SHOCK WARNING: Russia eyeing up Estonia ‘like it did Crimea’ warns former army commander

Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, Colonel Rupert Wieloch said he had “no doubt” that Russia had ambitions of invading Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, before insisting it was vital NATO forces asserted there presence in the region.

The comments come as 800 British soldiers, with tanks, drones and armoured vehicles, prepare to enter Estonia in May in a bid to reassure Baltic states over Russian aggression.

How the Kremlin Manipulates Europe’s Refugee Crisis

Russian intelligence is detectable in the huge migration wave hitting Europe. What does this mean for Western security?

None can now deny that the refugee crisis that descended on Europe over the last year has changed the continent’s political landscape. The arrival of millions of migrants, mainly from the Middle East and Africa, with the encouragement of some European leaders, has birthed a political earthquake that promises to reshape Europe’s politics in important ways.

Even Europeans who initially supported the efforts of Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor and the most powerful politician in the European Union, to welcome millions of refugees have begun to express public doubts about this enterprise. This week, Austria’s foreign minister, whose country only months ago was welcoming tens of thousands of migrants, expressed Vienna’s position concisely: “The concept of no borders is not going to work.”

Exclusive: Dissident says he was tortured for challenging Vladimir Putin

From London to Vienna to Berlin, exiled opponents of the Russian state are increasingly fearing for their safety. Not since the Cold War have Russian operatives been accused of such violence nad [sic] intimidation abroad. The story of one man who says he was tortured for challenging Putin

On a warm morning in early August, a 68-year-old Chechen man named Said-Emin Ibragimov packed up his fishing gear and walked to his favorite spot on the west bank of the river that runs through Strasbourg, the city of his exile in eastern France. Ibragimov, who was a minister in the breakaway Chechen government in the 1990s, needed to calm his nerves, and his favorite way to relax was to watch the Ill River, a tributary of the Rhine, flow by as he waited for a fish to bite.

Ibragimov had reason to be nervous. The previous month he had accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of war crimes in a criminal complaint he had sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and to the Kremlin. Ibragimov had taken five years to compile evidence of what he considered crimes committed during Russia’s two wars against separatists in the Russian republic of Chechnya. During the second Chechen war, which Putin oversaw in 1999–2000, Russia bombarded the Chechen capital of Grozny and killed thousands of civilians. The U.N. later called Grozny “the most destroyed city on earth.”