(TALLINN) - Estonian experts and officials on Friday repeated accusations that Russia instigated last month's violence in the Estonian capital, when a Soviet war memorial was removed from the city centre.

Moscow also had a hand in the cyber-attacks that followed, they alleged.

"There is quite a convincing amount of evidence pointing to Russian government involvement in fanning the flames of violence during the relocation of the monument," Andres Kasekamp, director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute, told AFP.

"The hand of the Kremlin is quite clear in the events in Tallinn," he said.

"Russian politicians and the state-owned media had for months been making highly inflammatory statements about Estonia, stirring tensions in the build-up to a conflict," he said.

"We can similarly detect the hand of Moscow... when the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi blockaded the Estonian Embassy in Moscow and attacked the Estonian ambassador," he said.

The renewed accusations of direct Russian involvement in last month's riots came as Russian President Vladimir Putin, hit out at Estonia and Latvia at European Union-Russia summit talks.

He criticised both countries for violating the rights of their large ethnic Russian minorities, and accused the Estonian police of using excessive force to quash the riots in Tallinn last month.

Kasekamp said a series of cyber-attacks launched against Estonia after the riots over the statue bore indications the Russians were involved.

"The continuing cyber-attacks against Estonia bear evidence of Russian involvement. Computer experts have traced some of the attacks to Russian government and presidential computers," he said.

Officials in Estonia, including Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, have claimed that some of the cyber-attacks, came from Russian government computers, including in the office of President Vladimir Putin.

The cyber-assaults forced the authorities in the Baltic state to temporarily shut down websites.

Russian officials have denied involvement, but Estonian Defence Ministry spokesman Madis Mikko insisted Friday that "a large amount of the attacks came from computers in Russia, including within the Russian administration."

"That can be bad in two ways," Mikko told AFP.

"Whether attacks originated within the Russian state system, or Russian state computers are infected with a virus, which sends out attacks on Estonian servers -- it's bad in either case," he said.

A report published last week by the Tallinn-based International Centre for Defence Studies has also pointed to evidence of Russian involvement in the riots that rocked Tallinn last month.

The violence prompted the authorities to remove the Soviet war memorial secretly and ahead of schedule.

"Initially, both the Estonian authorities and our allies treated the events as looting, an internal affair of Estonia," the Centre said in its report.

"But subsequently, Moscow's involvement has become broadly visible."

There were reasons to suspect that "the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Tallinn has been directly instructing local extremists and organizers of unrest," the report added.

Russia's aim in fomenting unrest in Estonia was to present the EU newcomer as unreliable, troublesome, and unworthy of membership of the organisation, said Kasekamp.

"Ever since the big-bang enlargement of the EU in 2004, Russia's foreign policy has tried to drive a wedge between the old and new EU member states," Kasekamp said.

"The goal has been to discredit the Baltic states and Poland as immature, unreliable and simply not good Europeans, with the aim of marginalising them from forming a common EU stance towards Moscow," said Kasekamp.

"Russia is testing how far it can go in putting pressure on a small EU member state before the Union reacts," he said.

Moscow's anti-Estonian rhetoric was also aimed at undermining the Baltic state as a credible partner in the eyes of other former Soviet republics, whose fledgling democracies have strong support from Tallinn, said another analyst.

"Moscow is keen to discredit Estonia and show it as a problematic place whose voice would not be taken seriously in the former USSR," said Erkki Bahovski, foreign policy analyst and opinion editor of the Postimees daily.

"Estonia has been very active in assisting democratic movements in the former Soviet Union by arranging training courses and imparting Estonia's own successful experience in adopting a market economy," Bahovski told AFP.

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