The former General is also adamant that Ukraine can destroy Putin’s army if supplied with sufficient offensive weapons. Riho Terras served as the Chief of Estonia’s Defence Forces for seven years between 2011-2018, before swapping a military career for a political one. He is a staunch critic of Putin and has consistently backed up calls from Ukraine’s President for more offensive arms to be sent to Kyiv.
The MEP told Express.co.uk Putin will only be encouraged to embark on further military campaigns against the West if he is successful in Ukraine.
He pointed to Putin’s past foreign adventures to support his claim that the Russian tyrant is only emboldened by his military successes.
Mr Terras explained: “Three months after becoming PM he destroyed Grozny, attacked Georgia, then Crimea and Donbas, eight years later Ukraine.
“He will come back to us, he will. So we need to fight him right now and end this problem of Putin.”
Russia attacked Chechnya for a second time in the autumn of 1999, after it blamed a series of apartment bombings in Russia on Chechen extremists.
Then, in 2008, Putin sent tanks into Georgia after a dispute concerning the breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Finally, in 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea and invaded parts of Ukraine’s Donbas region in the east.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly asked the West to deliver more offensive arms to help his forces counter new attacks by Russian troops in the east.
The Estonian politician fully backed Mr Zelensky’s call for more weapons and argued that, if Kyiv received what it needed, Ukraine could emerge victorious from this war.
He said: “The Ukrainians have shown us they will fight and if they have capable modern weapons they can defend European values in Ukraine without European soldiers being involved directly.
“That only tells me we have to give them weapons as much they ask and these weapons will be air defence, multiple rocket launchers, battle tanks, armoured vehicles and ballistic missiles harpoon type.”
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Only the US has offered more ($4.77 billion), while the UK has provided $0.22 billion in arms transfers.
The Estonian Embassy in Kyiv announced it had delivered “anti-tank missiles, blowouts, anti-tank mines, wireless anti-tank guns, automatic weapons, ammunition, disposable grenades and hand grenades” in a Facebook post earlier in April.
It comes as the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a visit to Kyiv on Sunday to hold talks with President Zelensky.
Mr Austin later told reporters the US wanted to see Russia weakened so that it could never again unleash such a war in the future.
He said: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”