Baltic: Transport ministers ponder permanent summer time
Baltic transport ministers have discussed Lithuania’s proposal to stop seasonal time changes, LSM reports. Latvia’s…
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Welcome to Via Baltica, your “information superhighway” for news from the three Baltic tigers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania! Our founder and editor-in-chief is Kerkko Paananen, senior news analyst with more than two decades of professional expertise in covering and reporting on current affairs in the Baltic States. We aim to do one thing well:…
Baltic: Transport ministers ponder permanent summer time
Baltic transport ministers have discussed Lithuania’s proposal to stop seasonal time changes, LSM reports. Latvia’s outgoing Transport Minister, Atis Svinka, said that the Baltic ministers conceptually supported a transition to permanent summer time. He stressed that the Baltic States needed to have a unified position on the question, pointing to the example of the Estonian-Latvian…
Lithuania: Hostile states behind big data leak: President
Hostile states were probably responsible for a massive data leak at Lithuania’s Centre of Registers (VIRC), President Gitanas Nauseda announced, BNS reported. He said that the theft of over 600,000 records from VIRC’s real estate register was a matter of national security. Nauseda slammed the government for not disclosing the data breach until one or…
Latvia: Unemployment rate 7.1% in Q1/2026
The number of unemployed people in Latvia totalled 66,400 in the first quarter of 2026, which was 3,100 (4.5%) fewer than in the same period of 2025, the Central Statistical Bureau (CSP) reported. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2025, the number of unemployed rose by 2,600 (4.0%), however. The country’s unemployment rate stood at…
Estonia: Finance Minister vows to defend budget discipline
Estonia’s Finance Minister, Jürgen Ligi, vowed to defend budget discipline and push back against populist spending proposals ahead of the parliamentary elections in March 2027, ERR reported. Ligi said that the country’s political culture had deteriorated badly, and acknowledged that populism had crept into his own Estonian Reform Party as well. He insisted on the…
Baltic: EU, Baltic leaders blame Russia for drone incidents
Recent drone incidents in the Baltic States are part of Russia’s strategy to destabilise democratic societies in the region, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated, BNS reports. Speaking after a meeting with Baltic presidents in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, von der Leyen stressed the need for EU unity in support of the three…
Lithuania: Military to buy nearly 1,000 armoured vehicles from Finland
Lithuania’s State Defence Council (VGT) has approved a decision to buy 936 armoured vehicles from the Finnish defence group, Patria, BNS reports. President Gitanas Nauseda said that Lithuania expected that 300 of the vehicles would be delivered by 2030. He added that part of the production process would take place in Lithuania. A Patria representative…
Latvia: Riga Airport’s revenue, profit up in 2025
Latvia’s Riga International Airport (RIX) posted an audited profit of EUR 4.2mn in 2025, which was up EUR 0.8mn from 2024, The Baltic Times reported. The airport’s annual net turnover totalled EUR 80.7mn, which was up 3.9% over a year. Revenue from aviation services amounted to EUR 47.3mn (up 5.4%) and from non-aviation services to…
Estonia: Fatherland still on top in May 2026 poll
Estonia’s national-conservative opposition party, Fatherland, had 26.7% support in Norstat’s poll conducted in May 2026, ERR reports. The opposition Estonian Centre Party came in second with 21.7%, followed by two other opposition parties — the Social Democratic Party with 14.3% and the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia with 13.7%. Support for the ruling Estonian Reform…
Baltic: NATO to assign more forces to defend Baltics
NATO plans to assign additional forces to defend the Baltic States, Reuters reports. Military sources revealed that Germany and the Netherlands had agreed to assign the 1 German-Netherlands Corps (1GNC), based in the German city of Münster, to the defence of Estonia and Latvia. The move would facilitate the rapid deployment of forces into the…