The Baltics’ ‘disrespect’ for Russia . . .

Russia and the Baltics: Once Friend, Now Foe

by Vladimir Kara-Murza


This may be hard to imagine, but there was a time when the national independence movements in the Baltic states had no greater ally than Russia, and its leader. As Soviet tanks rolled into Vilnius to crush Lithuania’s independence aspirations in January 1991, Boris Yeltsin—speaker of Parliament and head of state of the Russian Federation, then still a constituent part of the USSR—made a strong public stand against the Kremlin’s aggression and backed self-determination for the Baltic republics. 

In what Western diplomats—and many of his own supporters—considered a “crazy” move, Yeltsin then flew to the Estonian capital of Tallinn to sign a joint statement of mutual support with the leaders of the three Baltic states, as well as separate cooperation treaties with Estonia and Latvia, recognizing their “inalienable right to national independence” in an act that, in the opinion of many observers, prevented further bloodshed. 

While in Estonia, Yeltsin met with Soviet troops stationed there and urged them to disobey any orders from their Kremlin commanders to crush peaceful demonstrators. On the advice of friends, who had (well-founded) fears that the KGB might try to shoot down his plane, Yeltsin returned to Russia in a private car.

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During his fifteen-year rule over Russia, Vladimir Putin has erased Yeltsin’s democratic legacy, both in domestic affairs—by censoring the media, fixing elections, jailing opponents, and turning Parliament into a rubber stamp—and in foreign policy, particularly with regard to the “post-Soviet space.”

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