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I'm back from vacation, but it's going to take a day or two before normal posting resumes here.

For the time being, however, here's some candid discussion of Putin's May 9 performance by Jamestown Foundation analyst Vladimir Socor - I read this while on holiday, and it is certainly food for thought:

From the standpoint of Russia-West relations, perhaps the most consequential aspect of the May 9 anniversary celebrations in Moscow was the Kremlin's verbal assault on the Baltic states, amid complete and even complacent silence on the part of the European Union, NATO allies, and the United States. For the first time since Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power, the Kremlin boldly tested allied solidarity -- and found it wanting.

Putin made calculated use of insult and vulgarity in this exercise. Russia is ready to sign border agreements with Latvia and Estonia, he said, "provided they do not involve stupid (duratskiye) territorial demands." Falsely accusing Latvia's government of demanding the retrocession of the Abrene/Pytalovo district, Putin called on "Latvian politicians to stop engaging in demagoguery." He then opined, "Estonia's leadership took the wrong decision in not attending the [Moscow] celebrations."

Answering a female Estonian journalist who asked her question in Russian, Putin mockingly imitated her Estonian accent, then put on a show of anger: "What else are we supposed to do, maybe condemn the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact every year? We consider this topic closed, and will not return to it. We [condemned] it once, and that was enough."

Putin then proceeded to give a breathtaking version of Russia-Baltic relations: Under the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918, he said, "Russia turned over some of its territories to Germany," including the territories of what became the Baltic states. "In 1939, Germany returned them to us, and these territories joined (voshli v sostav) the Soviet Union." Consequently, "in 1941 [sic] we could not possibly have occupied them, inasmuch as they were already a part of the USSR." "Whether this was good or bad, such was history. It was a secret deal, the small states being a currency of exchange. Such were the realities of life, regrettably," Putin concluded, though not before citing "Europe's past colonial policies" and slavery in America (Russian TV Channel One, Interfax, May 9, 10).

Putin's version implies that the Baltic states were never independent countries, but mere territories passing from hand to hand, and that they "joined" the USSR by consent. More broadly, it demonstrates a completely value-free approach to issues of crime of aggression, war crimes, and Soviet totalitarianism. While also displaying ignorance of history, Putin's version is partly informed by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement of May 5, which similarly claimed that the Soviet Union could not possibly have occupied what it already possessed (Interfax, May 5).

The whole article is here.

I'll be coming back to this subject, and will also be looking at its relation to current "CIS"-related topics, including Uzbekistan.