Baltic States Quotes

Since 2012, Putin has made it perhaps his largest foreign policy priority to have the Magnitsky Act repealed. But none of his efforts have worked. Not only has it not been repealed, it's spread to six additional countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, the Baltic states and Gibraltar.

For two generations up through the mid-1980s, many thought we were losing the Cold War, even in early 1989, few believed that Poland's solidarity movement could win, that the Iron Curtain would come down, that the Baltic states could be free, that the second of the 20th century's great evils, communism, could be vanquished without war, but it happened and the West's great institutions, NATO and the E.U., grew to embrace 100 million liberated Europeans.

My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.

I grew up in Russia. I grew up in Latvia, to be exact.

There is no Baltic identity with a common culture, language group, religious tradition.

Vladimir Putin and Russia. 'When a bear wakes up from hibernation, he doesn't eat a few blueberries and then go back to sleep.' They have their eyes on Eastern Europe, and if NATO is not willing to stand up forcefully to this threat today, it will only become more difficult to do so down the road.

I would like to see Russia not invade Ukraine or put pressure on and threaten Baltic states. But we live in the real and existing world.

Nowadays, there are plans to separate the Baltic states from the common power system of the former Soviet Union and to integrate them into the European system. What does it mean for us in practice? In practice, it means that a number of zones will emerge between several regions of the Russian Federation, where we will have no power transmission lines, since previously we used to have a loop transition through the Baltic countries.

The U.S., together with trans-Atlantic allies, never recognized the occupation of the Baltic states by the Soviet Union. Moscow faced pressure or retaliation every time it tried to move toward official recognition, or at least acceptance, of its claim that the Baltic states were Soviet republics.

Russia is the biggest European nation. We are Europeans, we are not Asians.

Here I was in Estonia, doing a concert for 5,000 people, and not many people know the song My Way - Gorbachev in the 80s, My Way had just become a famous song, and [Mikhail] Gorbachev in a satirical, kind of cynical manner coined the term the Sinatra Doctrine and My Way was the song because the Baltic states in the Warsaw Pact wanted to go their own way and secede from the Soviet Union, so joking he says," Yeah, we've got the Sinatra Doctrine now."

Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and can't find rest, she's talking and she can't stop.

I assume that our colleagues from both the United States and the European Union will proceed from current humanitarian law and ensure political freedoms and rights of all people, including those who are living in the territory of Baltic states after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

I was born in Eastern Europe, in Latvia, and I'm fluent in Russian.

We've had Vice President Pence visiting Tallinn, where he met not only with me but also with my other Baltic colleagues - Lithuanian President Ms. Grybauskaite and Latvian President Mr. Vejonis. And, of course, Vice President Pence has been very clear that NATO acts as a whole. Attack against one is attack against all.

The Baltic republics have invented something totally new. Do you know what? They use the word 'non-citizens' for people who have been living for decades in the territory of Baltic states and have been deprived of a number of political rights. They cannot participate in the election campaigns; they have limited political and social rights. Everybody keeps quiet about it, as if this is the way it should be. Of course, this cannot but cause a certain reaction.

The army is the only power to preserve the [Soviet] Union.

Following the end of the Cold War, there was much discussion concerning the point of NATO. In the event, it was reinvented as a means of reducing Russia's reach on its western frontiers and seeking to isolate it. Its former East European client states were admitted to NATO, as were the Baltic states.

There are exceptions of course, like for instance the Baltic States, which are members of the European Union, together with Ukraine and Moldova, as well. In those countries, the governments have been reformed as a result of elections.

What Secretary Ash Carter is looking at is the constant pressure that Russia's putting on our European allies. The way that Russia is trying to move the boundaries of the post-World War II Europe. The way that he is trying to set European countries against one another, seizing territory, holding it in Crimea. Beginning to explore whether they could make some inroads in the Baltics.