Culturally? Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are culturally distinct from Russia, i.e. non-slavic. E.g. they all have their own archaic languages and so on.

One can look at the populations in circa 1300 and extrapolate from that. Without going into details - the baltic coast had it's own catholic/pagan populations with trade ties to hanseatic cities, and those populations are the basis for current nation states.

Russia, with it's slavic culture strongly tied to the greek orthodox church was a bit further to east.

See for example

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_changes_of_Russi...

and other wikipedia pages on the baltic states.

None of this have much to do with the current tech scene, though :)