Latvia: President George W Bush flew to Latvia last night to begin three days of events marking the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, celebrations that risk being overshadowed by a deepening rift between Russia and its former Eastern Bloc allies.
European Union and White House officials have backed the presidents of the three Baltic states, whom Mr Bush will meet here today, in urging the Kremlin to acknowledge that VE Day 60 years ago also marked the start of five decades of Soviet occupation for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Mr Bush has pledged to remind President Vladimir Putin of that fact at a lavish ceremony in Moscow on Monday.
In a show of solidarity between new EU members, Poland yesterday denounced the Kremlin's EU envoy for saying that the Soviets had not occupied the Baltics but reached "agreements at the time with the legitimately elected authorities" there.
"The 'request' by the Baltic authorities to be incorporated into the USSR is on a par with the 'request' by Czech leaders in 1968" for Moscow to crush the Prague Spring reform protests, President Alexander Kwasniewski said on Polish radio.
"This way of stating the facts is historically unjustified and morally wrong. We know perfectly well that the Baltic countries lost their independence for several decades, and that cannot be explained away with slogans or legal subterfuge," said Mr Kwasniewski, who has been criticised at home for agreeing to go to Moscow on Monday.
In a German television interview shown in part yesterday, Mr Putin said it was enough that in 1989 Soviet leaders had condemned the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, by which Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Germany carved up Eastern Europe.
"I want to repeat: We already did it," an irate Mr Putin said. "What, we have to do this every day, every year?" Mr Bush's aides insist that his Baltic summit will not only be about history.
Stephen Hadley, the US national security adviser, said Washington's relationship with the three states was "strong and built on a commitment to shared values: democracy, rule of law and tolerance, values that we are working together in partnership with the Baltic states to advance within those states, within Europe and, more generally, abroad."
Russia and Georgia failed to agree on closing Soviet-era bases in Georgia, Georgia's Foreign Minister Salome Zurabishvili said yesterday.
The failure means Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili will boycott Monday's parade in Moscow marking 60 years since victory in World War Two and a summit of leaders of former Soviet states the day before, she told journalists in Moscow. - Reuters