The head of state evoked Ronald Reagan's famous "Tear down this wall" appeal to Mikhail Gorbachev, juxtaposing it with a sad irony against the metaphorical wall we have erected around ourselves and around Ukraine.

Not only are these restrictions sad, but they are also unfair, immoral and harmful, in addition to being inconsistent and self-contradictory – granting Ukraine assistance on the one hand, but then barring it from using that assistance on the other.

Even more disturbing is the double standard applied to Ukraine, forced to fight yet with one hand tied behind its back, compared with Russia, by far the larger country and being supplied with weapons by the totalitarian regimes in North Korea and Iran, weapons used to kill civilians, destroy hospitals – as the Estonian head of state has seen for himself while visiting Ukraine - and have hit ships transporting grain to Africa.

Yet Ukraine is forbidden from retaliating – firing on the source of these attacks – thanks to assumptions made about Russia and its intentions, and now we have conjured up a false fear of escalation; drawn an inappropriate red line.

Developments show this; giving Ukraine tanks and fighter jets was counseled against as "an escalation," yet it has not been, just as the very thought of proving any sort of military aid to Ukraine in those early phases of the invasion had been seen in the same way.

When it comes to achieving its imperialist ambitions in Ukraine and Europe, Russia doesn't care about the cost — whether in money or human lives, yet for we in the west things should be cut and dried: Russia is the aggressor; Ukraine is the victim.

It is not as if we haven't been here before, the Estonian president noted: The pretext Russia used to justify its attack on Ukraine starting February 24, 2022 – that it was "encroaching" on Russia by wishing to make moves to join the EU and NATO – had already been used, twice before, namely in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine itself, in 2014.

The president also reflected on his own memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, when he was a young man, an academic, with two small children, witnessing the start of a chain of events which were to lead to Estonia becoming free less than two years later.

The original POLITICO piece by President Alar Karis is here.

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