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Support BAD BALTIC

Support BAD BALTIC

First, a few words from our friends:

President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia 2006-2016:

“Bad Baltic Takes brings a healthy dose of reality to media coverage of the Baltics, too often shaped by stereotypes and misinformation.”

Dr Artis Pabriks, Latvia’s former Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Defence Minister, and Chairman of the Northern Europe Policy Centre:

“Europe benefits from hearing more perspectives from our region, and Bad Baltic Takes does a great job strengthening that by cutting through a lot of the nonsense.”

Gabrielius Landsbergis, Foreign Minister of Lithuania 2020-2024:

"Bad Baltic Takes provides readers with the full context needed to debunk pervasive myths and expose canards that reoccur in analysis of the Baltics, a region of ever-increasing significance in geopolitics."

Eerik-Niiles Kross, Head of Estonian Intelligence 1995-2000, National Security Advisor and MP:

"Bad Baltic Takes has grown from a fun Twitter account into insightful and original reporting that makes a great contribution to helping more people around the world understand the reality of our region."

Bad Baltic Takes

It began with a dumb tweet back in 2022.

In the aftermath of Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, an influential commentator in the UK suggested that the world would be a better place if only Eastern Europe had been made into a buffer zone between Russia and the West at the end of the Cold War.

Bad Baltic Takes was born in response as an Twitter account that would screenshot bad takes like that and provide a bit of additional context from the perspective of the people they are talking about (and trying to sacrifice).

"No, thanks," we told him. Sacrificing other people's security for your own has consistently proven to be the very worst idea in human history. A bit on the nose to try it again in Eastern Europe too.

Our Twitter account kept growing as more people asked us to address more bad takes. The Baltic countries happen to attract a lot of them.

As small independent nation states, surviving and thriving after century of attempts at erasure, our continued existence irritates some of the worst people in the world.

That includes unreformed imperialists, various ideological obsessives, "realist" scholars desperate for any of their predictions to come true, and "Russia experts" who have spent a little too long schmoozing at the Valdai Club.

We discovered that their bad takes can be a good opportunity to talk beyond them and celebrate the wonderful reality of our countries, while also advocating for a world built on freedom and sovereignty for all nations.

We now have an active community of followers across the Baltic countries and the wider region, and also a lot of international journalists and policymakers following us.

Our original content has generated heaps of media coverage and been praised by the Washington Post for its authenticity. We like to think we've made a positive contribution to how the media talks about the Baltic countries, most notably with AP updating their style guide to clarify that 'former Soviet state' should no longer be the default descriptive label.

BAD BALTIC

After a few years offline, we're back and we launched this website to both expand our content and ensure it is easier to find.

Kui juba, siis juba, as the Estonians say. If we're gonna do something, let's really do it.

Bad Baltic Takes is still on X, and now also Threads, BlueSky, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Hopefully that's enough for now. We just hope to God you don't want us on TikTok any time soon.

We decided to call our site BAD BALTIC so we can go beyond the format slightly and not only respond to bad takes but help advocate for a better rules-based world of sovereign nation states.

We'll cover history, policy, culture, and more with original reporting, interviews, and satirical commentary from a growing team across all three countries.

Fortunately we have no investors and no business model. So we don't follow any strategy, we're not aligned with any political party, we don't care about readership metrics, and nor use any of the best practices espoused by social media marketing gurus who think everyone has short attention spans and can only handle reading short, polished AI slop.

We write as much as we want, whenever we want, in our own style from a distinctly Baltic perspective, in support of that better rules-based world of soverign nation states.

And a world in which it's ok to acknowledge that "poor waif in his underwear" is an objectively hilarious thing for a US official to have said and we need some accountability for the people who amplify that kind of nonsense.

So please do go follow us on whichever platform you like to hang out and share us when you see something you like.