The West's directive is that Russia should not lose and Ukraine should not win, and Biden's pledge to defend "every inch of NATO territory" was a catastrophic mistake

Translating from an interview of historian Yuriy Felshtinsky to the Estonian branch of Deutsche Welle, 23.05.25:

"NATO is no more

...You have repeatedly indirectly mentioned our country in your speeches, saying that if Putin seizes Ukraine, then Moldova will be next, and after that, the Baltic countries.

This is obvious: I have not discovered America here. Ukraine was never the final goal. In early 2022, Putin, having decided that he would seize Ukraine quickly and therefore had nothing to hide, stated directly that he was not satisfied with the influence that the Russian Federation had on the international stage and that he intended to restore the influence that the USSR once had. If you add this to his dissatisfaction with NATO expansion, it turns out that he is seeking to restore either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union and intends to seize the republics that separated in 1991. 

Why in this order: Ukraine, Moldova, Baltic countries?

Russia has been trying to break through to Transnistria since 2014. There is already a serious pro-Russian enclave there, and 220 thousand Moldovan citizens have been issued Russian passports (the same was done in Abkhazia and South Ossetia before the invasion of Georgia). Putin wants to enter Moldova under the pretext of infringing on Russian citizens. 

If this happens, Moldova will become easy prey, and then Russia will go to the Baltic countries. Aggression will most likely begin with Lithuania under the pretext of breaking through a corridor to Kaliningrad. Remember how World War II began with the German attack on Gdansk - to implement Hitler's sick idea of breaking through a corridor to the German city of Danzig? Putin has borrowed a lot from the Fuhrer.  

If Putin invades Lithuania, will NATO's Article 5 be activated? 

I'm afraid that with Trump in the White House, we'd be best off assuming that NATO is gone. It's not yet in the public interest (either for Europe, the US, or Ukraine) to announce it, but I absolutely cannot imagine a situation where Trump would announce a war with the Russian Federation in response to Russia's invasion of one of the Baltic States. Moreover, I fear that Trump might even seek to ensure that other NATO components that are not related to the US also cease to function...

What events should Estonians follow to stay alert? What needs to happen for us to understand that the Russian threat has moved from a hypothetical to a real one?

The world has changed dramatically since Donald Trump came to power. Neither Estonia, nor Latvia, nor Lithuania, nor Finland, nor Sweden, nor Poland will be able to withstand a Russian attack on their own. Not because Russian soldiers are motivated or fight well, but because there are more of them and their command does not care how many people die along the way. This, paradoxically, is the strength of the Russian army.  

Even the Ukrainian leaders underestimated it. They were not prepared for Russia to lose a million people and continue to wage the war as if nothing had happened. The Ukrainians initially assumed that when Russia saw how many people it was losing in the war, it would stop it...  

But Ukraine is not to blame for anything here - the strategy was imposed on it by the EU and the US. For example, Ukraine had no right to use Western weapons to strike at Russian territory (only at its own occupied territories). And they forbade Ukraine to strike at Russia because the directive was: Russia should not lose this war under any circumstances, and Ukraine should not win under any circumstances.

Why? 

They feared that Putin would then escalate the war into a nuclear one. They also believed that if Russia disintegrated, it would create even more chaos and destabilization in the world than if the war continued...

Would Article 5 have been activated under Biden? 

100%. You can argue about how much it would have been activated and what real actions would have followed, but Article 5 would definitely have been formally activated. 

Another issue is that Biden behaved incorrectly at the very beginning of the full-scale invasion. At that time, everyone was convinced that Russia would seize Ukraine, if not in three days, then in a few weeks, and against this background, Biden said: "We will defend against Russia an inch of NATO territory." 

A catastrophically incorrect statement. Firstly, it meant that Ukraine could be seized. Secondly, Biden forgot that Finland and Sweden were not in NATO at that time (it's good that they managed to quickly jump in).

What should have been done instead? 

As a historian, I have repeatedly conducted a thought experiment: what would I have done if I were the US president in 2021-2022 to prevent the invasion? The answer to this question is simple. It was impossible to include Ukraine in NATO - and, let's be honest, Ukraine is more to blame than others for not joining the alliance (because it did not want to do this for a long time, and then it was too late). 

But there was an opportunity to transfer NATO troops to Ukraine under the guise of exercises. Moreover, they would have been conducted in response to Russian exercises in Belarus. In order to take such an extraordinary, drastic step, political will was needed - and it was not there..."