The Russian Police declared this Tuesday that the Prime Minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas, was wanted and captured in its territory. He also included two ministers from the Baltic republics on the same list: Taimar Peterkop, Secretary of State of Estonia; and Simonas Kairys, Minister of Culture of Lithuania.
The information comes from a database of the Russian Ministry of the Interior. This says that they are wanted “for an article of the penal code”, but does not specify the article that justifies the issuance of the order against an active senior official of a foreign country.
However, the state agency Tass cites a source who claims that they are accused of “destroying monuments from the Soviet era.” Later, Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov declared that Kallas is wanted for “desecration of historical memory.” At a press conference, he accused the Baltic countries of “hostile actions against the historical memory” of Russia.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said “this is just the beginning.” On her Telegram channel, she commented: “Crimes against the memory of those who liberated the world from Nazism and fascism must be prosecuted!”
Baltic politicians will risk arrest if they cross the Russian border. If not, the search and seizure declaration will have no real consequences.
In the summer of 2022, Kaja Kallas announced that in Estonia, a country that achieved independence in 1991 while the USSR was disintegrating, between 200 and 400 Soviet monuments were going to be removed “from public space.”
After that, the director of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrikin, ordered the opening of a criminal investigation into this matter.
Kallas, 46, has been in favor within the European Union and NATO of the supply of weapons to Ukraine and greater sanctions against Russia.
After Russia entered Ukraine with its Army, which Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered on February 24, 2022 and called a “special military operation”, several countries of the former USSR began to remove Soviet-era monuments from the Public spaces.
Estonia dismantled a monument to the T-34 tank in the city of Narva, bordering Russia, in August 2022 and moved it to the Estonian War Museum in Viimsi.
The monument was erected in 1970 on the left bank of the Narva River to mark the place where Soviet troops crossed the river to draw German troops away from the city.
Also in August 2022, Latvia demolished in Riga, its capital, the statues and obelisk of the Monument to the Soldiers-Liberators, which was erected in 1985 to commemorate the anniversary of the Soviet reconquest of Riga in 1944, during World War II.
In Lithuania, a monument to Soviet soldiers at the Antakalnis cemetery in the capital Vilnius was removed in December 2022.
Moscow has criticized these actions. The Russian Foreign Ministry said the Baltic countries should be brought to justice for destroying the monuments and accused them of discriminating against their Russian-speaking population.
Putin, for his part, in January described this practice as a “formidable ignorance” that would have consequences. “They destroy monuments to the heroes of the Great Patriotic War, and only Russian, Soviet monuments. Pushkin’s monuments have already begun to be demolished. This, of course, is from formidable ignorance and not understanding where they live, what they are doing and what consequences it will have,” said the head of the Kremlin in a meeting with students from the Immanuel Kant State University in Kaliningrad.
