Op-Ed

The news and updates come at a blistering pace. It’s hard to keep up with the volume and impact. But the quality of content? It is frighteningly stupefying. The Trump administration has been hellbent on upending the everyday normal. Steve Bannon’s “flooding the zone” strategy, which The New York Times...

February 20, 2025 The war in Ukraine began with Russia’s unprovoked and catastrophic invasion on the morning of February 24, 2022. The symbolic significance of this date, Estonia’s Independence Day, commemorating liberation and freedom from Russia, is alarmingly clear to Estonian-Americans. Estonians endured almost 50 years of Soviet occupation and...

For second and third-ge-neration Estonians living abroad, maintaining a connection to their linguistic and cultural heritage can be challenging. Recognizing this unique need, a specia-lized Master's degree programme “Estonian and Finno-Ugric Languages” (EFUL) has been launched at the University of Tartu to empower these individuals to rediscover, embrace, and deepen...

2024 was a busy year for advocacy on the U.S.-Baltic front. 2025 will continue to be so. In the U.S. Congress, a sign of success is the fast-growing interest in the Baltic Caucus, as both House and Senate Caucuses increased exponentially. 34 new House members joined in 2023-2024 during the...

A monument commemorating the Great Flight of 80 years ago was unveiled in Pärnu. The statue, funded through donations, was erected under the leadership of the Estonian World Council, which gifted it to the city of Pärnu during a ceremony on September 21st. The sculpture depicts the final touch of...

As the instigator of the Pärnu Monument idea and the dreamer who could not let go of the desire to somehow publicly express  my generation’s “Thank you” to our refugee-suurpõgenemise families, I am so proud of ALL the other dreamers, many friends and the ÜEKN Suurpõgenemise  Commit-tee who joined what...

Twenty years ago on March 29, 2004, Estonia, along with Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This was the biggest single NATO expansion in the history of the alliance founded 75 years ago on April 4, 1949, to provide security against threats...

Amazing, awesome, excellent — were some of the words that viewers of the The Paradox of Seabrook Farms used to describe Helga Merits’ documentary that had a successful sneak preview at the Boston Baltic Film Festival (BBFF) on March 3, and a “world premiere” in South Jersey on March 16,...

In these challenging times, with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine spanning over 1.5 years, the repercussions have reverberated across  Europe, particularly affecting the Baltic States,  Finland, and the United States. By now we have accepted that this war will go on probably for a long  time. The economy is shaken...

The Estonian Society of Los Angeles is proud to present the winning essays of "The Importance of Community" contest for Middle and High School students by Allison Vilms There have been times in my life that I have felt very alone. Times where everything seemed to fall out of place....