ninme

I’m usually very tolerant of whatever that man does, but this business with the Baltic States is really getting on my last nerve.

swissinfo – Bush to recall painful Soviet rule of Baltics, By Steve Holland

RIGA (Reuters) – U.S. President George W. Bush will recall the painful history of the Baltic states under Soviet occupation in a speech on Saturday that could cause concern in Moscow before he visits there to mark the end of World War Two.

Wary of their powerful neighbour, the three Baltic states want to put pressure on the Kremlin to apologise for five decades of Soviet rule. But President Vladimir Putin accused them on Saturday of trying to cover up past Nazi collaboration….

While Latvia’s president will attend the Moscow ceremonies, the leaders of Lithuania and Estonia refused. In a new snub to Moscow, Georgia said on Friday its pro-Western president would also boycott the celebrations.

Bush has a difficult diplomatic path to follow on the trip as he seeks to pressure Putin to respect the budding democracies on his border and halt what U.S. officials call backsliding on democracy within Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to protest at Bush’s visits to Latvia and Georgia, U.S. officials acknowledged.

Bush will meet all three Baltic leaders on Saturday and give a speech at Riga’s Small Guild Hall to commemorate the end of the war “but also talk about what that period meant for the Baltic states”, McClellan said.

The President of Latvia was on television today. Her quote was longer than both John Howard quotes in the past six months put together, btw. Anyway she’s the only one of the three going. She’s a real classy lady, btw.

Reuters UK – Baltics urge Moscow to atone, Bush arrives in Riga, By Patrick McLoughlin

In an interview aired on Latvian television on Friday, Bush said he sometimes felt he had to tell Putin to respect neighbours in former Soviet satellites. The Baltic states joined NATO and the European Union last year.

“My job time to time is to send a message: ‘Look, treat your neighbours with respect. Free nations, democracies on your borders are good for you, whether they are Baltic states, Ukraine, Georgia. These are free countries and will be good neighbours’,” he said.

In Brussels, the European Union sided with the three Baltic countries against the Kremlin by saying the collapse of the Berlin Wall, rather than the defeat of Nazi Germany, marked the “end of dictatorship” in Europe.

“We remember as well the many millions for whom the end of the Second World War was not the end of dictatorship, and for whom true freedom was only to come with the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

The presidents of Estonia and Lithuania, who have both criticised Moscow in the past for failing to atone for the occupation, will boycott the May 9 celebrations in Moscow while Vike-Freiberga has agreed to attend.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili announced on Friday he would stay away from Monday’s parade in Moscow after Russia and Georgia failed to agree on closing Soviet-era bases.

But here’s the kicker:

But Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the Baltic states of trying to cover up collaboration with the Nazis during World War Two.

“Our Baltic neighbours … continue to demand some kind of repentance from Russia,” he wrote in a commentary to be issued in the French daily Le Figaro on Saturday.

“I think they are trying to attract attention to themselves, to justify a discriminatory and reprehensible policy of their governments towards a large Russian-speaking part of their own population, to mask the shame of past collaboration,” he wrote.

Hah! Just who put that Russian-speaking population in the Baltic States, hmmmm? And what happened to the native Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians that said Russian-speaking population replaced, eh Mr Putin?