Dear readers, Baltic Reports will be not be publishing new articles for the time being. Baltic Reports has been a very DIY project thus far, the work of a handful of determined journalists with no start-up capital operating for little to no pay. While we’ve garnered an audience over the past year, we must now [...]

RIGA — Latvia’s transport minister walked out of the TV5 studio after insisting on speaking Latvian during a planned interview for a Russian-language news program. The incident immediately created a storm of controversy along Latvia’s well-trod language fault line, which in recent days underwent a sizable quake after Moscow’s mayor suggested that eventually Russian will [...]

TALLINN — The Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church is lambasting the Ministry of the Interior for allowing the Mormon Church access to records that may be being used to re-baptize deceased Estonians. Estonian Lutherans are not happy with the state’s cooperation agreement with the U.S.-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that allows the copying [...]

RIGA — Jānis Urbanovičs, Harmony Center’s prime minister candidate, downplayed suggestions that his party is planning on forming a government with the pro-business tandem For a Good Latvia (Par labu Latviju). In an interview with the Latvijas Avīze newspaper Urbanovičs said that he did not see the possibility for a forming a government with Par [...]

TALLINN — A man who is suspected for attacking two women, killing one, in downtown Tallinn last November was arrested Thursday and has confessed to the crime. A male Estonian citizen named Vjatšeslav, 28 of Tallinn, allegedly attacked two women with a baseball bat on Nov.23 last year around 8 a.m. at Toompark in Tallinn’s [...]

KAUNAS, Lithuania — Delays in the construction of a new basketball arena in Kaunas has FIBA threatening to strike Lithuania’s second-largest city from the list of 2011 Eurobasket tournament host venues. The new Žalgiris Arena, being built by the Vėtrūna construction company was supposed to be completed by October, but now the building has been [...]

RIGA — Despite calls for further austerity from the International Monetary Fund, Latvia’s approved the elimination of the excise tax on natural gas for the next year. The move is anticipated to cost the national government only 3 million to 5 million lats (€4.2 million to €7 million) in revenue. The bill easily passed the [...]

TALLINN — Sixty years after widespread electrification came to the Estonian countryside, the government has initiated constructing a high-speed Internet network that will bring a connection to every household by 2015. With its old wooden windmills, thatched roofs and decaying Soviet-era collective farm buildings, bucolic Estonia does give an immediate impression of being high-tech, but [...]

TALLINN — The troubles with Tallinn European Capital of Culture project continues, now the foundation’s administrative council member Katrin Saks resigned from her position amid acrimony about political control over the project. Saks, a Social Democrat and Tallinn alderman, said her resignation was prompted by the lack of support for her proposal to add another [...]

VILNIUS — Twenty-one years after the Baltic Way united Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania with a human chain to protest against the Soviet occupation, a new monument commemorating the event was unveiled in Vilnius. On Monday President Dalia Grybauskaitė, Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, Speaker of the Seimas Irena Degutienė, former President Valdas Adamkus and Sąjūdis leader [...]