NATO Member Estonia’s PM Placed on Russia’s Wanted List

By Hamodia Staff

Estonia’s prime minister has been put on a wanted list in Russia because of her efforts to remove Soviet-era World War II monuments in the Baltic nation, officials said Tuesday, as tensions between Russia and the West soar amid the war in Ukraine.

The name of Prime Minister Kaja Kallas appeared on the Russian Interior Ministry’s list of people wanted on unspecified criminal charges. While independent Russian news outlet Mediazona first reported Tuesday that Kallas was on the list, it said she has been on it for months. The list includes scores of officials and lawmakers from other Baltic nations.

Kallas dismissed it as Moscow’s “familiar scare tactic.”

“Russia may believe that issuing a fictitious arrest warrant will silence Estonia,” she said. “I refuse to be silenced -– I will continue to vocally support Ukraine and advocate for the strengthening of European defenses.”

Estonia and fellow NATO members Latvia and Lithuania have pulled down monuments that are widely seen as an unwanted legacy of the Soviet occupation of those countries.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago, numerous monuments to Red Army soldiers also have been taken down in Poland and the Czech Republic, a belated purge of what many see as symbols of past oppression.

Moscow has denounced those moves as desecrating the memory of Soviet soldiers who fell while fighting Nazi Germany.

The inclusion of Kallas — who has fiercely advocated for increased military assistance to Ukraine and stronger sanctions against Russia — appears to reflect the Kremlin’s effort to raise the stakes in the face of NATO and European Union pressure over the war.

“Estonia and I remain steadfast in our policy: supporting Ukraine, bolstering European defense, and fighting against Russian propaganda,” Kallas said, pointing to her family’s history of facing Soviet repression. “This hits close to home for me: My grandmother and mother were once deported to Siberia, and it was the KGB who issued the fabricated arrest warrants.”

It’s the first time the Russian Interior Ministry has put a foreign leader on a wanted list. Estonian Secretary of State Taimar Peterkop and Lithuanian Culture Minister Simonas Kairys also are on the list, which is accessible to the public, along with scores of officials and lawmakers from Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was a response to action by Kallas and others who “have taken hostile action toward historic memory and our country.”

Russia has laws criminalizing the “rehabilitation of Nazism” that include punishing the desecration of war memorials. Russia’s Investigative Committee, the country’s top criminal investigation agency, has a department dealing with alleged “falsification of history” and “rehabilitation of Nazism,” which has ramped up its action since the start of the war, according to Mediazona, which broke the news on Kallas’ addition to the wanted list.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that ridding Ukraine of far-right, neo-Nazi groups is one of the central aims of the war, but he has offered no proof to back his repeated claims that such groups have a decisive voice in shaping Ukraine’s policies.

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Meta spokesperson Andy Stone are on the list too. Meta is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which are banned in Russia.

While it means little in practical terms since contacts between Moscow and the West have been frozen during the conflict, it comes at a time when European members of NATO are growing increasingly worried about how the U.S. election will affect the alliance.

There also are scores of Belarusian nationals on Russia’s wanted list, including opposition figures, rights advocates and journalists who are being sought by authorities in Minsk. Leanid Sudalenka of Viasna, Belarus’ oldest and most prominent human rights group, told the Associated Press that Russian and Belarusian databases have been synchronized as part of the close relationship between the two nations.

Sudalenka, who fled to Lithuania last year after serving three years in a Belarusian prison and is on the list himself because of new charges, called it “an ugly conflation of two dictatorships that joined forces in prosecuting active people who protest against those dictatorships and the war.”

With reporting from wire services.