Estonia, along with fellow Baltic states Latvia and Lithuania, is counting down the days to finally rid itself of one of the last vestiges of 50 years of Soviet occupation: an electricity grid controlled by Russia.
Preparing the population for what most see as the unlikely scenario of power outages is the final stage of a year-long project. “Everything should flow smoothly,” reads the rescue board post, “but unexpected situations can arise… whether that be because of the actions of our hostile neighbor to the east, unexpected weather conditions, or technical failures.”
“Those risks are actually quite low right now,” Vootele Päi, an adviser to Estonia’s Interior Ministry, told CNN, adding that they are nevertheless making provisions for all possibilities.
The Baltics have been getting ready for this moment for almost the entire two decades since they joined the EU and NATO in 2004. They’ve renovated existing infrastructure and built new power lines, including several undersea cables to Finland and Sweden and a crucial overland link to the mainland European grid, the LitPol line linking Lithuania and Poland.
That meant that just a few months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, all three countries were able to stop buying electricity from Moscow.
But Russia was still in total control of the functioning of the grid, balancing supply and demand, and maintaining the frequency, said Susanne Nies, project lead at the German energy research institute Helmholtz-Zentrum. And, in another holdover from Soviet times, it was still providing these services for free.
“The big risk was that the Baltics, in the context of the Ukraine war, would find themselves in a situation where Russia, from one second to the next, just says, ‘Stop it. We don’t help you anymore,’”
Six months ago, the Baltic countries officially notified Russia of their intention to “desynchronize,” and so, on February 7, the so-called BRELL (Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) agreement that governs the shared grid will expire.
On February 8, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will simultaneously disconnect from that grid, at which point they will need to briefly function as an “island,” surviving only on the electricity they produce. On February 9, they plan to synchronize their newly independent grid with the Continental Europe Synchronous Area, which covers most of the European Union.
It’s a highly symbolic moment. Outside the Energy and Technology Museum in the center of Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, a countdown clock has been ticking down the last 100 days to “energy independence.” “This is the final break from its Soviet-era occupation,” said Jason Moyer, a foreign policy analyst at the Wilson Center, a think tank in Washington. “Psychologically, this is a huge step forward.”
The project has involved significant investment, most of it from the European Union, which has provided grants worth over $1.2bn. But for the Baltics, the price of allowing Moscow to maintain that leverage over their power grid was too high. “We understand fairly well that the cheap Russian energy always comes at a price that no democratic European country should be able to afford,” said Päi.
And lest there be any doubt as to their resolve, last year Lithuania’s grid operator Litgrid started cutting old Soviet cables that formed connections to Belarus so the lines could be repurposed.
The company told CNN it even sent parts from one dismantled power line to Ukraine to help rebuild its damaged energy infrastructure, a move that was both practical (Ukraine’s grid was also built in the Soviet era, so it uses much of the same equipment) and emblematic of the geopolitical risk underpinning this whole project.
“There is no scenario in which we remain connected to the Russian power grid,” Litgrid chief executive Rokas Masiulis told CNN in emailed comments.
The question plaguing Baltic leaders now, as some of the most vocal opponents of the war in Ukraine and some of the most generous donors (as a percentage of GDP) to Ukraine’s military, is whether Russia will try to exploit the moment of disconnection, be it through physical sabotage or another hybrid tactic like cyberattacks or disinformation.
Ukraine had disconnected from the Russian grid for a test just hours before Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. It never reconnected.
Russia has shown itself more than willing to weaponize its electricity supply, not only through repeated attacks on the Ukrainian energy grid but also through its almost three-year occupation of the Zaporizhzia nuclear plant, which before the war provided about a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity.
