Estonia has tightened its travel advice for Russia due to growing fears that Russian intelligence officers might threaten or attempt to recruit Estonian residents, putting pressure on the thousands of people each week who travel between the two countries for business or to visit family.
Tensions between Russia and its European neighbours have grown since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Kremlin has stepped up its unconventional hostile activity against European countries including sabotage, espionage and misinformation in an attempt to weaken their support for Ukraine, new research by the International Institute for Strategic Studies has found.
By travelling to Russia, residents of European countries make themselves vulnerable to being targeted by the FSB, Russia’s intelligence agency. Estonian citizens could find themselves being put under pressure by Russian intelligence officers to spy against their home country, according to Estonia’s chief state prosecutor, Taavi Pern.
“That's why it's very dangerous to visit Russia nowadays because you never know what the Russians may present to you or how they may threaten you to just help them,” Pern told The Parliament. “The intelligence services of Russia are playing with big puzzles and you never know what kind of piece of the puzzle is necessary for them.”
Estonia's foreign ministry last week updated its travel advice to strongly discourage all travel to Russia, warning its citizens that their electronic devices could be seized and searched and, in the event of finding material critical of Russia, they could be imprisoned, blackmailed into spying, or even forcibly conscripted into the Russian army and deployed to Ukraine. It noted that the risks were particularly severe for dual citizens.
A senior official told Estonian broadcaster ERR that the ministry had documented “several cases where Estonian citizens have come to the attention of Russian security forces precisely because of their views.”
Thousands of Narva border crossings weekly
In Narva, Estonia’s easternmost city, queues of travellers still line up daily to cross the bridge into Ivangorod, the smaller Russian town across the Narva river that forms the border. According to Estonian government figures from late 2024, between 1,000-1,500 pedestrians use the Narva border crossing per day.
Further south, several hundred people per day use the Luhamaa and Koidula border crossings, which can also be traversed with a vehicle.
Family and cultural ties are close. Nearly one-quarter of Estonia’s 1.4 million residents speak Russian as their first language, and many have family members in Russia. Earlier this year, Estonia cracked down on the Russian Orthodox Church, citing fears that it was a vector for Russian propaganda. This followed similar moves against Russian-backed media.
Other travellers cross the border to do business, transporting goods that are in short supply in Russia such as spare automotive parts, components for drones, and electronics and radios. Some of this is illegal; customs officials recorded nearly 600 violations in the month following the introduction of full checks last year, Euronews reported.
From Narva to Moscow: the Kapustin case
Estonia’s intelligence agencies have been waging a covert battle against Russia for years. A 2019 analysis by the Tallinn-based International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) found that Estonia had convicted 20 Russian spies since 2009 — the highest number among NATO countries at the time — including a number of high-profile cases.
In that latest case to come to public attention, Pavel Kapustin, a Russian citizen living in Narva, was handed a 6.5-year prison sentence last month for knowingly establishing a relationship with the FSB, spying against Estonia, submitting false data to a public authority, and violating sanctions by transporting luxury goods from Narva to Russia in order to sell them.
Kapustin was found to have passed sensitive information to the FSB, including on the removal of a Soviet-era military monument in Narva, and an assessment of sentiment towards the Wagner Group mercenary company.
Keir Giles, a fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, said that Kapustin may have been coerced into providing information to the FSB, in an illustration of the risks Estonian citizens and residents could face.
People are at risk “where there is some kind of vulnerability that the Russian intelligence services can exploit to persuade them to work for Russia,” Giles told The Parliament. “That can be either sympathy with Russia in some cases, it can be financial vulnerability, it can be blackmail, exploitation or compromise — all of the classic old tools that intelligence services use for the purpose of coercion.”
Russia's hunt for vulnerabilities
The FSB is responsible for Russia’s civilian intelligence, and also the security of the armed forces through its counterintelligence branch, the VKR (in contrast to the GRU, which deals with strictly military intelligence and is in the military chain of command). According to Estonia's annual Foreign Intelligence Service 2025 report, the VKR recruits informants from both Russian and foreign nationals.
To gain intelligence on a particular individual, the FSB might monitor their contacts and then try to recruit the people they meet with, said Kevin Riehle, a lecturer in intelligence and security studies at Brunel University London and a former US counterintelligence analyst.
The conversation could be along the lines of, “we’d like you to tell us what that Estonian guy is doing here … Get his phone number for us if you can. Get his email address. Learn something about his political views,” Riehle told The Parliament. The FSB will also use publicly available social media to complement these human sources, building a detailed profile of the individual over time.
Once enough information is collected, the FSB develops a “target package” to determine the best approach, which could range from friendly engagement to coercion. “It could have been a collegial approach … Or it could be a more coercive approach to basically pull him into a police office for some peripheral reason,” Riehle explained. The ultimate goal is to exploit vulnerabilities and elicit cooperation, particularly when the target is on Russian soil.
FSB officers will approach both foreign and Russian citizens, but since FSB officers “rarely travel abroad themselves” according to Estonia’s intelligence report, the service relies on Russian recruits to "establish and maintain relationships with foreign targets outside Russia.”
“Primarily for this reason, the Russian intelligence officer will probably use impersonal communication to provide instructions and receive information, or perhaps meet that person in a third country from time to time,” said Fred Hoffman, Chair of the Intelligence Studies Department at Mercyhurst University in Pennsylvania, and a former US human intelligence officer.
Russia’s hybrid war tactics threaten Europe’s security
The confrontation at the border is not unique to Estonia. It reflects a broader Russian strategy aimed at destabilising Europe and exacerbating divisions within the EU.
The Czech Security Information Service’s annual report for 2024 found that the FSB was recruiting migrants from outside of the EU via Telegram to engage in criminal activities with the “intent of weakening public cohesion,” undermining trust in the government, and reducing support for Ukraine.
In May, three people in Germany were charged with working for Russian intelligence. Moscow has also been linked to assassination plots: In 2024, a plan to kill Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger, whose company supplies weapons to Ukraine, was uncovered, and in 2019, Russian national Vadim Krasikov was convicted of murdering a Georgian veteran of the Chechen wars.
The threat is most acute for former Soviet states like Estonia. “The former Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, becoming 15 independent countries [including Russia]. The Russians are actively and aggressively either meddling in, militarily occupying, or fighting against seven of those countries,” said Hoffman.
These countries are not only more vulnerable to Russian espionage because of their historical ties; having them in the Russian sphere of influence is a cornerstone of the Kremlin’s idology. “Russia does not control those territories,” said Riehle, “but it still considers them as part of its domestic space.”
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