A poster on the Narva Fortress, Estonia, on 9 May 2025. Photo: Jack Styler

Russia’s Investigative Committee has charged the head of a museum in the Estonian city of Narva with “rehabilitating Nazism” and placed her on a wanted list over a poster comparing Vladimir Putin to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, state-owned Russian news agency TASS reported on Thursday.

Since 2023, Narva Museum director Maria Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova has arranged the annual hanging of a poster on the walls of Narva Fortress calling Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” to coincide with Russia’s Victory Day celebrations.

This year, the poster featured an image of Putin and Hitler’s faces spliced together, accompanied by the caption: “Putler: War Criminal!”.

Narva, Estonia’s third biggest city, lies directly across from the western Russian city of Ivangorod, with the two cities connected by a heavily fortified bridge spanning the Narva River.

In January, Russia’s Investigative Committee had first issued an arrest warrant in absentia for Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova, charging her with spreading “false information” about the Russian army. At the time, she told Estonian public broadcaster ERR that the ruling was a “great honour”.

In a press release accompanying the new charges, Russia’s Investigative Committee said that Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova had “assisted in the placement of posters” with an image of Vladimir Putin “containing false information about his commission of war crimes”.

In May, Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova told ERR that the spliced “Putler” poster had been a message intended for Ivangorod’s Russian audience.

“A full-scale war has been going on next to us for four years, which Putin unleashed. We call a dictator a dictator; war crimes, war crimes,” she said.

In recent years, the two border cities have become known for holding duelling Victory Day celebrations, with the Russian side first setting up a screen and stage for a concert visible to Narva’s primarily ethnic Russian residents in 2023.

For the last two years, some 200 metres away, the Estonian government has organised its own concert on 9 May to mark Europe Day, celebrating the 1950 Schuman Declaration that laid the groundwork for the creation of the European Union.