The Russian government's ongoing seizure of the private Yukos oil company threatens to extend into Lithuania . There, a Yukos subsidiary is the majority-owner and operator of the oil-processing and oil-transport industry, Lithuania 's largest industrial asset. The country seeks to prevent, or limit the... MORE

On January 12, Latvia's President Vaira Vike-Freiberga announced that she would be attending the VE-Day 60th anniversary summit to be held in May in Moscow. The issue is deeply controversial in the three Baltic states, and Vike-Freiberga's announcement scuttles the November 2004 agreement by the... MORE

On December 31, Lithuania shut down the first of two Soviet-era nuclear reactors at the Ignalina nuclear power plant and began the decommissioning process. The European Union required the closure of Unit One by December 2004 and of Unit Two by December 2009, as part... MORE

On January 5, Poland's leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, printed excerpts from the speech given by the European Parliament' President, Josep Borrell, to the previous day's closed-door session of the Forum for New Economics in Madrid. Borrell, a Spanish Socialist who is critical of the United... MORE

A left-of-center coalition government took office in Lithuania on December 15, capping complex power-sharing negotiations in the wake of the October parliamentary elections. The coalition includes two mainstream, "establishment" parties, the Social-Democrats and New Union/Social Liberals, governing jointly since 2001; and two populist parties, Labor... MORE

On December 1, Latvian political parties ended a two-month deadlock by concluding a broad-based coalition agreement and programmatic declaration for the new government. The outgoing government, which had resigned in October and stayed on as caretaker, was a minority government of heterogeneous composition. It depended... MORE

On November 9, leaders of the governing bloc Working for Lithuania, a loser in the recent parliamentary elections, signed an agreement with two left-populist parties to form a new parliamentary majority and cabinet of ministers. It is a disharmonious combination of Western-oriented democratic parties --... MORE

Lithuanian Conservative leader Andrius Kubilius made history as prime minister in 1999-2000, when he and the Conservative parliamentary majority kick-started unpopular market economic reforms, at the cost of the party's electoral fortune. But some Conservatives risk jeopardizing those historic gains and diminishing their record if... MORE

As anticipated (see EDM, October 12), the left-leaning Labor Party of Russian-born tycoon Viktor Uspaskikh faltered in the second round of Lithuania's parliamentary elections. After a strong performance in the October 10 vote on party lists, Labor went on to capture only 16 of the... MORE

Preliminary returns from Lithuania's October 10 parliamentary suggest that the traditional parties should be able to isolate the surging populist Labor Party after the elections, instead of entering into potentially risky arrangements with this challenger to the political system. The Labor Party, founded by Russian-born... MORE