Kaja Kallas
Kaja Kallas was prime minister of Estonia from January 2021 to July 2024, the first woman, the daughter of the prime minister who had brought in the kroon in 1992, and the granddaughter of a woman deported to Siberia as a baby in 1949. She became, when Russia invaded Ukraine thirteen months into her term, the hawk of the European Council, the voice that said the war must be won and not ended, that Russia must be made to lose, that the aid must be measured against the aggressor's economy and not the donors' comfort. Estonia, which gave more of its output to Ukraine than any country, was the measure. Russia put her on its wanted list in February 2024 for the removal of Soviet monuments, the first head of government it had listed. The European Council chose her in June 2024 as the Union's high representative for foreign affairs, the office she has held since December 2024. In it she has argued for the Russian assets to be spent, the sanctions to be kept and the Americans to be held to their guarantees, with less success than in Tallinn. She was born in Tallinn in 1977, studied law at Tartu and worked as a competition lawyer for a decade. She entered the Riigikogu in 2011 for the Reform Party, and sat in the European Parliament from 2014 to 2018. She took the party's leadership in 2018, winning the election of 2019 and being kept from office by a coalition of everyone else until it fell in January 2021. Then she won the election of March 2023 with the party's best result ever, thirty-one per cent. The government at home was the tax rises and spending cuts of 2023-24 that took her approval to the lowest of any prime minister. There was the education reform to Estonian-only schools from 2024, the defence budget to three per cent and the artillery bought. There was the scandal of August 2023, when it emerged that her husband's logistics company had gone on trading with Russia after the invasion, which she said she had not known. The country did not forgive. She handed over to Kristen Michal in July 2024 and went to Brussels. The first year there was the argument with the Trump administration over Ukraine and a reputation among the diplomats for saying what the capitals think and do not say. That is what she was chosen for and what the capitals then complain of.
- Lived: 1977 CE – ?
- Nationality: Estonian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
