VLADIVOSTOK, September 13. /TASS/. Russia will give an immediate, extremely tough response to Estonia should Tallinn go ahead with its threat to confiscate Russian assets and transfer them to Ukraine, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF), which is taking place in Vladivostok on September 10-13.
"We assess and would consider any attempts to seize Russian assets as a blatant violation of all known legal norms, an open encroachment on sovereign property," she said. "If such [mooted] initiatives by the Estonians actually become a reality more or less, then we would deem it to be not a ‘seizure’ but a case of theft; of this Tallinn can rest assured: the response measures [by Moscow] will hit them where it hurts and will not be long in coming from our side," the diplomat promised.
The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman described the idea of the Riigikogu, Estonia’s unicameral parliament, passing a law to authorize the confiscation of Russian assets in the Baltic country as malicious, and highlighted the fact that similar plans are now being hatched in other unfriendly countries. "The idea of the aforementioned bill fits into the aggressive anti-Russian line of the Estonian government, for the realization of which the Estonian political establishment will stop at nothing, including resorting to outright theft and banditry," she said.
Zakharova thought it was entirely possible that Estonian political circles may have resorted to "making noise with a high-profile story" in the new parliamentary season as a means of deflecting attention from "the recent corruption scandal involving one of Estonia's pro-government NGOs and non-profit organizations." "As it turned out, [these organizations] misappropriated multimillion-dollar donations to the Kiev regime," the diplomat recalled. "All of this [supposedly charitable fundraising] was promoted through social media advertising and then, it turned out, [the funds raised] simply ended up in the pockets of private individuals and not only didn’t reach the Kiev regime, but went nowhere at all. By the way, the local [Estonian] public, which was shocked by these developments, never got any explanation as to exactly where all of these generous dollops of financial aid disappeared to, and what the whole affair was all about," the spokeswoman pointed out.