Meet the European prime minister who Putin wants locked up

London: Russia has sought criminal charges for the first time against a foreign leader after her government’s push to destroy Soviet-era war memorials following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s centre-right prime minister, was listed a “wanted” person on Tuesday on the Russian interior ministry’s database of suspects, independent news site Mediazona reported.

Moscow has placed senior Ukrainian officials and generals on its wanted list since the start of the war, but Kallas is the first head of government to be publicly sought by the Kremlin.

meet the european prime minister who putin wants locked up

Russia has put Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas on a wanted list, an official register showed.

Dubbed Europe’s Iron Lady, Kallas – who has put herself forward as a candidate to become the next head of NATO – is a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. She was named alongside other Baltic politicians critical of the Kremlin and its war, including Lithuania’s culture minister Simonas Kairys, and dozens of MPs in Latvia.

Moscow did not say what Kallas had been charged with, but the move comes after Estonia and other NATO members – Latvia and Lithuania – sought to remove the monuments widely seen as a legacy of Soviet occupation of the countries.,

meet the european prime minister who putin wants locked up

Workers removing a Soviet T-34 tank installed as a monument in Narva, Estonia, in August 2022.

A senior Russian law enforcement official last year ordered investigations of Estonia’s plan to remove a monument involving a Soviet tank in the eastern city of Navra, denouncing it as a desecration of memory of Soviet soldiers who fell while fighting the Nazis.

“These people are responsible for decisions to essentially mock historical memory. And these people take hostile actions against historical memory and our country,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday.

The Russian foreign ministry also implied the charges against the Baltic politicians were tied to the push to remove Soviet monuments, with spokeswoman Maria Zakharova saying they “must answer for their crimes against the memory of those who liberated the world from Nazism and fascism”.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, the country’s top criminal investigation agency, has a dedicated department to deal with alleged “falsification of history” and “rehabilitation of Nazism,” and has ramped up its action since the start of the war.

Kallas said on Tuesday that Russia’s move was “nothing surprising” and “yet more proof that I am doing the right thing”.

“The EU’s strong support to Ukraine is a success, and it hurts Russia,” she wrote on social media.

“Throughout history, Russia has veiled its repressions behind so-called law enforcement agencies. I know this from my family history. When my grandmother and mother were deported to Siberia, the KGB issued the arrest warrant.”

Kallas, whose personal popularity has been dented at home after it was revealed that a company part-owned by her husband continued doing business in Moscow in the past two years, warned in January that the Baltic state, which shares a 294-kilometre border with Russia, must be ready for a conflict with its neighbour, saying that Europe had “three to five years” to prepare.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, 4000 Estonian volunteers have joined the Estonian Defence League, an organisation created in 1918 when the small Baltic state was born.

Banned in 1940, it was resurrected in 1991, when Estonia, which now has a population of 1.3 million, regained its independence after more than five decades of Soviet occupation. Of the league’s 30,000 members – all of them civilians – a third belongs to the country’s territorial defence, whose reason for being is to counter a possible Russian offensive.

Russia’s charges against Kallas are among 700 cases against foreigners, which have clear political motivations, Mediazona reported.

Four Polish citizens are also on the list, including Piotr Hofmański, president of the International Criminal Court.

Last year, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin in connection with his alleged role in the deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia, which would constitute a war crime.

In 2007, Estonia suffered extensive cyberattacks on public and private websites after it removed a Red Army monument from its capital, Tallinn. The action, combined with riots by ethnic Russians, is considered one of the first acts of cyberwar in history.

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