MOSCOW, October 4 (RIA Novosti) - Discrimination against ethnic Russians in the Baltic States, transit restrictions for Russians traveling to the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad and the suppression of dissent in Belarus will be high on the agenda of the Russia-EU summit in London, a Kremlin source said Tuesday.
The source said Russia will again call the European Commission's attention to Latvia's and Estonia's discriminatory policies vis-a-vis their large Russian-speaking communities and to Lithuania's attempts to hinder the travel of Russian passengers and cargoes to and from Kaliningrad.
He said the Lithuanian government had just announced the introduction of customs declaration requirements, to start January 1, 2006, for personal luggage and freights as well as a ban on medications containing petty doses of narcotic substances, including heart drugs.
"If the doses allegedly exceed [the amount] deemed permissible for transit through Lithuania, passengers [carrying such medicine] may be made to get off the train," he said.
EU officials will also raise issues relating to "Belarus, [the self-proclaimed republic of] Transdnestr, and, possibly, [the breakaway Georgian provinces of] South Ossetia and Abkhazia," the source said.
He said Ukraine is unlikely to make the agenda in the same way it did before, but that EU officials could ask how Moscow sees recent developments in Kiev.
Speaking of Belarus, the source said the EU is seriously concerned about "the strengthening of the authoritarian regime, the lack of rights for the opposition and its oppression."
He said the EU had, in an unprecedented move, released funds to run Belarusian-language broadcasts through the German radio network Deutsche Welle in an effort to influence public opinion in Belarus. He said this would hardly improve the EU-Belarus relations, but may make them worse and called "counterproductive" the EU leaders' attempts to isolate Belarus from the rest of Europe.
The source said the EU was aspiring to a bigger role in the former Soviet Union, something he described as its "interest No. 1."
"They would like to somehow be involved in the settlement process in Chechnya and to highlight integrated and expanded Europe's increased role in the former Soviet Union as a whole," he said. "Hence [their] proactive approach to Transdnestr, the South Caucasus... and Chechnya."
