MOSCOW. April 12 (Interfax) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Estonian counterpart Eva-Maria Liimets spoke over the phone on Friday to discuss bilateral relations and exchange views on pressing items on the regional and international agendas, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
"In regard to Russian-Estonian border agreements, Russia reaffirmed its position, which is that their ratification is preconditioned on Tallinn implementing the arrangements reached during the signing of the border agreements in 2014, i.e., Tallinn's unequivocally dropping territorial claims against Russia and any political scale-tipping," the statement said.
"Russia would like to see its neighbor's willingness to form a normal, non-confrontational atmosphere of bilateral relations," it said.
Also, Liimets was told of a "need for concrete steps to resolve problematic issues in Estonia related to its conservation of mass statelessness, discrimination against its Russian-speaking population, plans to squeeze out the Russian language from the info sphere and education, politically motivated persecution of Russian-language media outlets and activists from the movement of compatriots, and unacceptable attempts at falsifying history," the statement said.
Earlier, the Estonian Foreign Ministry said that Liimets told Lavrov that bilateral consultations on the border treaty should continue.
The treaty was signed in Moscow in 2005 after more than a decade of negotiations. However, during its ratification, the Estonian side put into the preamble a reference to the validity of the 1920 Treaty of Tartu, which drew the prewar border. Russia, which sees the 1920 treaty as a merely historical document which has no legal force, saw this move as an attempt to reserve a future right to territorial claims and revoked its signature. In 2014, the countries signed another treaty, which has still not been ratified.