Estonian Minister of the Interior Hanno Pevkur announced in ETV on September 30, that the government plans to establish a new border control task force to carry out special operations.
“Today we have a clear understanding that in addition to regular border control, we will establish a special task force,” said Pevkur, who added that the force will carry out special risk-assessment based operations.
Pevkur said the first location established for the task force will be in Piusa, which is in southeast Estonia near Võru. Narva, the third-largest city in Estonia on the northeastern border of Russia will be the second. There might be a third station put in Tallinn, he said.
According to Pevkur, the new units will be established in 2015 and this has already been agreed with the Police and Border Guard Board.
“One unit will be based in Piusa guard station, which will be rebuilt next year, and the other in Narva, so in the two most critical areas,” Pevkur said.
“They will react to border incidents and undertake special missions based on risk assessment,” said the minister, who promised that the task force will be supplied with the best possible equipment.
Pevkur did not say how much the new task force will cost to the taxpayers, as such information is not public. “I cannot say how many employees there will be. Let’s just say that it costs a lot.”
The former Minister of Defense and IRL party member Jaak Aaviksoo said during the TV program that some kind of rapid response capacity and special training is indeed needed after taking into account the changed security situation in Eastern Europe. At the same time, there is no point in overreacting.
“We have an incident in the public eye … but whether we have one, two, three or four pairs of boots per kilometer of the border makes little difference to defense. This is not something we should go through with, taking into account that these people will be taken from somewhere else,” Aaviksoo said.
VES/news.err.ee
