Putin's Challenger Leads EU's Diplomatic Front

 

When Kaja Kallas became Estonia’s prime minister she thought foreign policy was her weak spot. So she got to work. With recommendations from other leaders, Kallas drew up a study program. And she’s still at it.

She’s currently reading a history of Iran and has plowed through works by Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger and a biography of Ukraine’s Volodymr Zelenskyy this year — as well as books about the Middle East, Israel-Palestine and Taiwan. Graham Allison’s "Destined for War," on the dangers of the U.S.-China rivalry, was suggested by the NATO secretary-general.

Foreign policy, she told Adam Grant on his Re: Thinking podcast last year, "is not my weakness anymore.”

European Union leaders apparently agreed with that assessment when they nominated the 47-year-old former lawyer to become the bloc’s chief diplomat at a summit in Brussels on Thursday.

Provided she clears the hurdle of parliamentary hearings and begins her new role in November, Kallas will be dealing with a war in the Middle East, economic security threats from China and the struggle to engage a skeptical Global South that is being courted by Moscow and Beijing.

But most of all she will be charged with shaping the EU response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That, along with Vladimir Putin’s threat to the rest of Europe, is a subject she knows inside out.

Like most of her generation in the Baltics, Kallas was born and educated under Soviet occupation. Her nomination is a sign of how the EU’s priorities are changing as the war shifts the center of political gravity eastward.

"Kaja Kallas is the European politician who has proven that she knows best how to read Putin,” said Martin Selmayr, formerly the top civil servant in the European Commission, who currently teaches EU law at the University of Vienna. "She is thus ideally placed to lead the EU’s foreign policy at this critical juncture.”

This account of her political journey is based on conversations with numerous people who’ve worked with her, most of whom asked not to be named when discussing private conversations.

Kallas often tells the story of how her mother was deported to Siberia in a cattle wagon with her family as a baby.

She initially steered clear of politics, wanting to chart her own path. Her father, Siim Kallas, was a central banker who became Estonia’s prime minister from 2002 to 2003 and then a European commissioner for a decade.

By 27 Kaja was a partner at a law firm in Tallinn and decided there had to be more to life than playing golf with 60-year-olds, she told Grant’s podcast. In 2011, she was elected to Estonia’s parliament and three years later became a lawmaker in Brussels. She has been prime minister since January 2021.

The Estonian prime minister’s office has a balcony overlooking Tallinn’s medieval old town, which was bombed by the Soviet air force in the 1940s. Now the cityscape mixes glass-and-steel skyscrapers with Soviet-era housing blocks, a reminder to successive leaders of how far the country has come since regaining independence in 1991.

The Western Europeans who laid the foundations of the EU liked to describe it as a peace project built on the ashes of World War II. The eastern member states who joined from 2004 have a different perspective.

While the west of Europe was rebuilding postwar, beyond the Iron Curtain they just swapped one brutal occupier for another. Estonia lost about a fifth of its population under Soviet rule. More than 75,000 people were killed, imprisoned or deported.

So reports of Russian atrocities in Ukraine hit close to home. On a wall outside the government building in Tallinn, two stone plaques list dozens of ministers who died during the communist terror, most in 1941 or 1942.

From that history, Kallas wants her colleagues, in the west especially, to understand one important lesson: all this can be lost.

"This is an enormous responsibility at this moment of geopolitical tensions,” Kallas said in a statement following her nomination. "We must continue working together to ensure Europe is an effective global partner to keep our citizens safe, free and prosperous.”

For many in Western Europe, Russian aggression wasn’t a top priority when Kallas began to attend EU leaders meetings in 2021. Even after Putin occupied Crimea and shifted his forces toward Ukraine’s borders.

Angela Merkel was still arguing Russia could be bound into the rules-based world order through economic ties like the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, and at a meeting in June of that year was pushing for the EU to hold a summit with Putin.

Kallas argued against the proposal during the closed-door session and the idea was rejected, to the annoyance of the German chancellor. The two leaders spoke the following day to clear the air, one diplomat said, and Merkel came to like and respect her Estonian counterpart as a result.

A year later in Versailles, Kallas debated into the early hours to ensure the fine print on Ukraine’s EU accession didn’t give opponents any latitude to block the process. Her legal training encourages her to attend to the precision of wordings others don’t give as much thought to, one diplomat remarked.

Around the negotiating table, EU leaders have widely contrasting styles. Some read from pre-prepared scripts, some don’t use smartphones, or take only minimal notes.

Kallas has trained herself to speed-read and plows through hundreds of pages of memos before time. She documents discussions as she goes along, sending notes to her team from her iPhone. Diplomats from several other countries said they are sometimes jealous of the detail their Estonian counterparts receive.

For her briefing packs, Kallas wants information about the domestic challenges facing the leaders she’ll meet — she tells advisers it’s a good way to break the ice.

In some ways, the EU foreign policy job finds Kallas in the right place at the right time.

Her international profile has skyrocketed since the Russian invasion. She was the first European leader to be put on a Kremlin wanted list and has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.

But her popularity at home has tanked despite a landslide election victory last year. Several senior officials, including the president, have called for her to resign after it emerged that her husband was a shareholder in a company doing business in Russia. Meanwhile, the EU’s longest recession has seen the Estonian economy contract for the past nine quarters.

Those who have worked with her say her biggest strength — her straight-talking style — can at times be her biggest weakness.

She sometimes says things other politicians would avoid, and that makes handling the back-room politics of short-lived promises and compromises more difficult.

During a debate in parliament last December she was criticized for saying Santa Claus didn't exist. She responded by saying she didn't know whether to apologize to children or take solace in the fact that, once they grew up, they’d understand she was the only one who wouldn't lie to them.

All the same, several diplomats said she was bound to be better than her predecessor, Josep Borrell, who is disliked in many capitals for off-the-cuff remarks that don’t reflect an agreed line. One ally in Brussels will be Ursula von der Leyen, who is set to continue as president of the European Commission — assuming she also gets through a confirmation vote, as expected, in the European Parliament next month.

Von der Leyen visited Estonia in 2022 and the prime minister took her to visit a textile factory near the border with Russia founded by the commission president’s great grandfather. Von der Leyen said the trip brought alive "these distant fairy tales” she’d been told of her family’s history as a child.

That relationship has given tiny Estonia an outsized influence over EU policy, as the bloc’s biggest countries slowly reassess their attitude to eastern member states and their relationship with Russia.

"We did not always hear the voices you brought,” French President Emmanuel Macron said as he apologized for underestimating warnings about Putin during a speech in Bratislava last year. "That time is over.”

Kallas has a core team of around half a dozen and often rolls up her sleeves to work with them fleshing out ideas into formal proposals. They have proposed sanctions on Russia, came up with the plan to source 1 million rounds of artillery that later became an EU initiative, and have been working with France to get the bloc to work on a plan to issue tens of billions of euros in bonds to ramp up the continent’s defense industry.

French support has been a key factor in securing Kallas’s new position. Finding common ground with Germany will be a crucial challenge when she gets to work. Chancellor Olaf Scholz is fiercely opposed to the idea of more joint European borrowing.

But Kallas has started working on him. They sat together during a long dinner in Scholz’s home city of Hamburg in February where the Estonian premier was the guest speaker.

By the end of the evening, the two leaders had grown more familiar with each other, and Kallas had once more made her case about the dangers of Russia with an oblique jibe at Germany’s track record on Russia.

She recalled a speech that Estonia’s first post-independence president, Lennart Meri, had given in that same hall 30 years earlier. Putin, then the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, was in attendance.

When Meri had told the audience that despite the collapse of the Soviet Union they shouldn’t be naive in thinking that Russia would give up its expansionist ambitions, Putin walked out.

Despite the warnings from the east, in the intervening years, the EU deepened its reliance on Putin’s Russia, before the rupture in 2022.

"Putin’s walk-out revealed his true colors very early on,” Kallas said. "Many just did not receive the message or did not want to pay attention.”

She has their attention now.