The chairmen of the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian parliamentary foreign relations committees, along with prominent historians and political scientists from the three Baltic states, have decided to convene an urgent videoconference to restore the sense of common purpose in handling the challenge of the May... MORE

On January 20, Estonia 's President Arnold Ruutel used a radio address from Moscow to tell his country that Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to support an official Russian repudiation of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. If so, the move could suddenly ease the atmosphere of... MORE

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