RUSSIA has lodged an official protest over President Bush’s decision to combine his trip to Moscow on Monday with visits to Latvia and Georgia.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, wrote a letter of complaint to Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, shortly after the new itinerary was announced, according to US officials. The Russians are angry at what they see as the expansion of American influence in countries on their border. However, Dr Rice, a former Russia specialist, is reported to have written back that Mr Bush would visit whichever countries he pleased.

The revelation is likely to deepen an East-West row over differing views of history and democracy that threatens to sour the May 9 celebrations in Moscow of the 60th anniversary of Hitler’s defeat.

Mr Bush and European officials have backed calls by Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for Russia to recognise the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states under a secret deal between Hitler and Stalin in 1939.

However, President Putin argued on German television that the Soviet Union’s top legislative body had condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which led to the annexation of the Baltic states.

“But the only thing we hear now is that our country must admit the illegality of these decisions and condemn them. I repeat: we have already done so. Must we do this every day, every year?” Mr Putin said.

He also told a German newspaper that he did not think Joseph Stalin should be likened to Hitler. “Yes, of course, Stalin was a tyrant and many people call him a criminal. But he was not a Nazi. And they were not Soviet troops that crossed the German border on June 22, 1941, it was the other way around,” he said.

Historians say that 10-20 million people died in famines, purges, deportations and the labour camps under Stalin.

The European Union has also backed the Baltic states in a move that could overshadow a Russia-EU summit in Moscow on Tuesday. Günter Verheugen, the European Commission’s Vice-President, called on Russia this week to recognise the Soviet presence in the Baltic states as an occupation, and Brussels said yesterday that the fall of the Berlin Wall, rather than Nazi Germany, was the “end of dictatorship” in Europe.

Mr Bush is due to meet the three Baltic leaders in the Latvian capital, Riga, today.

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