Last May, the web sites of a number of high-ranking Estonian politicians and businesses were attacked over a period of several weeks. At the time, relations between Russia and Estonia were chillier than usual, due in part to the Estonian government's plans to move a World War II-era memorial known as the Bronze Soldier (pictured below at its original location) away from the center of the city and into a cemetery. The country's plan was controversial, and led to protests that were often led by the country's ethnic Russian minority. When the cyberattacks occurred, Estonia claimed that Russia was either directly or indirectly involved—an allegation that the Russian government denied. Almost a year later, the Russian government appears to have been telling the truth about its involvement (or lack thereof) in the attacks against Estonia. As InfoWorld reports, an Estonian youth has been arrested for the attacks, and current evidence suggests he was acting independently—prosecutors in Estonia have stated they have no other suspects. Because the attacks were botnet-driven and launched from servers all over the globe, however, it's impossible to state definitively that only a single individual was involved.
Dmitri Galushkevich, a 20-year-old Estonian student, launched the DoS (denial-of-service) attacks from his own PC last year. Although he's a native Estonian, Galushkevich was angry over his government's plans to move the statue, and launched the attack as a means of protesting the decision. The fact that a single angry student was able to impact international relations between two countries is an startling development. Understanding why Estonia and Russia got into a tiff about a war memorial statue in the first place, however, requires that we take a trip down history lane.
American history tends to focus its coverage of World War II on the theaters of combat we participated in. This makes logical sense—but it leaves the story of the eastern front largely untold, and doesn't begin to explain why the Russians would be upset over Estonia's movement of a statue nearly 63 years after the war's end—or why the Estonians would want to move it in the first place.
The Soviet Union occupied Estonia in 1940 as part of the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Once it held the country (Russia, to this day, insists the USSR was invited into Estonia and did not "occupy" it), extraordinary elections were held with the ballots restricted to pro-Communist choices. The country became a member of the USSR in August 1940—and was promptly invaded and occupied by the Germans in 1941 when that country opened the Eastern Front of the war.
Germany's eastern front with the USSR was both the longest and the deadliest in worldwide military history. Contemporary estimates on how many Soviet soldiers and civilians died can vary widely, but the median figures suggest that the Red Army lost approximately 10 million men, with an additional 20 million civilian casualties. Soviet casualties and losses dwarfed those of any other nation, and the conflict left an indelible imprint on Russian society.
The war memorials built in Soviet-occupied territories after the war ended weren't just monuments to the millions of soldiers and civilians killed in the conflict—they were Soviet ideological bulwarks and physical representations of what the Great Patriotic War had cost the motherland.
The majority of Estonians, however, have a different view. To them, the Bronze Soldier was a symbol of 50 years of Soviet and communist oppression—many Estonians, in fact, voluntarily enlisted and fought with the Germans in 1944 once it became apparent that the Soviets were about to reoccupy the country. Combine the two viewpoints with a significant minority of ethnic Russians who still identify with the memorial as a reminder of Soviet sacrifice, and you've got a pile of tinder just waiting for a spark.
The fact that a single student was able to trigger such events is particularly ominous when you consider just how many potential flashpoints exist between various countries all over the world. The DoS attack against Estonia is an excellent example of how a cyberattack carried out by a 20-year-old student in response to real-life events further exacerbated an existing problem between two nations.