West approved wartime occupation of Baltic states, Russians claim

RUSSIA:In an extraordinary statement that probably sent a chill through yesterday's EU-Russia summit, Russia's main spy agency has claimed that Britain and America approved of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states during the second World War.

The Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), which usually maintains a strict media silence, said on Thursday that reports from wartime agents in London and Washington showed the western powers viewed the occupation as a necessary evil.

The SVR statement is likely to unsettle the Baltic states just days before President Bush visits Estonia and leaders of Nato countries gather in neighbouring Latvia.

Under a secret Nazi-Soviet pact, Moscow's forces occupied Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in June 1940. Hitler's troops drove them out a year later, but the Soviet Union reclaimed control in 1944. The occupation of the three countries did not end after the war: they were declared Soviet republics, and only regained independence in 1991.

All three Baltic states, now members of the EU and Nato, still have tense ties with Russia, which refuses to apologise for the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of people from across the region when it was part of the Soviet Union.

Moscow also says Latvian and Estonian "resistance fighters" who opposed the Soviet occupation and sometimes fought with the Germans were Nazi sympathisers, and condemns both countries whenever they commemorate their so-called partisans.

The SVR says the recently declassified reports from its spies trace the evolution of Baltic policy in wartime London and Washington. "The removal of pro-German regimes in the Baltic states and the introduction of Soviet troops into the region . . . was seen by the western democracies as an unpleasant but undoubtedly essential and timely step," the SVR claimed.

It quotes a secret memorandum from British foreign minister Anthony Eden in 1942, in which he describes the Soviet presence in the Baltic states as "precisely in our interests, from a purely strategic point of view".

The spy agency also cites an "asset" in Washington, who sums up the view of a US presidential aide thus: "If the Russians want to have the Baltic states after the war, then they will get them, but he does not think the Americans will say this publicly."

Next week's Nato summit in Riga was supposed, according to Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga yesterday, to remove "the very last traces of the Iron Curtain" from the Baltic region.