MOSCOW, January 13. /TASS/. Estonia’s initiative to seize Russian assets is futile from a legal point of view as there are no Russian government assets in the country, Russian Ambassador to Tallinn Vladimir Lipayev said on Friday.
"Estonia was among the first countries to ban visa-issuing to Russian nationals," he said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel. "And now, Estonia has come out with a new initiative on the seizure of Russian property abroad. As a matter of fact, there are few Russian assets in Estonia: some 20 million [euro], according to some estimates, or slightly more, according to others - but it is not important, since there are no government assets here. Nevertheless, it was Estonia that began to develop a new mechanism to seize such assets."
According to the Russian diplomat, there are no legal grounds for such measures. "Because the issue of any reparations or indemnities can be raised only when combat operations between two states end in the defeat of one of them. Thank God, there have been no combat operations between Russia and Estonia," he noted. "Although the Estonian authorities are behaving towards us and our embassy as though we are in a state of war, which is surprising, to put it mildly. So, it is an absolutely futile initiative from the point of view of law."
The Russian diplomat stressed that the West is using Estonia as "a kind of a testing ground for various anti-Russian initiatives."
In December, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas called on EU member countries to continue efforts to use frozen Russian assets. According to Estonia’s agency on countering money laundering, nearly 20 million euro have been frozen in bank accounts owned by Russians in the country.