Three Russian tanks that were captured by Ukrainian forces and shipped to the Baltics last week for display are stoking tensions after supporters of Russian troops began laying flowers on the vehicles.
(Bloomberg) — Three Russian tanks that were captured by Ukrainian forces and shipped to the Baltics last week for display are stoking tensions after supporters of Russian troops began laying flowers on the vehicles.
In the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, a fistfight broke out between two men after one laid a flower at one of the heavily damaged T-72 tanks and another tried to remove it. The deputy mayor of Vilnius later put a garbage container by the tank that says “for carnations, candles and Soviet nostalgia.”
The squabbling has rekindled old ideological differences over the interpretation of the Soviet Union’s legacy in the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Among the most vocal European Union critics of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the three countries also have large Russian-speaking minorities that make up a quarter of the population in Estonia and Latvia.
Three Estonian towns with large Russian-speaking populations have expressed reservations about the Defense Ministry’s plan to put a tank on exhibit across the country.
Narva, an Estonian town of 54,000 where a third of residents have Russian citizenship, was last year forced by the government in Tallinn to remove a Soviet-built tank that had been cherished by the locals as memorial for Red Army soldiers who died in World War II.
“The smashed tank will not come to Narva,” Katri Raik, the mayor of the city that sits across a river from Russia, said on Facebook late Wednesday.
The three Russian tanks, as well as a fourth that was sent to Germany, were captured by Ukrainian forces at the start of the war in March 2022. Ukraine also sent captured tanks to Poland and the Czech Republic last year.
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