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.

...continued

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.