Baltic states

Estonians speak a Finnic language of the Uralic family, close to Finnish and unrelated to its neighbours. Latvians and Lithuanians speak the only two surviving Baltic languages, an old branch of Indo-European that also included Old Prussian, extinct since the 18th century. Lithuanian keeps many archaic features that linguists compare with Sanskrit.

Religion splits the same way only partly: Estonia and most of Latvia were Lutheran under their German lords and are now among the least religious places in Europe, while Lithuania and Latvia's Latgale region are Catholic, a legacy of the union with Poland. Orthodox churches serve Russian speakers across all three.

Each country has a Russian-speaking minority from the Soviet era — about a quarter in Estonia and Latvia, much less in Lithuania — concentrated in the capitals and in industrial towns such as Narva and Daugavpils. Citizenship and language laws after 1991 treated them differently in each state, and integration remains a live issue.

In the 13th century German and Danish crusaders conquered the lands of today's Estonia and Latvia, founding Riga (1201) and fortifying Tallinn (Reval). Merchant towns joined the Hanseatic League, and a Baltic German nobility owned the land until the 20th century. The Old Towns of Tallinn and Riga are this era's legacy.

Lithuania resisted. Under Gediminas and his heirs it became a vast grand duchy, the last pagan state in Europe, stretching to the Black Sea. It turned Catholic only after the 1386 union with Poland and later formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which shaped the Baroque look of Vilnius.

By the end of the 18th century the Russian Empire had absorbed all three. The 19th century brought national awakenings: song festivals, newspapers and folk-song collections in Estonian and Latvian, and book smuggling in Lithuania when the Latin alphabet was banned.

All three states declared independence in 1918 and held it for two decades, with Kaunas serving as Lithuania's capital while Poland held Vilnius. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 assigned them to the Soviet sphere; the Red Army occupied them in June 1940.

Mass deportations to Siberia began in June 1941. The German occupation that followed brought the Holocaust, in which most of the region's Jews were murdered, often with local collaboration. The Soviets returned in 1944; tens of thousands fled west, more were deported in 1949, and armed resistance by the Forest Brothers lasted into the 1950s.

Western governments never recognised the annexation, a legal point that later allowed the states to claim continuity with their pre-war republics. Soviet industrialisation brought workers from across the USSR, changing the population balance, most sharply in Latvia and Estonia.

From 1987 mass protests in the Baltics took an unusual form: song. Estonians gathered in hundreds of thousands at the Song Festival Grounds; Latvians and Lithuanians held rallies around national symbols. Popular fronts — Rahvarinne, Tautas fronte and Sąjūdis — won elections in 1990.

On 23 August 1989, the 50th anniversary of the Nazi–Soviet pact, about two million people joined hands in the Baltic Way, a human chain 675 km long from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. Lithuania declared independence on 11 March 1990; Soviet troops killed civilians in Vilnius and Riga in January 1991, but after the failed Moscow coup in August 1991 independence was recognised.

The three joined NATO and the EU in 2004 and Schengen in 2007, and adopted the euro in 2011, 2014 and 2015. The shared Song and Dance Festival tradition is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list.

The Baltics grew fast after EU entry, crashed in 2008–09 and recovered with export and tech sectors: Estonia's e-state, Lithuania's fintech and lasers, Riga's logistics and airline. Emigration and ageing have shrunk the populations, and prices in the capitals have climbed towards Nordic levels.

Security now shapes daily politics. Since 2022 all three have cut energy links with Russia (leaving the Soviet-era power grid in February 2025 to join Europe's), fenced the Belarus border, removed Soviet monuments and raised defence spending towards or above 5% of GDP. Border crossings with Russia and Belarus are restricted and close at short notice; airspace and drone incidents are regular news.

For travellers the region feels calm, orderly and connected — contactless everywhere, fast trains and buses, English widely spoken — with the eastern borders the one place where the wider tension becomes visible.