On a grey afternoon in April, in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, Berit Osula, a blonde woman in her 40s with pink lipstick and long, mascara-painted lashes, presented her fingers to the manicurist. “The gun oil is terrible for my nail polish,” she joked. Osula is the mother of two and, like 30,000 other Estonians, a volunteer in her country’s defence league. (Volunteer soldiers vastly outnumber Estonia’s professional army of a little over 7,000.) She had watched Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in tears and was shocked by the massacres carried out by the occupying forces. She thought: what if it happened here? “I wanted to protect my family and myself,” she told me. “I didn’t want to sit at home afraid and
asking for help.”
Osula is now a corporal, one of six women among the 200 volunteers of Alpha company. She specialises in mortars. Defence-league volunteers are required to train for a minimum of 48 hours a year – Osula signs up for every exercise she can. Her husband, Otto, and her children wish she was around more, but they understand her devotion. Osula pointed out a bruise through the ripped knee of her trendy jeans. “Last weekend I was carrying the machinegun and it was raining and muddy. It wasn’t easy, running long distances. The machinegun weighs about 12kg, and we’re already wearing armour and packs which are another 20kg.”
Over the past two years, Osula has done things she thought were beyond her. She was proud to tell me she came first in her machinegun course. She was scheduled to participate in an exercise with the regular army the day after we talked. The forecast said that rain was likely and she was thinking about what to pack. The manicurist applied pale-pink gels and Osula held out her fingers to admire the finish: shiny, tough, unscratchable. | | |
