Palling, who is part of the delegation accompanying President Kersti Kaljulaid on her state visit to Finland on Tuesday and Wednesday, said that the two countries continued cooperate very well. This, however, could not be taken for granted. While there were numerous success stories in areas such as energy, IT, and transport interconnections, there were still plenty of places where there was potential for the two countries to move closer, Palling told BNS.

Palling said that topics of security were important, but that economic cooperation as well as cooperation in the digital sphere were just as important.

“The X-Road initiative has been taken up, now we have to get services to function on it as well,” Palling said. He also described it as essential to make sure that businesses in Finland could access digital services as easily as their counterparts in Estonia.

“There’s also plenty of space for development in the cooperation between Estonia and Finland in the field of energy,” Palling added.

Palling observed that Estonia had been dealing with the issue of desynchronization from the Russian energy network for years, and instead linking up to the European frequency area. “We have two scenarios, to link up either to Central Europe, or to the Nordic countries. Right now, looking to the Nordic countries first seems a more realistic scenario,” he added.