RussiaThe Kremlin has rejected angrily growing US and European calls to acknowledge the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states after the Second World War, stoking tension on the eve of President George Bush's visit to Latvia and Russia.
In an interview with Lithuanian television yesterday, Mr Bush said he would remind Russian President Vladimir Putin of the occupation when they meet in Moscow on Monday for a huge celebration of the 60th anniversary of the war's end.
Earlier this week Guenter Verheugen, the European Commission's vice-president, said that Moscow's relations with Brussels would depend on its willingness to admit the illegality of almost five decades of Soviet rule in the Baltic states.
But, even with an EU-Russia summit looming next week, the Kremlin appeared unmoved.
"There was no occupation," Russia's European affairs chief, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, shot back yesterday.
"There were agreements at the time with the legitimately elected authorities in the Baltic countries." Most historians agree that Soviet forces occupied the Baltic states in June 1940 before being driven out by the Germans a year later. In 1944, the Red Army retook the Baltics, reincorporating them into the Soviet Union. The Yalta Conference consigned them to Stalinist oppression, which saw more than 200,000 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians deported and killed.
But Mr Yastrzhembsky, who has urged the EU to challenge Latvia's treatment of its large Russian minority, suggested lingering resentment fuelled the current spat, which has clouded Moscow's vast VE Day preparations.
"I advise those who want to develop constructive relations with Russia to leave the analysis to historians and to experts, and not to bring too many phobias and historical prejudice into current relations between Russia and the European Union," he said.
The leaders of Lithuania and Estonia rejected invitations to Moscow for Monday's celebration, but their Latvian counterpart accepted.
"I felt this was a good opportunity to remind the world of what happened in the Baltic states," President Vaira Vike-Freiberga said yesterday.
"I did see the need to explain history and that aspect of history which in Western Europe is frequently forgotten, and certainly we find that Russia is absolutely incapable of facing up to it," she said of the Soviet occupation.
"My going to Moscow is a way of saying this hopefully is a different country from the one that won the war," she added. "Much as it was an ally of the Western allies, it was a totalitarian regime, it was a bloody, oppressive regime."