The small Baltic nation of Estonia wants more respect from Russia amid cooling political relations between two countries, Estonia's foreign minister said Friday, according to dpa. "We'd like to have good - or at least normal - relations with all our neighbours, including Russia. We also hope Russia will realize that Estonia is not an enemy," Urmas Paet said in an interview. Since Estonia broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991, relations have been complicated by issues such as the treatment of Russian minorities and the countries' complex shared history. "One very important issue is that we see our big neighbour has respect toward us," Paet told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in Tallinn, capital of the nation of 1.3 million. "We're neighbouring countries but during the last 18 years, no Russian president, no foreign minister, no prime minister ever visited Estonia," he said. Relations with Russia turned worse after the Estonian government decided to relocate a Soviet era war memorial from the town centre of Tallinn to a military cemetery in April 2007. The move caused a diplomatic row abroad and two days of riots in the capital, mostly by the local Russian community. While the three Baltic republics were victims of Soviet domination after World War II, then joined the European Union in 2004, they do not always act in unison. When Lithuania threatened to veto a mandate for EU talks with Russia covering strategic issues like energy and trade, Estonia supported an open line of communication with Moscow. "Our position has been that it's better to talk than not to talk," Paet said. But some of Moscow's tougher rhetoric raises hackles in Estonia. "It's not normal when we hear frequently inadequate accusations from the Russian side," Paet said. Russia accuses Estonia of discriminating against the local Russian-speaking minority, who make up 25 per cent of the population, and promoting fascism - "which is completely ridiculous," Paet said. "We have listened to this for the last 18 years," he said.
