In 1991, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania achieved independence from the Soviet Union. Or did they? The Russian Federation, it seems, has its doubts. On 30 June, the Chief Prosecutor’s Office announced that it would examine the legality of Baltic independence following a request from two parliamentary deputies. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicus has called the move an, ‘absurd provocation’.
To say that the independence of three sovereign nation states was granted ‘by an unconstitutional body’, as asserted by the MPs in question—United Russia’s Yevgeny Fedorov ¬and Anton Romanov, the duo who requested that Mikhail Gorbachev be investigated and tried for the collapse of the Soviet Union — is indeed absurd. And to request that Russia, a separate sovereign nation state, investigate the legality of that independence 24 years later is even more absurd (as was the recent and somewhat belated declaration of the illegality of the 1954 transfer of Crimea to Ukraine). To then grant that request by conducting an examination — particularly one that, by the Prosecutor’s own admission, will have no legal ramifications for the Baltic States — is most absurd of all.
Legal dissidence
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which partitioned the independent countries between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
