Estonia’s activities in recent years

• In 2023, it was decided to increase the wartime composition of the Estonian Defence Forces by almost half, including the addition of 10,000 reservists to territorial defence. In order to train a large number of additional fighters, the Defence Forces and the Defence League organised the largest reservist training in Estonian history, ‘Ussisõnad’, in 2023.

• In addition to developing military defence, preparations have also been made in other areas. With additional funding, the Police and Border Guard Board and the Estonian Rescue Board have increased their crisis reserve. New equipment has been purchased, such as buses for riot control, demining equipment, rescue watercraft, etc. The availability of the emergency number 112 has been improved (for all communication service providers), as has the capacity of the supporting state helpline 1247. To support the Estonian information space and to ensure that important information reaches everyone in Estonia, state support is also provided in Russian.

• All state IT centres have invested in cybersecurity to improve systems architectures, multi-site backups, recovery speed, automation, and collaboration between the state IT centres, including the creation of cyber reserves. CERT-EE provides the public sector with an additional technical layer of protection against denial-of-service attacks, which have multiplied in volume due to Russian aggression in Ukraine. In addition, a public network and back-up facilities are being built alongside private networks at the Data Embassy in Luxembourg. Since 2022, the public sector and providers of critical services are required to implement the Estonian Information Security Standard (E-ITS) or the equivalent ISO/IEC 27001 standard.

The government has approved a crisis preparedness investment plan for extensive national defence and civil protection, which will allow for setting clearer targets for the activities of the different institutions. The plan allocated nearly 80 million euros for the next four years, including for security enhancement, civil protection activities, cybersecurity, etc. In February 2024, the government also approved a framework document with measurable benchmarks to support the development of civil protection for the next ten years and an action plan for four years (both documents can be found at  kriis.ee opens in a new tab).

Crisis preparedness and the responsibilities of the institutions are described in different legislative acts (e.g. Emergency Act, National Defence Act, etc.). In January 2024, the Critical Entities Resilience Directive (CER Directive) of the European Union entered into force, which is to be transposed into Estonian law by October 2024 at the latest with the Emergency Act, which is to be amended. The change will also bring a comprehensive view of the reliability of critical services and their interdependencies into the national risk analysis.