Reporter: Eric Campbell
Camera: Ron Ekkel
Editor: Garth Thomas
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Transcript
ERIC CAMPBELL: It looks like something out of a fairy-tale and its characters are desperate to live happily ever after.
KAUPO KARUSE: "The Soviet occupation is not so far away at the moment. It's far away for our children".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Pint-sized Estonia has shaken off dictatorship and built a hi-tech economy that's the envy of the world. But its old enemy in the east is rising again and Estonia is gearing up to fight.
MARINA KALJURAND: "Of course we are worried. We're worried about unpredictability of Russia".
ERIC CAMPBELL: [riding in truck] "So we're kind of on the run at the moment. This unit came under attack in the field from all sides".
Taking on the Russian bear means more than boots on the ground. Estonia is pushing cyber defence to the very limit.
MARINA KALJURAND: We have to be prepared and we have to react if needed".
KIRSTEN: "As they say, if you don't want a war, prepare for a war".
Text: NORTH EAST ESTONIA
Title: WE'RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT
ERIC CAMPBELL: Every spring, when the weather warms up, Estonia is invaded. In the capital, Tallinn, it's tourists jostling for space in Europe's hot new destination - a mix of medieval splendour and historical kitsch.
MAN HAULING CART: "Beware of rats... pigeons... for they also carry the disease of the black plague".
ERIC CAMPBELL: But two hour's drive away in the forest there's a more aggressive fight for territory. These are NATO's annual war games near the Russian border. This year, it's 9,000 troops from 15 countries. They train alongside the Estonian Defence Forces and the Estonian Defence League, a reserve army of volunteers.
MARIA T�KKE: "I've got it written down here that it's a shrapnel wound in the left hand".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Maria T�kke is a student at Estonia's national film school. One day she hopes to be a movie director. Today she's learning what to do if a hand grenade explodes in front of her.
MARIA T�KKE: "We have one guy who lost almost his hand and we're giving him first aid and we are preparing that he's going in transport and going to hospital".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "Does it feel a bit more real when you're doing these exercises?"
MARIA T�KKE: "Yeah. He's ready for transport".
ERIC CAMPBELL: [in the war games] "Estonia has been doing these exercises for fifteen years, but in the past three years the notion of conflict with Russia has become much more real. People have seen the annexation of Crimea, the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, the downing of MH17 and more recently the cyberattacks on the US and France that many have blamed on Russia and this is one very small country trying to work out how to defend itself from a giant neighbour".
Maria and her friend Kirsten decided to learn combat. They were among hundreds of young women to join the League after Russia invaded its neighbour Crimea.
MARIA T�KKE: "Yes because like Russia is next door to Estonia so I thought why not come to protect like our family or country or nation and stuff".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "Are people worried about it?"
MARIA T�KKE: "A little bit, yeah. Like, maybe it's coming but no, we don't know".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "But you want to be ready".
MARIA T�KKE: "Yes" [laughs].
ERIC CAMPBELL: "And you're prepared to actually fight in a war?"
KIRSTEN: "We're working on it. That's why we're here".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "You're not frightened of the idea of combat?"
KIRSTEN: "Of course I am. War is awful. I don't want to have a war in Estonia, but as they say, if you don't want a war, prepare for a war".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Estonia feels it has good cause to be concerned. In World War II it was invaded by the Soviet Union, the communist empire dominated by Russia.
KAUPO KARUSE: [on patrol in war game] "There's machinery coming in front! Somebody's coming from the car".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Kaupo Karuse was a boy when Estonia finally won independence in 1991.
KAUPO KARUSE: [Estonian Defence League] "Most of the world doesn't understand the cost of freedom. I'm thirty eight years old. I remember the Soviet times. I remember Soviet Army and I don't want that back. Freedom is not, you know, it's not granted as we, as we can see in the world today, even today, in 2017".
ERIC CAMPBELL: He knows Estonia on its own could never defeat Russia. With a population of just 1.3 million, they're outnumbered 100 to 1. But he believes they could inflict enough pain to make Moscow think twice.
KAUPO KARUSE: "We don't exercise to invade other countries. The more we exercise, it's less likely somebody to attack us. That's the thing. Attacking us is, must be as expensive as possible".
ERIC CAMPBELL: You just have to glance at a map to see why Estonia's wary. It's not only dwarfed by Russia, which his nearly 400 times its size, it's seen how easily Moscow can take back former Soviet territory. In 2014 it captured Ukraine's province of Crimea with barely a shot fired.
Moscow sent in soldiers, guns and pop stars - supposedly to protect Crimea's ethnic Russians. Russian media warned they were about to be attacked by Ukraine's new pro-western government.
NEWS REPORT: "In Ukraine, another regime takes power in a violent takeover. This regime is reckless, cynical and cruel".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Russian militias surrounded Ukrainian army bases as separatists held a referendum to formalise the split.
MARINA KALJURAND: "To me it reminds me very much of what happened in Estonia in 1940. 16th of June Soviet troops entered, referendum was staged a month later and a month later we 'voluntarily' joined Soviet Union. So the scenario is very familiar to the people in Estonia if you talk to them".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Marina Kaljurand is a former ambassador to Russia and has little trust in its President Vladimir Putin.
MARINA KALJURAND: [Foreign Minister 2015-2016] "Of course we are worried about recent steps, we're worried about unpredictability of Russia. We are worried about violations of our airspace. We do follow the military exercises that do not have defensive or friendly character but scenarios are rather, rather aggressive ones - so of course we have to take everything into account. We have to be prepared and we have to react if needed".
ERIC CAMPBELL: And conventional war is not the only danger. Estonia has learned the hard way that there are other ways to be attacked.
[walking in park] "Ten years ago the Estonia government decided to move a statue from this park that commemorated the Soviet 'liberation' of Tallinn. Well Russia was outraged. And amid fake news reports that the statue was being destroyed, some Russian speakers in Tallinn went on a rampage. More than a 100 people were injured. But the main attack was on the internet".
Overnight, websites froze and servers shut down. It's called a denial of service attack and it was launched from IP addresses across Europe. Estonia was briefly plunged back into the pre-digital age. Russia's government denied any involvement.
MARINA KALJURAND: "I was Estonian ambassador to Russia then so of course the question of retribution, who was behind those attacks was raised. Some of the Russian officials, even officials, were stupid enough to, to, to say themselves that they were behind those attacks or they were part of that attack or they took place in both attacks".
ERIC CAMPBELL: NATO, the Western Defence Alliance, saw it as the first cyber war. It set up a cyber defence centre in Tallinn to counter future attacks. Every year it stages complex cyber war games to probe for weakness. That approach is now being copied by allies like Australia - Foreign Minister Julie Bishop one of this year's observers.
The research has helped Estonia develop one of the world's most secure digital networks. If Russia's intention was to scare Estonia, it backfired.
TAAVI KOTKA: "Because it was so out of the blue, I mean like it didn't affect our every day life too much. One bank was down for one and a half hour so that was the maximum damage basically".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Rather than retreating from cyberspace, Estonia decided to double down and make digital development the core of its new economy. The government backed up all its data on foreign servers to prevent disruption. Every citizen was given a unique digital identity to access any government services on line - from paying taxes to voting. Taavi Kotka helped design the system and says the public embraced it.
TAAVI KOTKA: [software consultant] "People got used to the benefits like e-voting or like paying taxes with zero click or one click and everything happens like this, hospitals sharing information, like government institutions sharing information with each other without any paper or like personal interference so they liked that. They like the thing that everything's so efficient".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Once high-speed internet was extended to every part of the country, nobody needed to line up at government offices.
TAAVI KOTKA: "I had a round-ward trip with my children and our first stop of in JFK and you know there's the immigration with all those ropes forming the line and my children were asking me like, 'Father what is this?' 'Um, it's a queue'. 'What is a queue?' Because they had never seen a queue. I mean the obviously have seen the like 7 or 8 persons standing in grocery store like and waiting, but an organised queue with ropes, they've never seen that".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "It all happens on line?"
TAAVI KOTKA: "Yes".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "You don't need to do it in person?"
TAAVI KOTKA: "Yeah".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Estonia is now one of Europe's most wired countries. This former Soviet industrial estate near Tallinn Airport is becoming a new Silicon Valley. We caught up with Kaupo Karuse, the machine gunner we filmed in the forest. He's a software consultant.
KAUPO KARUSE: "Yeah it's connected. There are like hundreds of services the country is offering us, the government is offering us, and companies, like our company, we can use them for free and develop our own things which is really, really smart and secure and reliable".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "So you basically leapfrogged from being a fairly backward Soviet economy, to being a very advanced hi-tech economy".
KAUPO KARUSE: "Hm mm. We had no choice. We had to do something, right? And since we don't have resources in the ground, we don't have a lot of land to grow food for Europe, we had to do something with our brains".
ERICK CAMPBELL: Little Estonia has developed some of the world's biggest digital products, like the video calling service Skype. But even as it looks to the future, there's always one eye on the Soviet past which is why Kaupo alternates his hipster uniform of jeans and t-shirts with military fatigues.
But not everyone here fears Russia. Less than 3 hour's drive from Tallinn is the old fortress town of Narva on the Russian border. It's just 2 hour's drive from here to Russia's second city, St Petersburg. 90% of Narva's residents speak Russian. Most, like Vladimir Cherdakov, feel Russian.
"Is it a Russian town or an Estonian town, in your opinion?"
VLADIMIR CHERDAKOV: "Well, it's a Russian town which is located in the territory of Estonia, I would say".
ERIC CAMPBELL: More of a quarter of Estonia's population hails from Russia. As in Crimea, many of their families moved across in Soviet time when they were the same country. Narva and its neighbour Ivangorod were effectively the same town but in 1991 they were suddenly cut off. People now need visas to visit family and friends across a heavily patrolled border.
VLADIMIR CHERDAKOV: "I'm a citizen of the Soviet Union. I lived in the USSR, served in the Soviet Army - and one day we woke up in a different country".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Despite finding himself on the Estonian side, Vladimir Cherdakov remains proud of his heritage. Twice a week he rehearses with a Russian folk group in Narva's castle, a symbol of a long history of conflict.
Danish occupiers built it in the 13th century as they advanced on Russia. In the 15th century Tsar Ivan the Third built an even bigger fortress directly opposite. It's now the only place in the world where two fortresses face each other across a border.
VLADIMIR CHERDAKOV: "In general, Russian residents of Narva are more or less fine with Russia and Putin - but nobody wants to get into a war... only if some third power were to provoke that conflict. But I'm sure nobody wants that, and Russia doesn't want that either. If anyone says that Russia is a provocateur, I don't believe it".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Of course Russia did support separatists in Ukraine and Georgia but the Russian community here is different. Nobody's that keen to re-join the Motherland.
"The last time I was in Narva was in 1998, seven years after the Soviet Union had split up into 15 different countries. Back in those days there was no fear that Russia would try to grab part of the new country of Estonia. Back then the Russians over there in Ivangorod wanted Estonia to take them".
We followed a local resident organising a petition to join Estonia.
YURI GORDEYEV: [ABC Lateline 1998] "I collected these signatures as a protest to show Moscow how badly we live".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Life here was utterly desperate. Hospitals had no medicine, people struggled to find food and warm clothing.
NINA VYESER: [pensioner - ABC Lateline 1998] "We don't get pensions, there is no work. My daughter hasn't worked for 5 years. What kind of life is this?"
ERIC CAMPBELL: Things improved after Putin came to power, mainly thanks to rising oil prices but it's still far behind Estonia.
VLADIMIR CHERDAKOV: "I think it's better to live here, of course. You can tell that even with the parking. We have problems parking our cars, because each family has 2 or 3 cars now, and we didn't have this before. Now it's a no problem to buy a car, the problem is where to park it".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "What would you say to people who think Narva is the next Crimea?"
VLADIMIR CHERDAKOV: "That's bullshit! That's what I call it - because there is no reason, or thoughts, or dreams about it here. Everyone just wants to live their lives and raise their kids - earn some money and travel somewhere".
ERIC CAMPBELL: While he doesn't see trouble coming from the Russian side, he does blame one group for stirring up the neighbourhood - NATO.
VLADIMIR CHERDAKOV: "They try somehow to push the Russian bear. For what? If we didn't have NATO bases or military in Estonia it would be much safer to live here".
ERIC CAMPBELL: This year's NATO operation was called Spring Storm. Two weeks of war games leading up to a major battle. The commander of the Estonian Defence Forces, General Riho Terras, told us it was minor compared to what Russia was planning for September.
GENERAL RIHO TERRAS: [Commander, Estonian Defence Forces] "Russians are exercising in more than a 100,000 people, so I think the only provocation I can see is if we don't do anything. I think Ukraine provoked enough in Crimea not doing anything, so no provocation from our side".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "You're ready, you're prepared?"
GENERAL RIHO TERRAS: "Yes we're ready, we're prepared and we're not afraid".
ERIC CAMPBELL: But this year Vladimir Putin wasn't the only president causing concern. US troops were taking part in the games, but their new Commander-in-Chief, Donald Trump, had called NATO obsolete while praising Putin.
NEWT GINGRICH: [Campaign 2016] "Estonia is in the suburbs of St Petersburg".
ERIC CAMPBELL: His campaign team had even questioned if the US would defend a NATO member.
NEWT GINGRICH: [Former US House Speaker] "I'm not sure I would risk nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St Petersburg".
ERIC CAMPBELL: This year's war games were a pointed demonstration that NATO would fight a conventional war.
[on side of road in battle zone] "Well this is the day of the major battle of Spring Storm. We've been allowed inside the battle zone, hence this [taps helmet]. There'll be no live ammunition used today, just blanks, but otherwise everything is going to be done as real as possible".
Mock battles are soon raging around us. We find ourselves caught on the Estonian side being hunted down by Brits.
[in transport retreating] "So we're kind of on the run at the moment. This unit came under attack in the field from all sides so they're heading back in the armoured personal carrier to the trenches to make a stand".
Unlike a real war, it's all over in a day.
But the real battle was just beginning. As soldiers gathered for the closing ceremony, NATO leaders were converging on Brussels for their first meeting with Donald Trump. General Terras was playing down the differences.
GENERAL RIHO TERRAS: [addressing the soldiers of the war games] "Hereby I call all you nations back to the next year's exercise in order to show the strengths of alliance which is today shown in Brussels in a couple of hours time".
ERIC CAMPBELL: The Alliance's 28 other members hoped Trump would affirm the NATO doctrine that an attack on one was an attack on all. Instead he attacked them for not paying their bills.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: "This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States and many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Some European leaders seemed dismayed but Estonia's Prime Minister, J�ri Ratas, says his meeting with Trump left him reassured.
PRIME MINISTER J�RI RATAS: [Estonian Prime Minister] "First of all I tell him that Estonia is a strong supporter for NATO and also that Estonia keep our promises. For example, our defence expenditure is this year more than 2%, actually 2.17".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "While a lot of other people talk about Donald Trump's attitude, you actually met him. What did he say to you?"
PRIME MINISTER J�RI RATAS: "United States is behind NATO. Of course it's very important to fight against terrorists, but also he said that Russia is also a threat".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Even with the nagging fear of war, Estonians are getting on with life. Caught between great powers from the east and west, their land has been fought over since the 13th century.
KAUPO KARUSE: "The longest period of freedom in Estonian history is at the moment and we are hoping it will last, for years and for decades".
EGER KARUSE: I'm sure it will last.
ERIC CAMPBELL: Kaupo Karuse and his wife Eger hope their children won't have to worry about fighting.
KAUPO KARUSE: "The Soviet occupation is not so far away at the moment. It's far away for our children. They don't, they haven't seen it".
EGER KARUSE: "And I think they're smarter and they have more opportunities and not only because of this digital world, but everything".
KAUPO KARUSE: "Their mind is free. Their mind is free. It's very, very important".
EGER KARUSE: "I think it's like evolution also like every generation is smarter, they have more experience and so on and so on".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "And you're building on that".
EGER KARUSE: "Yes".
ERIC CAMPBELL: [looking at their child] "He seems pretty smart".
If Estonia can avoid war, this will be the first generation in 800 years to be free of foreign domination. And that really would be a fairy-tale ending.