Kaja Kallas

Kaja Kallas (born June 18, 1977, Tallinn, Estonia) is an Estonian politician, the former prime minister of Estonia (2021–24), and the highest ranking diplomat in the European Union (EU) since 2024. Her international profile rose while she was prime minister, as she called on world leaders in 2022 and 2023 to respond forcefully to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She also committed significant resources from her country to support the Ukrainian war effort. She took up her EU position in the summer of 2024.

Background and early life

Kaja Kallas’s great-grandfather served as Estonia’s first chief of police when the country became independent from the Russian Empire after World War I. In 1940 Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union, and in 1949 Kallas’s mother (who was six months old at the time), grandmother, and great-grandmother were deported to Siberia by the Soviet authorities. The family was allowed to return to their home country during the post-Stalin “Thaw” period, when a limited liberalization occurred.

By the time Kaja Kallas was born, her father, Siim Kallas, had become a rising figure in the Soviet Communist Party. In 1988 a new movement to restore Estonian independence started gaining traction. After the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, Siim Kallas, who had emerged as a reformist during the later years of Soviet rule, became the governor of the country’s central bank. He founded the center-right Reform Party in 1994 and was the party’s leader for a decade. He served as Estonia’s prime minister in 2002–03 and as the European Commissioner for Transport from 2010 to 2014.

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Career in politics

Kallas graduated from the University of Tartu in 1999 with a degree in law and became a partner at a Tallinn law firm. In 2011 she left her job for a seat in the Estonian parliament, and in 2014 she was elected to the European Parliament, representing the Reform Party as part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. She returned to Tallinn in 2018 to become leader of the Reform Party. In 2021 she became Estonia’s first female prime minister.

Her tenure was shaped by two events: the global energy crisis that began in 2021 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Energy prices around the world shot up in 2021, thanks in part to increased demand following the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, Kallas had pledged not to spend any additional public money to prop up the country’s fossil fuel industry. But the energy crisis was compounded by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, and the government reverted to using shale oil to produce electricity instead of importing Russian gas and power. Her administration also brokered a deal with the Lithuanian government in which both countries agreed to decouple from the Russian power grid in early 2025.

Russia’s actions in Ukraine molded Kallas’s tenure in other ways as well. In 2021, as Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin started amassing troops on Ukraine’s borders, Kallas was quick to act, sending weapons to Kyiv as early as December of that year. “Our neighbours’ problems today are our problems tomorrow,” she told the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee in November 2024. At the same time, she called Ukraine’s victory “our priority.”

Once the invasion occurred, Estonia ramped up its material support for Ukraine. By February 2026 the country had transferred aid equivalent to 3.05 percent of its gross domestic product to Ukraine, second only to Denmark’s contribution of 3.27 percent. Kallas has also repeatedly called for other countries to increase their support for both Ukraine and Estonia and has asked for American soldiers to be stationed in her country.

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Kallas’s criticisms of Russia drew significant international press attention, and her global profile rose rapidly. At the same time, her support in Estonia plunged. Estonian Public Broadcasting, also called ERR News, revealed in August 2023 that Kallas’s husband, Arvo Hallik, had a 25-percent stake in a logistics company that was supplying an aerosol container factory in Russia. Two major Estonian newspapers called on Kallas to resign, and two opinion polls that month showed that a majority of residents agreed with the demand. She was reelected as her party’s chair in November, but by January 2024 her approval rating had fallen to 16 percent.

In late 2023 Kallas was also being considered for major international positions. In the same month that she was reelected party chair, she started to be regarded as a serious candidate to become the next NATO secretary general, and she told Politico that she was interested in the job. But in June 2024, she was instead in the running for the position of high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy, the EU’s most powerful foreign policy role. By this time she was also wanted by the Russian government on a charge of “desecration of historical memory,” because of her decision to remove statues of Soviet soldiers from Estonia’s public places. In July 2024 she resigned from her post in Estonia to take the EU position. Her term as high representative has been marked by continued strong support for Ukraine, including through criticism of China for its role in backing Russia in the conflict.