THE Estonian Prime Minister Kaya Kalas denounced the usual today intimidation tactics by Russia after issuing an arrest warrant against her and against other European officials.

The Kremlin justifies the arrest warrant by accusing the officials of the Baltic countries as well as Poland of hostility towards Russia, due to a different perspective on the history of their relations.

“The Russian Federation’s action is not surprising, as it is its usual intimidation tactic,” Kalas said in a statement, vowing to support war-torn Ukraine and combat “Russian propaganda.”

“I will not be silent, I will continue to vigorously support Ukraine and I will support the strengthening of European defense,” he stressed.

The Baltic countries, members of the EU and NATO, fearing the Kremlin’s military ambitions, consider the Soviet Union to have taken them over, while Moscow considers it a liberator and considers any other approach a “falsification of history”, which constitutes crime in Russia.

Kalas and other officials from the Baltic states and Poland are being prosecuted for “destroying monuments to Soviet soldiers,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said today.

In recent years, several of these monuments inherited from the Soviet Union after the Second World War have been demobilized in the Baltic countries and Poland, in a sign of rejection of the Soviet period, as these countries consider that they were occupied by the Soviet Union.

“Crimes against the memory of the world’s liberators against Nazism and fascism must be punished. And this is only the beginning,” he added.

A Russian minority resides in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, three former Soviet republics that are now members of the EU and NATO and have strained relations with Moscow.

These relations were further strained by the conflict in Ukraine. The Baltic countries, which consider the threat of a Russian threat to be real, strongly support Kiev in its battle against the Russian military.