#toomas hendrik ilves

[quotesfrommyreading]

Much of the public discussion of Ukraine reveals a tendency to patronize that country and others that escaped Russian rule. As Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia, acidly observed, “When I was at university in the mid-1970s, no one referred to Germany as ‘the former Third Reich.’ And yet today, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we keep on being referred to as ‘former Soviet bloc countries.’” Tropes about Ukrainian corruption abound, not without reason—but one may also legitimately ask why so many members of Congress enter the House or Senate with modest means and leave as multimillionaires, or why the children of U.S. presidents make fortunes off foreign countries, or, for that matter, why building in New York City is so infernally expensive.

The latest, richest example of Western condescension came in a report by German military intelligence that complains that although the Ukrainians are good students in their training courses, they are not following Western doctrine and, worse, are promoting officers on the basis of combat experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Similar, if less cutting, views have leaked out of the Pentagon.

Criticism by the German military of any country’s combat performance may be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the Bundeswehr has not seen serious combat in nearly eight decades. In Afghanistan, Germany was notorious for having considerably fewer than 10 percent of its thousands of in-country troops outside the wire of its forward operating bases at any time. One might further observe that when, long ago, the German army did fight wars, it, too, tended to promote experienced and successful combat leaders, as wartime armies usually do.

American complaints about the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its failure to achieve rapid breakthroughs are similarly misplaced. The Ukrainians indeed received a diverse array of tanks and armored vehicles, but they have far less mine-clearing equipment than they need. They tried doing it our way—attempting to pierce dense Russian defenses and break out into open territory—and paid a price. After 10 days they decided to take a different approach, more careful and incremental, and better suited to their own capabilities (particularly their precision long-range weapons) and the challenge they faced. That is, by historical standards, fast adaptation. By contrast, the United States Army took a good four years to develop an operational approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq that yielded success in defeating the remnants of the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda-oriented terrorists.

A besetting sin of big militaries, particularly America’s, is to think that their way is either the best way or the only way. As a result of this assumption, the United States builds inferior, mirror-image militaries in smaller allies facing insurgency or external threat. These forces tend to fail because they are unsuited to their environment or simply lack the resources that the U.S. military possesses in plenty. The Vietnamese and, later, the Afghan armies are good examples of this tendency—and Washington’s postwar bad-mouthing of its slaughtered clients, rather than critical self-examination of what it set them up for, is reprehensible.

The Ukrainians are now fighting a slow, patient war in which they are dismantling Russian artillery, ammunition depots, and command posts without weapons such as American ATACMS and German Taurus missiles that would make this sensible approach faster and more effective. They know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows, and they are experiencing a combat environment that no Western military has encountered since World War II. Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.

  —  Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine

[dadsinsuits]

Toomas Hendrik Ilves

[nicklloydnow]

“As I sat across a table from a minister in the Bulgarian government in his office in Sofia, he shook his head and then held it in his hands. “I can’t believe it. It is impossible,” he said. “It would be a disaster. How can Americans not see that?”

He was speaking about the prospect of Donald Trump being reelected president of the United States. His despair at the prospect echoed that of others from government, business, and the media with whom I spoke during a recent trip to Eastern and Central Europe. But his palpable fear of a Trump return to office was not abstract or in any way based on political preferences. As he and others explained to me, it was based on the fact that they all felt that a Trump win would have a direct and profoundly negative impact on the lives of people in all of Europe.

The view the Bulgarian minister and others expressed to me was that a Trump win would result in a redrawing of the map of Europe in ways that would enable and embolden Vladimir Putin while simultaneously weakening the NATO alliance. Indeed, a Trump win would amount to nothing less than an undoing of many of the gains that came to the West through winning the Cold War and of many of the most important achievements forged in the wake of World War II.

This view is based not only on Trump’s public statements and actions while in office and since but also on a European perception of the Russian threat that is much more sweeping and menacing than most Americans and many of our leaders in Washington seem to grasp.

Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author who has written extensively on the former Soviet Union and emerging authoritarian threats, told me, “Many Europeans are afraid that a second Trump administration would work together with the Russians and their far-right allies in Europe—both those in power in Hungary and Serbia, as well as those who lead opposition parties in France and Germany—to transform European politics, destroy the European Union, and eventually dismantle NATO as well. That would make it easier for Russia and China to divide and dominate the continent for both economic and political advantage.

“Of course this is not in America’s interest,” she went on, “but Trump does not act in America’s interest.”

As for awareness of the sweeping nature of this threat, she said, “Many Europeans do understand this threat. A German member of parliament recently said to me that he fears Europe will soon be facing three hostile, autocratic, and illiberal states: Russia, China—and the U.S.”

When I mentioned my impressions of my conversations to former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, he said, “What you’ve heard is fairly widely shared and feared across not only Central and Eastern Europe but the rest of Europe as well. The general assumption, especially after Trump’s ‘If you don’t pay, I’ll tell Russia to do whatever the hell they want,’ conjures up the images of Bucha, mass killings, torture, rape, etc., we have come to associate with Russia. It can’t be undone.”

This has, in Ilves’s eyes, produced increasing support for developing plans for Europe to attempt to go it alone in the wake of a Trump victory. Countries that were once skeptical of such approaches, like France, are in the process of developing them. “[Emmanuel] Macron’s Autonomie strategique is purely the result of an understanding—right or wrong—that Trump will abandon Europe and NATO in favor of his strongman buddy Putin,” Ilves wrote in an email. “Someone who believes Putin more than his own intelligence services (as we saw in his Helsinki meeting) is not someone people in Europe trust.” Ominously, he concluded, “In any case everyone seems to expect that after a Trump victory, transatlantic relations will be worse than they have been since WW2.”

General Mark Hertling, who commanded the U.S. Army in Europe and spent 12 years working with leaders and other military commanders within the region, said, “A former senior ranking military leader from Romania recently said something that I found insightful. Many of us thought that the election of Trump by the people of the U.S. in 2016 was just an anomaly, he said. We saw the effects of his presidency by the way he disparaged the members of NATO, implied he wouldn’t support (and [would] even pull out of) the alliance, and through the appointment of specific terrible ambassadors to European postings. We were glad, he continued, that you returned to normalcy with the Biden election, but the potential of another Trump presidency would cause a complete loss of faith in the U.S. He said, ‘It would be much like how we all feel about Hungary, or Turkey.’”

(…)

Further, there is a widespread concern, most recently manifested in the wake of several incidents in Poland, of Russia employing “hybrid measures” like sabotage to damage and weaken neighboring governments that oppose it. Threatening language from Putin and his supporters directed at new members of NATO like Sweden and Finland, at the Baltics, and indeed at all of NATO are the reason that most of those states closest to Russia are so committed to stopping Russia in Ukraine and making the country pay a heavy price for its aggression as a way of mitigating the threat they collectively face from Moscow.

How Trump may handle these issues in a new administration with a new team is of grave concern to those in the region and U.S. experts. For example, Hertling told me, “One of the other things I heard (from Europeans) after Trump was elected was that while he and his staff in the [White House] were often out of touch with the culture and issues in Europe, several European leaders told me they depended on the ‘old hands’ in State, and the competency of the military assigned to Europe, to keep things on the rails. I would be afraid that the 2025 plan would take those old hands out of their positions, replacing them with those who don’t understand the history of the former Soviet satellites, their fight for freedom over the last three decades, or the intricacies of places like Transnistria, South Ossetia/Abkhazia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. If Russian actions are not countered in Ukraine, those who used to be under the Russian boot—the Baltics, Poland, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and Bulgaria—would then be in the crosshairs. We are already seeing increased Russian actions in Georgia, Moldova, Poland, and Kaliningrad.” (Kaliningrad Oblast is Russian territory that sits between Lithuania and Poland, extending to the Baltic, a vestige of post–World War II territorial division that provides a strategic forward position for the Russians in Eastern Europe.)

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who worked on East European issues during his time on the National Security Council staff, described his perception of how the dominoes would fall across the continent should Trump once again occupy the Oval Office. “A Trump victory in 2024 would undoubtedly lead to the end of American support for Ukraine,” Vindman said. “Without American political and material support, Ukraine would be forced to fight the war with considerably less resources and would likely remain on the defensive footing indefinitely. Trump would also likely push [Volodymyr] Zelenskiy to immediately enter negotiations with Putin (despite the Russian government’s repeated bad-faith approach to negotiations over the past two years). While Trump and his team would likely present this as a diplomatic victory, we should remember that Trump’s interests in Ukraine are mostly grounded in seeking Vladimir Putin’s personal approval and his personal vendetta against Zelenskiy and me.”

He continued: “Any negotiation signed by the Ukrainian government in this state of duress would be a victory for Russian interests in Eastern Europe and would be followed by renewed hybrid warfare efforts against Georgia and Moldova. The end result of this would be effectively canceling Georgian, Moldovan, and Ukrainian EU membership and keeping all three states within Moscow’s sphere of influence.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute offered the following critique of the current Washington understanding of the evolving situation along Europe’s Eastern flank and specifically of the constraints the Biden administration has placed on support for Ukraine, such as limitations on where U.S.-supplied weapons can or cannot be used that weaken Ukraine’s position and may increase the risks associated with a potential second Trump presidency: “In a time when we are fixated on Putin’s redlines, we have missed the most important: He has set Russia on a path of constant and enduring conflict with the West, requiring aggression and provocations that justify a wartime economy and complete concentration of political power in him as president. His aggression takes a variety of forms: combat in Ukraine, cyberattacks on NATO allies, disinformation campaigns, and election interference. He has subjugated the long-term prospects of Russia to his campaign of aggression, meaning Russia will suffer political and economic isolation for the foreseeable future. Finally, he relies on Russia’s relationship with China, despite Russia being the clearly junior partner. These moves will not be easily reversed, even when Putin leaves the scene.”

(…)

But in Eastern Europe, reminders of what life was like under Moscow’s domination are everywhere. So too are signs that a return to those very bad old days could be just around the corner. Our delays in providing aid to Ukraine and the limitations we have placed on the use of that aid are one sign that many in Washington do not fully realize the implications or extent of Putin’s moves against the West. But for those in the region, there would be no sign more frightening of that disconnect from reality than electing to the U.S. presidency an avowed Putin fanboy like Trump.”

“A week after Emmanuel Macron decided to call a snap parliamentary election, the upcoming vote has turned into one of the most crucial in post-war French history. At stake at the two-round election on June 30th and July 7th is the serious possibility of a government led by the hard-right or hard-left. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (rn) is well ahead in the polls, followed by the New Popular Front, an alliance of left-wing parties. Either could mean extremist politics, economic populism and financial instability. Among Mr Macron’s allies, fears are growing of a rout. “He has thrown us under a bus,” says one minister.

(…)

The biggest bloc is the hard right. Ms Le Pen’s rn held only 88 seats out of 577 in the outgoing lower house. Now, according to a poll by ifop published on June 15th, it tops first-round voting with 35%, though other polls have the rn as much as five points lower. The remains of the divided centre-right Republicans, who had 61 seats in the outgoing National Assembly, are polling at 7%. Many Republicans are co-operating with Ms Le Pen’s rn, which breaks the cordon sanitaire that has henceforth kept her party untouchable by the mainstream.

The left, meanwhile, is running nine points behind RN in the same poll, under the banner of the New Popular Front. It is a left-wing alliance of four parties: Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (lfi), the Communists, the Greens and the Socialists. Finally, Mr Macron’s centrist Renaissance-led alliance trails in third place, with 19%.

(…)

An analysis by Le Figaro, a newspaper, based (somewhat tendentiously) on voting to the European Parliament on June 9th, suggested that the rn could come top in nearly two-thirds of the constituencies on June 30th. Thanks to Ms Le Pen’s efforts to make her party more presentable and shed its formerly thuggish image, the rn’s support base has spread from its traditional strongholds of the industrial north-east and the south of France into villages and suburbs even in places such as Brittany. Moreover, according to this analysis, in 536 second-round run-offs Ms Le Pen’s candidates would face not Mr Macron’s but those of the left-wing front. Renaissance and its friends would go through to the second round in as few as 41 constituencies, half of them in the Paris region.

(…)

Above all, voters seem no longer either ashamed or nervous about backing the rn. As early as December 2023, for the first time, fewer people (41%) judged the party to be a “danger for democracy” than thought that it was not (45%). Ms Le Pen’s party is in triumphant mood. She has won support from Marion Maréchal, her niece, who was kicked out of Reconquest, Eric Zemmour’s ultra-Catholic far-right party, for her “world record betrayal”.

Ms Le Pen’s victory at the European vote, with over twice the score of Mr Macron’s centrists, has already begun to shake up politics on the nationalist right. Eric Ciotti, head of the centre-right Republicans, is defiantly putting up over 62 candidates in an alliance with the rn. Indeed Mr Ciotti’s decision led, mid-week, to scenes in Paris worthy of a melodramatic mini-series. The party met to oust him. Mr Ciotti holed himself up alone at party headquarters, filming himself to dramatic music in an empty office. A court then invalidated that expulsion, leaving him to claim the right to the party’s logo and, apparently, its finances. Some Republicans, such as Othman Nasrou, a candidate in the western Paris suburb of Les Yvelines, are having to stand under the banner of “the republican right”. Republicans against Mr Ciotti’s alliance say they are putting up nearly 400 candidates anyway.

The political shenanigans have been no less surreal on the left, where electoral expediency has triumphed over deep political differences. As part of a pre-election pact announced on June 14th, the New Popular Front announced a swathe of populist economic policies that would reverse much of Mr Macron’s agenda since he has been in power, including raising the minimum wage by 13% to €1,600 net a month, lowering the legal pension age from 64 years to 60, capping energy prices even though costs have stabilised and restoring the wealth tax. Moderate Socialists, in return, secured a promise to support Ukraine against Russia.

(…)

In a further twist, on June 15th François Hollande, a former Socialist president, declared—to initial denials at his own party headquarters—that he was standing for the Socialists in his old rural heartland of the Corrèze. Portraying himself as a bulwark against the hard right, he declared that “the situation is grave”. By agreeing to run under the left-wing alliance, Mr Hollande is both lending it legitimacy and attempting to wrest control of it.

The sense of chaos and rising risk of extremism will continue to weigh on the markets. Already French assets have taken a battering. Between the start of June 10th and the end of June 14th the French stockmarket, the world’s sixth biggest, fell by 6%. Shares of domestically focused firms such as banks dropped by more than this. A key measure of perceived risk, the yield on French ten-year government bonds compared with German ones, increased by 0.29 percentage points. France’s budget deficit is projected by the imf to be about 5% in 2024. The policies of the rn, and the New Popular Front alliance of left-leaning parties, both imply a substantial further increase in the deficit. The more the odds rise of either political group becoming the largest force in parliament, or even having a majority, the more jittery markets will get.

The most likely outcome on July 7th remains a hung parliament, with the rn the biggest party. Mr Macron’s alliance faces massive losses. Those who have spoken to the president say that he remains “combative” and determined not to cede to what he calls the “spirit of defeat”. Kylian Mbappé, a French football star, has called on voters not the back “the extremes”. Mr Macron’s supporters point to the courage it took to let the people decide too. But the people seem to be gripped by a sort of dégagiste (get rid of them) fervour. And France looks ever closer to entering the uncharted territory of a government led by the hard right; or possibly by the hard left; or perhaps a chaotic hung parliament with no government at all. It is not a pretty picture.”

[webntrmpt]

Excerpt:

“When I mentioned my impressions of my conversations to former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, he said, ‘What you’ve heard is fairly widely shared and feared across not only Central and Eastern Europe but the rest of Europe as well. The general assumption, especially after Trump’s ‘If you don’t pay, I’ll tell Russia to do whatever the hell they want,’ conjures up the images of Bucha, mass killings, torture, rape, etc., we have come to associate with Russia. It can’t be undone.’”

[nedsecondline]

‘Shameful’ Nicolas Sarkozy under fire for defending Putin’s Ukraine invasion | Nicolas Sarkozy | The Guardian

Responding to Sarkozy’s Ukraine remarks, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former Estonian president, used even less diplomatic language to describe the former French president. “After his own 2008 Georgia ‘peace plan’, which he himself scuppered a month later to restore the EU-RU cooperation agreement, he’s France’s most mendacious postwar foreign policy president. On Russia, venal as hell. Why take…

[jeintalu]

MIDA SEAL HARVARDI ÜLIKOOLIS ÕPETATAKSE?

Olen kuulnud hooplemist, et TH Ilves olevat õppinud Harvardi Ülikoolis.

Ei tea, mida seal siis küll õpetatakse, kui ta ei oska mõisteid õigesti rakendada ega entsüklopeediatest järgi vaadata, mida üks või teine üldtermin tähendab?

Ilves on leiutanud uue sõna "genotsiidisõda" ja rakendab seda Venemaa invasioonile Ukrainasse.

Ilmselt ei tea või ei taha ta teada termini "genotsiid" tähendust.

Genotsiidi tunnustele vastab pigem Ukraina tegevus Donbassis alates aastast 2014.

Veel leidsin Ilvese intervjuust sellise lõigu:

'"Saame anda Ukrainale alliansiga liitumiskutse, kui liitlased on nõus ja tingimused on täidetud.' See on üleolev ainsa riigi suhtes, mis on pärast 1945. aastat pidanud sõda venelaste vastu ja seda juba üheksa aastat."

Ilmselt on Ilvesel tõsiseid raskuseid ajaloo või loogika oskamisega.

Mida head saab olla rahvuse vastu sõdimises?

Just rahvuse vastu sõdimine kaldub üle kasvama genotsiidiks.

Ja see ei vasta tõele, et Ukraina on ainus, kes pärast teist maailmasõda on Venemaa või venelastega sõdinud.

Näiteks Vietnami sõda on kohane käsitleda USA ja NSVL-i vahelise sõjana Vietnami territooriumil, aga Venemaa (sotsialistlik) kuulus NSVL-i, olles selle tuumikuks.

On selge, et TH Ilves õhutab vene rahvuse vastast vaenu, mis oma olemuselt ei erine näiteks juudi rahvuse vastase vaenu õhutamisest.

Õnneks ei saa ma seda artiklit edasi lugeda.

Aga ma mäletan, et ka presidendiks olemise ajal rääkis Ilves sageli propagandistlikke absurdsusi.

Muide, Eesti presidendi tööülesandeks on kaitsta Eesti Põhiseadust, aga rahvustevahelise vaenu õhutamine on Põhiseaduse vastane.

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

P.S. In European defense matters, this troika can be described briefly and precisely: Too late, too little, too slow. The amount of heavy long range weapons delivered to Ukraine, or rather their small volume during 108 days of war, shows that the Troika has absolutely no understanding of the scale of the invasion of the Russian orcs and the real needs of Ukraine's defense. It is quite clear that, despite the loud democratic statements, "old Europe" is ready to pursue its business interests at the expense of the security and lives of Eastern Europeans. It would be a big mistake for Eastern Europeans to rely solely on the guarantees of the "old" Europe in matters of security. 

All Eastern European countries need to make significant efforts to strengthen their military industry and regional defense capabilities and military cooperation...

[politicaldilfs]

Toomas Hendrik Ilves

[reportwire]

The most dangerous place on earth – POLITICO

The most dangerous place on earth – POLITICO

Press play to listen to this article Strolling amid the ornate 19th-century villas, fountains and lakes that dot this sleepy spa town, it’s easy to forget that you’re standing in Vladimir Putin’s crosshairs. Nestled on Lithuania’s southeastern border, Druskininkai opens onto a narrow notch of strategic territory known as the Suwałki Gap. Stretching about 100 kilometers along the…

[oldblogger]

The Republic of Estonia and her President

The Republic of Estonia and her President

I was briefly in Tallinn, Estonia’s capital city, in early 2003. My intention was to make connections for my consulting business, which I have since put to rest. Tallinn is a short distance from Stockholm (237 miles, or 381.0 km), directly east across Östersjön (The Eastern Sea); that is, the Baltic Sea. The population of the country is around 1.3 million people (in 2002). States around the…

[dadsinsuits]

Toomas Hendrik Ilves

[ithacanexile]

Estonia, where you can engage in twitter chats with the (former) President about how beautiful certain languages are for singing.

[felipeandletizia]

Felipe and Letizia retrospective: July 9th

2004: Graduation students of the Military General Academy and other officials of the Civil Guard in Zaragoza, Spain

2007: Lunch & Gala dinner offered to the president of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves

2008: Visited Expo Zaragoza 2008

2009: Received the young participants in the cultural program “Ruta Quetzal BBVA 2009” and Received the participants in the 8th Balboa Program for young Ibero-American journalists at El Pardo

2010: Basic Air Academy graduation

2012: Graduation for the cadets at the Spanish Military Officer School

2013: Graduation of the Basic Air Academy

2014: Air Force Academy graduation (1, 2) & Oversaw the oath of the new Constitutional Court judge, Mr. Antonio Narváez Rodríguez

2015: Visited Telecinco TV Channel (1, 2) & Received President of the regional government of Andalusia Susana Diaz at la Zarzuela.

2016: Received US President Barack Obama at the Torrejón de Ardoz airbase

2018: Inauguration of the World Assembly of Jesuit Institutions of Higher Education in Bilbao

2019: Meeting of the Council of the Royal Board on Disability and delivered the “Queen Letizia 2018 Awards” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

2021: Graduation of the Military General Academy in Zaragoza.

F&L Through the Years: 797/??

[unofficial-estonia]

4 of 6 Estonian presidents (and their spouses) on the same picture. The presidents in the picture are:

Arnold Rüütel, 3rd president (1st from left)

Alar Karis, 6th president (4th from left)

Kersti Kaljulaid, 5th president (5th from left)

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, 4th president (8th from left)

[romanmigracs]

Telex: Két éve a politikai elnyomás csak eszköz volt a lopáshoz. Most már cél, ez vegytiszta fasizmus

És ott van még az Oroszországból közvetetten érkező korrupcióexport, amit a volt észt elnök, Toomas Hendrik Ilves csak úgy nevezett: schröderizáció. Gerhard Schröder volt német kancellár óta ugyanis minden európai vezető tisztviselő tudja, hogy ha nem kerül konfliktusba Putyinnal, akkor kaphat egy nyugdíjbiztosítást, ami például Schröder esetében évente több mint 600 000 dollárt jelent – a semmittevésért. [A volt német kancellár tanácsadói munkák után bekerült az Északi Áramlat 2 gázvezeték mögött álló, Gazprom többségi tulajdonú Nord Stream AG felügyelőbizottságába – a szerző] Ennek a lehetősége befolyásolja a politikusokat, és Schröderen kívül sokan mások is éltek vele, mint az egyik volt finn miniszterelnök, François Fillon francia exkormányfő, vagy Karin Kneissl osztrák exkülügyminiszter – sok hely van az orosz állami vállalatok igazgatótanácsaiban. Az még hagyján, hogy ez a négy-öt ember elfogadta ezeket az ajánlatokat – de befolyásolja az ítélőképességét annak a többi 40-50 vagy talán 400 vagy 500 politikusnak, aki tud erről a lehetőségről. Ez egy hatalmas probléma, amivel szintén foglalkozni kell.