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Supermarkets, lawmakers in Russia boycott Estonian goods

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Moscow-centered supermarket chains will stop selling Estonian goods from the weekend as part of a civil protest against the removal of the Soviet-era WWII memorial in Estonia this week.
MOSCOW, April 28 (RIA Novosti) - Moscow-centered supermarket chains will stop selling Estonian goods from the weekend as part of a civil protest against the removal of the Soviet-era WWII memorial in Estonia this week.

"In the next two days we are going to opt out of selling Estonian goods," a spokesperson for the top tier chain Seventh Continent said Saturday.

Samokhval, a retail chain based in the Moscow Region, warned the regional government that it has ceased buying and marketing Estonian goods.

Russian pro-government youth movements have set up seven tents near the Estonian consulate in Moscow and have spoken about adding another 10.

Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and the legislature of the Leningrad Region surrounding Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg, have called on all government institutions and government-run organizations to freeze financial and economic transactions with Estonia, and on all Russians to boycott Estonian goods.

Flamboyant Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, deputy speaker of the lower house, has offered to fund a replica of the Tallinn memorial to be installed across the street from the Estonian embassy in Moscow.

There were violent clashes between protesters and police as crowds gathered in Tallinn after Estonian police cordoned off the area around the Soviet World War II memorial, which was dismantled and removed early Friday. As a result of the clashes in the central streets of Tallinn, one man aged 20 died, 60 injured, and over 500 detained. The deceased was Russian.

Estonia has said the Bronze Statue and other Soviet monuments - rallying points for ethnic Russians and places of their clashes with Estonian nationalists - "divide society," and the central square is not a proper burial place.

European institutions have made no comment on the dismantling of the monument in EU member Estonia so far.

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