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Nonsense-free analysis for fans of a rules-based world of sovereign nations.

Nonsense-free analysis for fans of a rules-based world of sovereign nations.

TL;DR: Born out of Bad Baltic Takes on Twitter, Bad Baltic offers investigative, no nonsense journalism with a distinctly Baltic outlook from a growing team of contributors across the Baltic countries, passionate about defending a rules-based world of sovereign states for everyone. We're in beta mode so bear with us - and send us feedback!

Rewind.

Our work began in 2022, prompted by a single tweet.

Russia had just launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, in the leafy London suburb of Islington, an influential commentator put down his flat white (we presume), opened his phone and confidently typed out how all this could have been avoided...

"...if only we had created a buffer zone between the West and Russia after the end of the Cold War." Send tweet.

Yikes. As people who happen to live just to the West of Russia ourselves, we thought we should point out that sacrificing our sovereignty has historically not proven to be such a great idea.

Not for us, obviously. But also not for anyone else either. It led to a whole world war last time, which even affected people in Islington.

Rather than returning one more time to the age of empires, the best solution from our perspective is to keep building an even better rules-based world of sovereign nations and include even more people in it.

And maybe we shouldn't just leave the job of defending that to boring policy wonks.

Bad Baltic Takes was born.

So we created Bad Baltic Takes, first as a Twitter account, to help share more perspectives from our region.

We'd simply screenshot bad takes like that then add a bit of history, a Baltic perspective, and occasionally a few jokes or memes.

Part of the reason for why there are so many bad Baltic takes is that some of the worst people in the world find it very irritating that the Baltic countries continue to exist as small, successful Republics with some of the highest levels of freedom in the world.

That includes vatniks, unreformed imperialists, and various ideological obsessives, as well as our ultimate archnemesis: "Realist" scholars clinging to the hope that a prediction by John Mearsheimer might one day come true, and "Russia experts" who spent a little too long schmoozing at the Valdai Club and are keen to share their analysis of a war they previously insisted would absolutely never happen.

Bad Baltic Takes has wonderful followers across the Baltic countries and the wider region, especially in Ukraine, including plenty of great NAFO fellas, and also a lot of international journalists and policymakers - on whom we like to think we make a positive impact.

For one thing, AP updated their style guide to say they'd no longer call us ex-Soviet states.

Our original content posted to Twitter has generated heaps of media coverage, and we were once even praised by the Washington Post for authenticity in covering the region, which is all a bit odd for what was little more than a snarky Twitter account.

After a few years offline, we've returned to X, and are now also on Threads, BlueSky, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Hopefully that's enough social media channels for now. We just hope to God you don't want us on TikTok any time soon.

But, then we though, what if we created our own media outlet?

Welcome to Bad Baltic.

This site is the work of a growing team of contributors across the Baltic countries.

We'll keeping running our Bad Baltic Takes accounts on social media, but have built this site to expand our longer form content, break out of the format of only responding to bad takes, and make it all easier to find.

Good journalism has to be considered bad by some people, otherwise it's just marketing. BAD also describes our particular style of satirical journalism: Bold, Accurate, and Distinct.

Well, that's something we just made up retrospectively to keep the name similar but it seems to work?

In addition to the whole rules-based-world-of-sovereign-states thing, we also strongly believe in a world where it's ok to laugh at absurdities. No sane washing here.

Our somewhat snarky style is inspired by great satirical journalism, such as Private Eye in the UK and Charlie Hebdo in France, but we want to create our own version that is distinctly Baltic in its outlook. We believe too much of the news these days is overly sane-washed, so our style is to focus on the most absurd parts of a story because that is most newsworthy, while using satire to highlight flawed logic behind stories others want us to accept.

Fortunately we have no investors and no business model. So we don't follow any strategy, we're not aligned with any political party, we don't care about readership metrics, and nor use any of the best practices espoused by social media marketing gurus who think everyone has short attention spans and can only handle reading short, polished AI slop.

So we can just get on with writing as much as we want, whenever we want, in our own style from a distinctly Baltic perspective, in support of our Republics and a rules-based world.

And a world in which it's ok to acknowledge that "poor waif in his underwear" is an objectively hilarious thing for a US official to have said and we must be able to both laugh at things like that more and also bring accountability for the people who amplify that kind of nonsense.

So please do go follow us on whichever platform you like to hang out and share us when you see something you like.

Finally, a word from our friends:

Edward Lucas, former Senior Editor at the Economist and founder of the Baltic International Security Centre:

“Bad Baltic skewers the lazy prejudices of the foreign commentariat and serves them up sizzling.”

President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia 2006-2016:

“Bad Baltic Takes brings a healthy dose of reality to media coverage of the Baltics, too often shaped by stereotypes and misinformation.”

Dr Artis Pabriks, Latvia’s former Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Defence Minister, and Chairman of the Northern Europe Policy Centre:

“Europe benefits from hearing more perspectives from our region, and Bad Baltic Takes does a great job strengthening that by cutting through a lot of the nonsense.”

Gabrielius Landsbergis, Foreign Minister of Lithuania 2020-2024:

"Bad Baltic Takes provides readers with the full context needed to debunk pervasive myths and expose canards that reoccur in analysis of the Baltics, a region of ever-increasing significance in geopolitics."

Eerik-Niiles Kross, Head of Estonian Intelligence 1995-2000, National Security Advisor and MP:

"Bad Baltic Takes has grown from a fun Twitter account into insightful and original reporting that makes a great contribution to helping more people around the world understand the reality of our region."