Estonia

Estonia, officially the Republic of Estonia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia (343 km), and to the east by Lake Peipus and Russia (338.6 km). Across the Baltic Sea lies Sweden in the west and Finland in the north. The territory of Estonia consists of a mainland and 2,222 islands and islets in the Baltic Sea, covering 45,339 km² (17,505 sq mi) of land, and is influenced by a humid continental climate.

After centuries of successive Teutonic, Danish, and Swedish rule, Estonians experienced a national awakening that culminated in independence from the Russian Empire towards the end of World War I on 24 February 1918. During World War II, Estonia was then occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, then Nazi Germany a year later and again in 1944 establishing the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1988, during the Singing Revolution, the Estonian SSR issued the Estonian Sovereignty Declaration in defiance of the illegal Soviet rule. Estonia then restored its independence during the 1991 coup by the Soviets on the night of 20 August 1991.

Estonia is a democratic parliamentary republic divided into fifteen counties, with its largest city and capital being Tallinn. With a population of 1.3 million, it is one of the least-populous member states of the European Union, Eurozone, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the OECD and the Schengen Area.

Ethnic Estonians are Finnic people, sharing close cultural ties with the Northern neighbour of Finland, and the official language, Estonian, is a Finno-Ugric language closely related to Finnish and the Sami languages, and distantly to Hungarian.

A developed country with an advanced, high-income economy and high living standards, Estonia ranks very high in the Human Development Index, and performs favourably in measurements of economic freedom, civil liberties, education, and press freedom (fourteenth in the world in 2015). Estonia has been among the fastest growing economies in the European Union and is a part of the World Trade Organization and the Nordic Investment Bank. Estonia is often described as one of the most internet-focused countries in Europe.