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 preprepared scripts, some don’t use smart phones, 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.

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