Ambassador
Jaap Ora
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Estonia to the Republic of Kazakhstan, Republic of Kyrgyzstan, Republic of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Republic of Uzbekistan
Jaap Ora joined the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2000. Until 2002 he served as the Second Secretary and Director of Division at the Policy Planning Department. From 2002-2005 he was Political Officer at the Estonian embassy in London, before returning to the Policy Planning Department, where from 2005-2007 he served as Director of Division and Acting Director General. From 2007-2011, he was responsible for relations with countries in Western Europe and North America, as Director of Division at the Political Department. From 2011-2014 he served as Political Counsellor at the Representation of the Republic of Estonia to NATO, and from 2014-2015 he was Estonia’s first diplomatic representative in Baku in Azerbaijan. Since 2015 he worked for the European External Action Service, initially at the Delegation of the European Union to the Kyrgyz Republic, as Deputy Head of Delegation (2015-2017), and Chargé d’Affaires (2017-2018). Thereafter he joined the service’s Security and Defence Policy Division in Brussels, where he was responsible for security and defence cooperation with countries in Asia from 2018-2020. Most recently he has served as the Deputy Head of the Delegation of the European Union to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom of Bahrain and the Sultanate of Oman (2020-2024).
Jaap Ora has given guest lectures at the University of Tartu and published articles on foreign policy in daily newspapers, the yearbooks of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the magazine Diplomaatia.
Jaap Ora has a Master’s degree (M.Phil) in international relations from the University of Cambridge (1997) and a Bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Tartu (1994). More recently, he has earned a Master’s degree (MAS) in European and international security from the University of Geneva and the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (2009).
In addition to his native Estonian, Jaap Ora speaks English, Russian, French and Swedish, plus conversational German and Arabic.
Jaap Ora’s interests are music, art and sport, particularly cycling and skiing. He is married to Signe Ora, with whom he has one daughter.