Baltics hit back at Putin's "regrettable and misleading" speech

Apr 26, 2007, 15:39 GMT

Tallinn - Diplomats in the Baltic states hit back on Thursday at comments made by Russia's President Vladimir Putin during his annual state-of-the-nation address.

During the address, Putin suggested that Russia could freeze its adherence to the strategic Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty until such time as all NATO members should ratify it.

'New members of NATO, such as Slovakia and the Baltic states, despite preliminary agreements with the alliance, haven't joined the CFE at all, which creates real dangers with unforeseeable surprises,' Putin said, according to the Interfax news wire.

The statement received a chilly welcome in the Baltic states.

'I evaluate his announcement with regret, because in fact it undermines the treaty as such,' Latvian Foreign Minister Artis Pabriks told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The announcement is a 'pretext' for Russia not to comply with the 1999 Istanbul agreement, by which Russia undertook to withdraw its troops from Georgia and Moldova, he added.

Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet was equally dismissive, saying that the statement was regrettable and misleading, a foreign ministry statement read.

'President Putin should know that (the CFE treaty) is not in force, because it has not been ratified by all parties,' Paet said.

'Most of the countries have not ratified it because Russia has not met its Istanbul obligations of withdrawing its armed forces from Georgia and Moldova,' he added.

The original CFE treaty was signed between the members of NATO and the defunct Warsaw Pact in Paris in 1990. It provided for the large- scale reduction of conventional military forces in Europe.

After the collapse of the USSR and the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe in the 1990s, the treaty was amended at an OSCE conference in Istanbul in 1999.

At that conference, Russia undertook to pull its ground forces out of the former Soviet republic of Moldova and greatly reduce its forces in Georgia.

Those operations have not yet taken place - leading the treaty's NATO signatories to say that they cannot ratify the amended text.

'Ratification by NATO allies of the adapted treaty is awaiting Russia's ... continued fulfilment of its Istanbul summit commitments regarding withdrawals of Russian forces from Georgia and Moldova,' a US State Department fact sheet said.

And according to both Paet and Pabriks, the Baltic states - who joined NATO in 2004 and were not signatory to either the 1990 treaty or the 1999 amendment - cannot make any move to join the treaty until its original signatories have ratified it.

'Russia never honoured its commitment to pull its troops out of Georgia and Moldova. That makes it impossible for Latvia to join the treaty,' Pabriks said bluntly.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Petras Vaitiekunas is currently meeting NATO colleagues in Oslo, and will only comment on the matter when discussions are complete, his office said.