Tag: estonia

Baltic foreign ministers pull out of OSCE summit over Russian participation | Russia-Ukraine war News

Ministers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania say presence of Sergey Lavrov risks legitimising Russian war in Ukraine.

The foreign ministers of three Baltic states have announced that they will boycott a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was invited to the event.

In a statement on Tuesday, the officials from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania said that a decision to invite Lavrov to attend the summit in Skopje risked legitimising Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We deeply regret the decision enabling the personal participation of Russian Foreign Minister S. Lavrov at the 30th Session of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Skopje,” the statement reads.

“It will only provide Russia with yet another propaganda opportunity.”

Separately, Oleh Nikolenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian foreign ministry, wrote in a statement on Facebook that the Ukrainian delegation would not take part in the meeting.

Nikolenko said Russia had abused the rules of consensus in the organisation, resorted to “blackmail and open threats” and had also been holding three Ukrainian OSCE representatives in prison for 500 days.

“In such conditions, the presence of a Russian delegation … at minister-level for the first time since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine will only deepen the crisis into which Russia has driven the OSCE,” he said.

There was no immediate comment from the Russian foreign ministry.

The move comes as Ukraine’s Western allies sought to rally more support for Kyiv, as fighting continues with no clear end in sight.

Speaking before a gathering of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg urged members to “stay the course” in their support for Ukraine, as both the United States and European Union struggle to agree on further military aid.

The OSCE, a 57-member organisation first started during the Cold War with the goal of lowering tensions between East and West, has a rotating presidency currently held by North Macedonia, whose foreign minister invited Lavrov to the summit that is set to begin on Thursday.

Lavrov said on Monday that he would attend, in what would be his first trip to a NATO member since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Speaking to reporters at NATO headquarters on Tuesday, North Macedonia’s Foreign Minister Bujar Osmani defended the decision and argued that the OSCE should be seen as a neutral forum.

“Lavrov is not coming to Skopje, in a way. Lavrov is coming to the OSCE just as he went to [the] UN in New York a few months ago,” Osmani said. “I won’t be meeting him as the foreign minister of North Macedonia, but as the OSCE chairman in office.”

However, Osmani also took a firm stance on Ukraine, saying that he would tell Lavrov that “we have turned [the] OSCE into a platform for political and legal accountability of the Russian Federation for its deeds in Ukraine, and we will continue to do so”.



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Estonia Revokes Operational Licences of Nearly 400 Crypto Firms, Deploys New Rules

Estonia is implementing stricter policies to regulate crypto activities propagating from and within its region. In recent days, the government of Estonia revoked the operational permits of 398 service providers of virtual assets. The move comes almost a year after the northern European nation amended its anti-money laundering laws to ensure that cryptocurrencies and similar digital assets are not misused to wire illegal money around, right from under the government’s nose.

The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of Estonia analysed and decided which crypto firms would be barred from offering their services there. After this trim, currently around 100 crypto firms have managed to retain their work permits in Estonia, Bitcoin.com said in a report.

For now, the names of the companies that lost their licences in Estonia remain undisclosed.

The FIU accessed the companies around the status of their compliance with the legal requirements that Estonia has laid out for the companies of this sector. The regulators allowed firms that submitted correct documents, kept the manner of operation in alignment with the law, and had policies in place to mitigate any risks involved retain their licences.

“In the applications, we found very many suspicious circumstances on various topics. This calls into question the credibility of the companies that wanted to do business here – their actual desire to provide services in Estonia or, vice versa, shows the desire of certain persons to use the Estonian economic and financial system for illegal activities,” Matis Mäeker, the Director of Estonia’s FIU said in a blog post.

In 2017, Estonia began issuing crypto licenses in a loosely regulated ecosystem. This caused several crypto companies to flock to the country in order to establish their businesses in pro-crypto Estonia.

Between 2017 and 2022 however, the government of Estonia realised that some notorious businesses were taking advantage of the largely untied rulebook and selfishly minting money while not contributing to the economy of the country.

This was the trigger that led the Estonian government to amend its laws to monitor the businesses concerned with virtual digital assets in 2022.

Following the amendment of the anti-money laundering laws in Estonia, over 200 crypto firms voluntarily cancelled their business licences in Estonia.

“We will continue reviewing the applications for amendment of authorisations, but soon, we can return to normality in terms of supervision, where we will be moving largely from assessment on paper to daily on-site supervision,” Mäeker noted.

Research platform Triple-a estimates that over 32,000 citizens of Estonia currently hold cryptocurrencies.

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