Estonia's 2026 annual intelligence report

Friday 13 February 2026

On 10 February 2026 Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (Välisluureamet) published its annual public assessment, International Security and Estonia 2026. The report is written in a deliberately steady tone—Russia remains dangerous, it argues, but she is not about to launch a direct military attack on Estonia or another NATO ally in 2026 and, very likely, not in 2027 either. That combination of reassurance and warning is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the spine of the document, and it produces a set of conclusions that, if broadly correct, matter far beyond the Baltics.

The central judgement is blunt. Russia is waging a long war. Even the recent rhetorical turn towards “peace talks” is treated as an instrument—less a diplomatic opening than an attempt to buy time, divide Western coalitions and manoeuvre the United States into a settlement that would formalise Ukraine’s defeat. In the report’s telling, Moscow’s strategy is not to end the conflict, but to reframe it—shifting from the battlefield to negotiation rooms and information channels whenever that promises better returns.

At the same time the service argues that deterrence is working. Estonia and Europe have taken enough steps to compel the Kremlin to calculate very carefully what she can risk—hence the assessment that there is “no cause for panic” about a near-term NATO attack. Yet this is paired with a second, harder claim: Russia is rebuilding the very capacities that would make a future confrontation thinkable—reforming her armed forces for unmanned warfare and expanding ammunition output so quickly that she can both fight on and begin reconstituting reserves for later conflicts. 

What the report actually emphasises

The document’s summary points reveal the priorities Estonia wants allies to hold in mind—several deserve particular attention.

First, the report depicts a Kremlin using the language of peace as a tool of manipulation. That framing is not merely moral condemnation. It is a warning about sequencing—Russia wants time, and time is itself a resource that can be traded for battlefield regeneration, industrial expansion and political interference. 

Second, the report pushes beyond the familiar “Baltics are threatened” narrative and describes a broader theatre of influence. Moldova is treated as a case study—an attempted political hijack that failed, but will be tried again in altered form. The South Caucasus appears as another fault line—an apparent US-brokered breakthrough between Armenia and Azerbaijan is portrayed as cutting across Russian geopolitical interest, with Moscow likely to respond through an influence campaign in Armenia during 2026. 

Third, and unusually for a public intelligence yearbook, there is granular attention to the machinery of Russian special services and sanctions evasion—especially the flow of dual-use goods sustaining the defence-industrial base.  This is Estonia signalling to partners that the sanctions debate has moved—what matters now is enforcement engineering: customs work, export controls, investigations and the political will to close loopholes.

Fourth, the report argues that Russia is adapting its force structure towards unmanned systems at scale—strategic, operational and tactical—across land, air and sea.  This is not simply an observation about drones. It is a forecast about the character of any future Baltic contingency—dense surveillance, massed attrition by expendable platforms and an attempt to saturate defences across the whole depth of Estonia’s territory. 

Fifth, the report’s ammunition claim is meant to jolt European planners out of comfortable arithmetic. It states that Russia’s military-industrial complex has increased artillery ammunition production more than seventeenfold since 2021—implying that, even while fighting Ukraine, she is preparing for other potential conflicts. Whether every figure survives scrutiny, the directional point is difficult to dismiss: Russia is treating industrial mobilisation as the foundation of strategy.

Sixth, it places Russia–China cooperation inside a shared worldview rather than a formal alliance—partners without a treaty, mistrustful but opportunistic. The report goes further and uses a specific contemporary example—Chinese artificial intelligence systems as channels for propaganda and perception distortion, with DeepSeek, a Chinese Large Language Model, discussed as illustrative of how such systems insert official positions or refuse politically sensitive truths. 

Finally, there is a self-reflective chapter on protecting classified information and the risks posed by artificial intelligence—less about Moscow, more about Western vulnerability: risk assessments date quickly, and risk management must be continuous. 

Are Estonia’s conclusions likely to be right?

Public intelligence reports are political documents—carefully edited, designed to deter and to educate without disclosing sources. That should make one cautious. Yet on the principal claims, Estonia’s assessment aligns with a wider pattern of reporting around the release.

On the “no NATO attack in 2026” judgement, the reasoning is plausible. Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to consume men, ammunition and political attention. Estonia’s report does not paint Russia as harmless—rather, she is dangerous and incompetent in a particular mix, capable of sabotage and coercion but constrained from initiating a major NATO war while her main effort remains in Ukraine. That is consistent with how other reporting characterised the message: deterrence is constraining Moscow’s immediate options even while she plans for later. 

On the industrial point—ammunition and the “next war” logic—the evidence base looks stronger than rhetoric alone. The Financial Times report on the yearbook highlighted the scale of Russian ordnance output and framed it explicitly as preparation for future conflict beyond Ukraine. Even if outsiders cannot independently verify every production line claim, the strategic inference is not far-fetched. A state expecting a prolonged confrontation invests in the consumables that make modern ground warfare possible—and she invests even more if she believes the West is slowly learning how to out-produce her.

On unmanned warfare, Estonia’s emphasis is also credible. Ukraine has been a laboratory for drone use, counter-drone measures and electronic warfare adaptation. If Russia is institutionalising those lessons into “large numbers of unmanned systems units”, the implications for the Baltic are immediate—because the Baltic theatre is small, flat, sensor-friendly and densely infrastructured. 

Where the report is more contestable is in the confidence of some regional political forecasts—Moldova and Armenia, for example. Not because interference is unlikely, but because political operations depend on local contingencies: elections, scandals, elite splits, economics and the unpredictable effects of protests. Estonia is probably right about intent—Moscow looks for cheap geopolitical wins where she can still reach. She may be less able to guarantee outcomes than the report’s tone can imply.

A second caveat lies in the report’s implicit assumption that European rearmament will continue steadily. Estonia quotes the Kremlin as being concerned that Europe might be able to conduct independent military action against Russia within two to three years—and that Moscow’s goal is to delay and hinder this. That concern may be real, but it also underlines a political risk inside Europe: rearmament is not only a budget line; it is an electoral project. If governments change, priorities can wobble—exactly the outcome Moscow would welcome.

If Estonia is right, what follows geopolitically?

If the report’s core thesis is correct—no imminent NATO assault, but a deliberate Russian build-up for a later balance-of-power contest—then Europe is living on borrowed time.

The consequences unfold across several levels.

Deterrence becomes an industrial race. NATO’s eastern flank is no longer primarily about tripwire battlegroups and reinforcement plans—important as they are—but about stockpiles, production capacity and the ability to sustain mass. Estonia’s ammunition emphasis is, in effect, a message to European treasuries: you cannot deter a state that believes she can outlast you. 

Sanctions policy shifts from morality to mechanics. The report’s attention to dual-use smuggling and the role of Russian military intelligence in sustaining procurement is a prompt for a less glamorous politics—customs cooperation, prosecutions, tighter export licensing and shared enforcement with transit states. A sanctions regime that looks impressive on paper but leaks in practice becomes, in strategic terms, a subsidy to Russian rearmament.

The Baltic Sea becomes a theatre of permanent contest. Estonia’s discussion of influence activity in the “Baltic–Scandinavian macro-region” is more than branding criticism. It implies an attempt to normalise Russian presence in academic, cultural and policy networks, slowly softening resistance and creating ambiguity about where “dialogue” ends and manipulation begins. Alongside this sits the practical problem of maritime infrastructure—pipelines, cables, ports—where deniable pressure can be applied without crossing the threshold of open war.

Politics on Europe’s periphery matters more, not less. If Russia is frustrated in Ukraine yet rebuilding for later, she will look for compensations—Moldova, the South Caucasus and parts of Africa are presented as arenas where influence can yield strategic leverage or resources without triggering the full force of Western response. A Europe that treats these as separate “regional issues” will keep being surprised by how they connect.

Washington becomes the key variable. Estonia’s assessment that Russia seeks engagement with the new US administration to relieve sanctions and lock in a favourable Ukraine outcome is a warning about alliance management: Moscow’s preferred victory is political. If the United States and Europe diverge on terms, timelines or enforcement, Russia gains what her battlefield performance has struggled to secure.

China’s role stops being a sidebar. The report’s argument that concessions to Russia also fuel China’s ambitions is deliberately provocative, but strategically coherent. If Beijing learns that revisionism is rewarded when conducted patiently and with sufficient narrative control, the lesson travels. Estonia’s focus on Chinese artificial intelligence as a perception tool is, in this sense, not a technology anecdote—it is a warning about the informational foundations of democratic policy-making. 

Finally, there is a domestic Western consequence which intelligence services rarely underline so openly—security is administrative as well as military. Estonia’s chapter on protecting classified information and “AI risks” points to a problem that will intensify as governments adopt machine tools for speed and cost-saving. A state cannot deter effectively if she leaks, misclassifies, over-shares, under-protects and forgets that adversaries are patient.

The strategic bottom line

Estonia’s yearbook is best read as a disciplined attempt to hold two truths together—Russia is not about to storm across the Narva this year, but she is laying the groundwork for a harsher strategic environment in the years ahead. The report’s conclusions are broadly convincing where they concern force development, industrial mobilisation and the use of negotiation rhetoric as a delaying manoeuvre. Its forecasts about specific political operations should be treated as warnings of intent rather than predictions of destiny.

If Estonia is right the geopolitical consequence is not inevitability of war, but a narrowing of complacency. Europe’s choices in 2026–2028—production, procurement, sanctions enforcement, counter-sabotage resilience and alliance cohesion—will decide whether Russia concludes, later, that she has a chance at fighting another war.