Since the competition's initiation, sectors of the Russian media claimed the competition's namesake was an attempt to glorify collaboration with Nazi Germany. In 2007, high-ranking government officials sharply criticized the competition, calling it "glamorization of Nazism" and expressing outrage over NATO members participating in the competition. Estonian officials attribute this recent development to the ongoing campaign for the Russian presidential election of 2008. Russian officials claim that commemoration of the Erna group today is part of alleged efforts by the Estonian authorities to glorify the Nazi past (other parts of it being the relocation of a memorial to Red Army invaders and an official greeting from the Minister of Defence to veterans of a unit of Estonians conscripted into a division organized within the "Waffen SS" to defend Estonia).