By Filipp Lebedev and Andrius Sytas
MOSCOW/VILNIUS (Reuters) -Russian police have put Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, Lithuania’s culture minister and members of the previous Latvian parliament on the wanted list, according to the Russian Interior Ministry’s database.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Kallas was wanted for “desecration of historical memory”.
Russian state agency TASS said the Baltic officials were accused of “destroying monuments to Soviet soldiers”, which is punishable by a 5-year prison term under the Russian criminal code.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in nearly two years ago, the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have demolished most of their Soviet-era monuments, including those commemorating Soviet solders killed in World War Two.
In response, the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, ordered a criminal investigation into the matter.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: “This is only the beginning.”
“Crimes against the memory of the world’s liberators from Nazism and fascism must be prosecuted,” she added.
The Baltic politicians risk being placed under arrest only if they cross the Russian border, otherwise declaring them as “wanted” is unlikely have any practical consequence.
As well as Kallas, Estonian State Secretary Taimar Peterkop, Lithuanian Culture Minister Simonas Kairys and about 60 of the 100 members of the previous Latvian parliament, which ended its term in November 2022, were put on the list, according to the ministry database.
A spokesperson for Kallas was not immediately available for comment.
Kairys told Reuters the arrest order “means I acted actively and in a principled way”.
The Baltic states were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, then occupied by Nazi Germany before returning to Moscow’s rule as part of the Soviet Communist bloc until they regained independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
All three are members of the European Union and NATO, and their relations with Moscow have worsened sharply since the start of the war.
Several dozen other Baltic politicians were also added to the Russian list, including mayors, municipal deputies, and the former Latvian Interior Minister Marija Golubeva.
The Interior Ministry database does not specify under which article of the criminal code the wanted are prosecuted.
Kallas said in 2022 that Estonian authorities would dismantle 200 to 400 such monuments. A Soviet tank commemorating near Russian-speaking Narva town was removed in August.
In Latvia, an 84-metre structure, built to commemorate the Soviet victory in World War Two, was crushed with a bulldozer.
Tens of thousands of Russian speakers in Latvia used to gather every May 9 around the monument, but their gatherings were banned after Russia’s invasion.
Lithuania removed dozens of memorials to Soviet troops in 2022, including the large group of sculptures in a Vilnius cemetery.
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov in Moscow, Filipp Lebedev in Tbilisi and Andrius Sytas in Vilnius; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Angus MacSwan and Alison Williams)
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