Putin says Russia condemned Baltic deal long ago

President Vladimir Putin, responding to growing calls for Russia to renounce the secret Soviet-Nazi pact that consigned the Baltic republics to Soviet rule, said Moscow condemned the deal long ago.

In a German TV interview published today by the Kremlin press service, Putin said the Soviet-era legislature, the Supreme Soviet, had issued a resolution in 1989 that criticised the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as “a personal decision by (Soviet leader Josef) Stalin that contradicted the interests of the Soviet people”.

“I want to repeat: We already did it,” Putin said. “What, we have to do this every day, every year?”

The presidents of Lithuania and Estonia have turned down Putin’s invitation to next week’s Victory in Europe day commemorations in Moscow celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. They and many of their compatriots consider the end of the war in Europe the start of a new tyranny, as the Soviet Union was to govern them, sometimes brutally, for the next 45 years.

US President George Bush has said he will remind Putin about the Soviet occupation when they meet in Moscow and stress that the end of the war did not bring freedom to the Baltics.

Russia denies accusations that it illegally annexed the three republics, saying the Baltic governments of the time had willingly invited Soviet troops into their countries and agreed to join the Soviet Union.

Putin appeared to be trying to spread the blame, telling the German interviewers that Germany and Russia had both been responsible for deciding the Baltics’ fate – first in 1918, when a German-Russian agreement granted them independence, and then in 1939, when “Russia and Germany decided differently”.

“And in essence, Germany agreed that this part of Europe should again return under the wing of the Soviet Union,” Putin said.

Putin also used the interview to renew Russian criticism of the rights records of the Baltic states, which joined the European Union last year.

He accused them, particularly Latvia, of treating Russian-speaking residents as “second-class people”.