Copenhagen, Denmark –
Estonia’s government said on Tuesday it had decided to remove a Soviet-era monument from public space in an eastern border town in the Russian-speaking part of the Baltic country, with the prime minister saying the reason for the removal is that it poses a risk. for the public. organize.
“No one wants to see our militant and hostile neighbor fomenting tensions in our home,” Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said, adding that the move came after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We will not give Russia the opportunity to use the past to disturb the peace in Estonia.”
Kallas said they did not want to give Russia a chance to “open old wounds”.
Outside Narva, Estonia’s third largest city with a large Russian-speaking population, a replica of a T-34 tank with a red Soviet star stands atop a monument commemorating Soviet soldiers who died liberating Estonia from the Nazi Germany during World War II.
The Soviet tank replica will be taken to the Estonian War Museum in Viimsi, a town north of the capital Tallinn, Estonian broadcaster ERR said.
The city, whose 57,500 inhabitants are mainly Russian-speaking, lies on the Russian border about 210 kilometers (130 miles) east of Tallinn, and is separated from the Russian city of Ivangorod by the Narva River.
The entire monument was being dismantled on Tuesday and “the operation will be done in a dignified manner, for example, the flowers and candles placed on the monuments will be taken to a cemetery, they will not be thrown in the trash,” said the interior minister, Lauri Laanemets. he said on Tuesday, according to the Baltic News Service. Estonian broadcaster ERR said the decommissioning was underway.
Photos posted on the ERR website showed the Estonian military and heavy machinery moving the monument after flowers and candles were removed from the site.
The mass grave of World War II victims in Narva will have a neutral tombstone and will remain a worthy place to commemorate them, Kallas said.
Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu said in a government statement that Russia “wanted to use the memorials of the criminal occupation regime to fuel tensions in Estonian society.”
On August 15, the Narva city council decided that the monument should be removed, and soon after, a crowd gathered around the monument to protest the plan.
Considering the current situation, ensuring public order is complicated for the Narva city authorities,” Laanemets said in the same statement, calling it “a big and complex issue.”
A total of seven Soviet-era monuments in Narva would also be removed, the government said on Tuesday.
Since gaining independence in 1991, the former Soviet republic of 1.3 million people has been mired in disputes over the status of Russians, most of whom came to Estonia during 50 years of Soviet rule.
In 2007, the relocation of the so-called Tallinn Bronze Statue, another Soviet war memorial, from a city park sparked days of unrest. One person was killed and more than 1,000 arrests were made, with Russian-speaking Estonians claiming that the removal of the monument erased their history. The statue was later moved to a military cemetery.