Kaja Kallas, the loudest voice against Putin
She presides over the government of the smallest of the Baltic countries, Estonia, with barely 1.3 million inhabitants, but above all she was the first voice to denounce Vladimir Putin's new imperialism in 2021, when neither the European chancelleries nor the most conspicuous analysts thought that the Russian president was lying, and that the more than 100,000 soldiers he placed along the border with Ukraine were only there for manoeuvres.
Kaja Kallas, 47, has had the honour of being declared "wanted" by the Kremlin. She is not the only one, as 84 high-ranking officials from the second Baltic country, Latvia, and 29 politicians from Lithuania, including the Minister of Culture Simonas Kairys, are also in the same situation. All of them are accused of having committed offences under the Russian Criminal Code, although without specifically mentioning them. However, the common denominator is that they all ordered or voted for the dismantling, destruction or removal of Russian monuments erected in the three countries during the Soviet occupation after World War II.
Of all of them, and because of her position, Kaja Kallas has been the one who has most vehemently and early on alerted her EU partners to Putin's real expansionist intentions. And she did so with deeds since 2021, when she decided to send arms to support Kiev in the face of the invasion that for her was imminent. On 24 February 2022 - two years to the day - Putin launched an operation that his generals and advisors assured him would last barely a week, enough time to oust Volodimir Zelensky and put in his place a puppet president of Moscow.
Two years into the war and, as she has made a point of emphasising in all her speeches, Kallas not only foresaw the brutal destruction of Ukraine and the stark murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians, but also tirelessly insists that, if Ukraine falls, Putin will not be satisfied and his imperialist cravings will once again be projected onto Europe, and first and foremost onto the countries he subjugated under the boot of the Soviet Union, so longed for by Putin himself.
Kallas, a warning voice in Europe
Kallas has often had to raise her voice to her European colleagues who are more conciliatory and sympathetic towards the master of the Kremlin. She has a life experience that contradicts the most pacifist theories. As a teenager, she herself witnessed the invasion of Russian tanks when Estonia proclaimed independence in August 1991. It was a sight that refreshed her memory of her mother and grandmother, who were deported in cattle cars by Stalin's commissars to remote, frozen Siberia, just as the Nazis did with Jews, Gypsies and not a few dissidents to concentration and death camps.
All these experiences, plus her own memory, led her to distrust ethnic Russian Estonians. Leader of the centre-right Reform Party, she has preferred to align herself with the social-democratic left rather than integrate Russian speakers into her political coalition government. She knows that Putin used the argument of allegedly coming to the aid of the Russian-speaking population to seize the Crimean peninsula and encourage separatism in the republics of Lugansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, an argument she could also hypothetically use to do the same in the Baltic states. Nor is it too innovative in this respect. It was the same argument that a certain Adolf Hitler used to break up the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.
Kaja has the same surname as the greatest soprano of all time, the unforgettable Maria Callas, and like her, Kallas never ceases to raise her voice against Putin. In this respect, she has a devastating motto: "If people don't know you exist, they won't realise you're missing when you're gone", a reference to the oblivion that her country and the other satellites of the USSR were subjected to by a Western Europe that prospered and developed as never before while they "enjoyed" the communist paradise for more than half a century.