VILNIUS - Meeting late March 23 in Vilnius on the eve of the European Council summit meeting in Brussels, the heads of the Baltic states and three Nordic governments agreed that they needed to urge the European Union to put more pressure on Russia in order to stop violations of environmental safety standards in shipping and exploring for oil in the Baltic Sea.
Prime ministers from Denmark, Sweden and Finland, as well as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, want the EU to enforce a ban on single-hull tankers and demand that Russia ratify an environmental convention on the Baltic Sea. Leaders of the six countries are worried that Russia's increasing volumes of crude-oil deliveries from the Gulf of Finland are fraught with environmental catastrophe.
In addition, Lithuania is concerned about the launching of crude oil extraction by Russia's Lukoil, just 22 kilometers from the Curonian Spit, which began last week.
"Gentlemen's agreements aren't resolving the ecological problems that Russia's growing activity is creating," Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas said at a news conference. "Big new oil terminals mean that tanker after tanker will sail off to who knows where in the world and in who knows what condition."
Lukoil CEO Vagit Alekperov has said that the success of the $270 million project, dubbed D-6, would strengthen Russia's position in the Baltic Sea region. He said that environmentalists should not be concerned since the company is using state-of-the-art technologies in its production.
Lukoil, Russia's second largest oil company and the largest taxpayer in the Kaliningrad region, plans to extract some 600,000 tons of crude from its offshore production sites by 2007.
The idea to invite the group of prime ministers to Lithuania came from Brazauskas, who personally invited his Swedish colleague, Prime Minister Goran Persson, while he was in Stockholm.
As the EU expands to 25 members next month, the informal alliance among Baltic and Nordic countries is taking stronger shape, and analysts predict that many other regional alliances are bound to emerge.
This was the first time the Baltic and Nordic ministers met in a Baltic state.
"Geography and other factors mean we share common interests on so many issues, from investments and economy to migration and ecology," Brazauskas said.
In addition to environmental concerns, the six prime ministers also discussed relations between the EU and Russia, ratification of the EU constitution and implementation of the Lisbon strategy.
