A few days ago, I crossed one of Europe’s strangest borders – the Saatse Boot, a narrow slice of Russian territory that intrudes into southeastern Estonia.
Vehicles may pass through the Boot along a 1 kilometre stretch of road without a visa, provided they do not stop. Even if a car breaks down, passengers must remain inside and contact the Estonian border guards for assistance, since stepping outside would constitute an illegal entry into Russia.
Just hours after my crossing, conducted as part of a field excursion with the Eur-Asian Border Lab, Estonian police and border authorities closed the passage following reports of an unusually large Russian troop presence in the vicinity.
The Saatse Boot links the Estonian villages of Sesniki and Lutepää, allowing traffic to pass directly between them rather than detouring nearly 20 kilometres around Russian territory. Its peculiar shape dates to 1944, when Soviet authorities redrew the internal boundary between the Estonian and Russian Soviet republics after the Red Army’s advance through the Baltics. As a result, several border areas of historical Petseri County, including the village of Saatse, were transferred to the Soviet Russian republic. The new line was merely an administrative demarcation within the USSR and carried little political significance at the time.
When Estonia regained independence in 1991, the former administrative line between the Soviet republics became a hard international border, later reinforced politically and institutionally through Estonia’s accession to the European Union and NATO. While operating as an international border, it technically remains a “demarcation line” rather than a fully ratified boundary, since the bilateral border treaty between Estonia and Russia has not entered into force.
Under a 2005 agreement, the two countries planned a limited land exchange that would have transferred the Saatse Boot to Estonia in return for two small parcels of territory elsewhere along the border. Moscow later withdrew its signature from that treaty, objecting to the preamble’s reference to the 1920 Treaty of Tartu, which for Estonia affirms the legal continuity of its pre-war republic but for Russia implies recognition of the Soviet occupation and potential territorial claims.
A revised treaty was signed in 2014 after the removal of that reference, but Russia never ratified it. In public statements, Moscow has claimed that bilateral tensions and an “unsuitable atmosphere” created by Estonia made ratification impossible amid the fallout from Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Estonia completed its own ratification process in 2015, but without Russia’s ratification, the treaty remains in limbo. Abandoning plans for a land swap, Estonian officials have since announced that a bypass road will be constructed to replace the Boot route.
In Setomaa, the rural region where the passage lies, the Seto borderland community straddles both sides of the frontier, maintaining Orthodox faith, language, and kinship ties that predate modern states. Since the tightening of border controls, many Seto on the Estonian side have found it increasingly difficult to visit family members, churches, and cemeteries now located in Russia. Such restrictions make the border’s presence felt in daily life. The closure of the Saatse Boot interrupts local transit routes within Estonia, revealing how the efficiency of everyday movement remains tied to the uncertainties of geopolitics.
The post-Cold War expectation of growing openness has yielded to a wave of investment in fences, sensors, and patrol infrastructure intended to reinforce border security.
Along NATO’s borders, Russia has adopted a pattern of calibrated military provocation, using proximity and limited disruption to exert psychological and strategic pressure. Drone incursions, airspace violations, and troop movements signal presence without escalation. The temporary closure of the Saatse Boot illustrates how even limited or ambiguous military activity prompts immediate precautionary measures, reflecting the persistent tension along the eastern borderlands. The month before the Saatse Boot closure, three Russian aircraft entered into Estonian airspace for 12 minutes, and similar drone incidents occurred over Poland. Such activity exemplifies the hybrid tactics that now defines Europe’s security environment.
These events reveal a broader form of infrastructural geopolitics in which ordinary transport links and border facilities acquire strategic meaning under the shadow of military threat. The pattern has become entrenched across Europe’s north-eastern borders, from the Baltic states to Finland and eastern Poland. The post-Cold War expectation of growing openness has yielded to a wave of investment in fences, sensors, and patrol infrastructure intended to reinforce border security. These installations mark the physical return of borders to the European landscape and the remilitarisation of its periphery. In 2025, Finland, Poland, and the three Baltic states announced their withdrawal from the Ottawa Convention banning anti-personnel landmines – an extraordinary reversal that reflects the broader normalisation of hardened defence policies along Europe’s northern and eastern edges.
In Setomaa, the collateral effects of this border reinforcement extend beyond disrupted mobility for the Seto community to the natural environment, as the new fences rarely include passages for wildlife. Along the Russia-Estonia border, brown bears, wolves, lynx and elk have been prevented from crossing their migration routes or injured by the barriers, revealing how geopolitical division can fragment habitats and reshape the ecology of borderlands.
The Saatse Boot encapsulates this border condition in miniature. More than a strange feature on the map, it reveals how even the smallest fragments of the past continue to shape the geopolitics of the present.
