Ilves Visits Border Guards, Declares NE Border Security Sound
On his trip to a majority Russian-speaking northeastern county, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves also visited a border guard prefecture where he commented on the state of the national border following an incident in September.
Ilves said on Tuesday that the lack of an updated border treaty with Russia is not a threat to Estonian security.
After meeting officials from the eastern prefecture of the Police and Border Guard, Ilves said the guards in the Ida-Viru county region have national security under control, ETV said.
The part of the EU external border in the southeast, where efforts are getting under way to better mark the land border, is considered more of a concern.
"Here [in Ida-Viru] the river does its job. Visibility is in place and the cameras with detectors show exactly what is going on. There's lots of brush in the southeast, on the other hand," said Ilves.
One such brushy section near Luhamaa was the site of the capture of an Estonian counterintelligence official on September 5, shortly after US President Barack Obama's one-day visit to Tallinn.
Ever since Russia started a proxy war in Ukraine, there has been concern over Narva, the largest city in the northeast, which is over 90 percent Russian-speaking and lies on the border.