the 2010 election in his home country, which saw an opposition candidate jailed and incumbent strongman Aleksandr Lukashenko maintain his grip on power.
“These restrictions impact the everyday lives of Belarusians in Estonia,” he says. “It doesn’t cure the real cause of the problem: the Russian regime, which controls Belarus and takes decisions against the views of the people.”
Local elections matter
For the Estonian government, stripping a minority of a minority of their local voting rights may be a price worth paying to protect the country. Local elections build “societal resilience and civil contingencies,” Olevs Nikers, president of the Baltic Security Foundation in Riga, the Latvian capital, tells The Parliament.
That makes them a potential target for foreign influence, which the government fears runs through Russian voters. In Russia’s sham presidential election earlier this year, exit polls suggested that 72 per cent of those who participated from Estonia voted for Vladimir Putin.
As Putin’s expansionist and revisionist ambitions have become clearer, so too have deep-seated fears and divisions in Estonia. Russian language and heritage are no longer merely markers of cultural identity but have become politically suspect.
“A lot of things changed after 24 February 2022,” Katri Raik, a former mayor of Narva and one-time interior minister, tells The Parliament, referring to the date that conventional Russian forces invaded Ukraine. "We removed Soviet monuments, renamed streets.”
“Now this right to vote is also being removed,” she adds. “People are asking, what's next? Suitcase, railway station, Russia?”
Though she opposes the constitutional change her own party has reluctantly backed, Raik acknowledges the threat of Russian influence. Estonians can receive state-controlled Russian media by satellite. Across the river from Narva, in Ivangorod, Russian officials are broadcasting propaganda from a new town square.
“Russia is very strong in their fakes and their soft power,” she says.
Estonia, and the EU more broadly, are on high alert for hybrid attacks. Estonian authorities say they disrupted an alleged Russian operation in February aimed at spreading fear by damaging property and defacing monuments. Ten people, including Russian nationals, were arrested.
Whether incidents like this speak to a broader, fifth-column threat posed by Estonia's Russian-minority residents is far from conclusive. A poll from last year concluded that 60 per cent of foreign nationals, most of them Russian, condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Undermining democracy to save it?
“This is a huge mistake because Estonia made some pretty big efforts to integrate people,” Jana Toom, an Estonian MEP, tells The Parliament, referring to the proposal. “And now by sending this signal, it will push them away.”
Toom’s own experience underscores that dilemma. She came under fire last year for meeting with a pro-Kremlin activist in Russia, whom Estonia had expelled. Toom paid the activist’s legal fees.
Estonia’s Russian residents are also divided on the issue, torn between gaining political rights and other tangible benefits that come with an EU passport, and giving up their Russian one, which for some carries meaningful cultural connection.
There are also practical hurdles and safety concerns. Russian citizens who spoke to The Parliament in Estonia said renouncing their passport is extremely difficult. When they visit the Russian embassy, they face long queues, understaffing and opaque bureaucratic procedures.
"Plus,” says Filipp, a student from St. Petersburg who had lived in Narva for ten years, “it's still Russian territory.”
That leads to the fear, especially among men of conscription age, that a trip to the embassy to renounce their citizenship could end on the battlefield in Ukraine.
“If I know Russia, I would go and they would meet me at the border there and take me to the army,” Boris, also a student, tells The Parliament.
A grey area
With 64,000 people in Estonia holding a grey passport, the country is home to the world’s 10th largest stateless population. Although the constitutional amendment excludes them, some see a slippery slope if it passes. A survey conducted by the Institute for Societal Studies in November suggests that about 48 per cent of the public supports extending the voting ban to stateless citizens.
That would target people like Tatjana and Dmitri, a married couple and holders of grey passports. She was born in Ukraine. He was born in Moscow. The two met in Tartu in 1986, when Estonia was still part of the USSR. Of their three sons, two are Estonian and one is stateless like them.
One of the few benefits to the grey passport is easier travel back to Russia, which until recently could be done without a visa. Tatjana and Dmitri have ageing mothers there and wanted to make sure they could visit.
“The main point of it was always to see my mother,” Tatjana tells The Parliament. “Now, the situation is so difficult.”
When her mother dies, Tatjana says nothing is stopping her from becoming Estonian. She will have no reason to go to Russia.
Her husband, however, has different motivations. Even after nearly 40 years in Estonia, where he expresses strong pro-Estonian and anti-Kremlin views, swapping his Russian identity for an Estonian one feels disingenuous.
“Russian culture is my culture,” he says. “But not the Moscow government.”
Daniil Martikainen-Iarlykovskii contributed to reporting. To protect their safety, some people quoted are identified only by their first names.