Latvia and Finland 'calmly' tracking Russian maritime border plans
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Latvia and Finland will maintain a calm and factually grounded response to Russia's surprise legislative project to redefine its maritime borders in the Baltic Sea, leaders of the two countries said on Friday.
"It is clear that Russia is looking for new ways for hybrid actions on both our EU and NATO borders. We must of course be vigilant and react based on facts," Latvian Prime Minister Evika Siliņa said in Riga after talks with her Finnish counterpart Petteri Orpo. "We will continue to follow developments closely."
"We are and we have to be well-prepared against all kinds of threats coming from Russia," stressed Orpo.
It was possible, he added, to see "time connections with all these issues in Finland, in Lithuania, in Estonia.
"But now it's time to be calm and look very carefully at what really is happening. Maybe they are testing us, but we don't know yet."
On Thursday, the Russian Ministry of Defence published a draft of the controversial initiative in the government's legislative database.
It announced an adjustment of the maritime borders in the Gulf of Finland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which also borders Lithuania, causing immediate alarm in the neighbouring states.
The draft later disappeared from the database without any reason being given.
On Thursday night, Russia also removed several markers from the Narva River border with Estonia, which also marks the eastern external border of the EU and NATO.
"We are also following closely what is happening now at Estonia's border Narva river. Estonia has our full solidarity," said Orpo.
Lithuania, which like Latvia and Estonia was also part of the Moscow-dominated Soviet Union until its 1991 collapse - has condemned the move as "further proof that Russia's aggressive and revisionist policy poses a threat to the security of neighbouring countries and Europe as a whole."
However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that political considerations were not behind the initiative.
