Border Treaty Ratified

From Tallinn, Mari-Ann Kelam writes:

Today June 20 in a special session, the Estonian Parliament ratified the border agreement with Russia 78-4.

Update:

Russia Against Border Treaty Ratified by Estonia - Top Lawmaker

Created: 20.06.2005

MosNews

Russia opposes the form of the Russian-Estonian border demarcation treaty ratified by Estonia's parliament, a senior Russian lawmaker said on Monday.

"I don't think the border treaty, in the form in which the Estonian parliament ratified it earlier today, would be acceptable to Russia," Mikhail Margelov, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the parliament's upper house, the Federation Council, was quoted by RIA-Novosti news agency as saying.

He accused Estonian parliamentarians of trying "to outwit themselves." He said Estonia avoids direct mention of an "annexation" and "occupation" of their country by the USSR in the document's final version, but at the same time it makes references to legal acts speaking of those events directly, in the document's preamble.

The treaty's architects used the 1944 borders as a basis, Margelov said. "The Estonian side is reducing us to 1918 in the final version, creating prerequisites for the Estonian side to subsequently make territorial and other claims to us." He added that "if Russia assesses the Estonian side's amendments as unacceptable, the draft would go in the same trash can as the border treaty with Latvia did."

Russia refuses to accept Latvia's territorial claims and rejects demands for an apology for the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states.

(update via M.L.)