The Baltic States

The Baltic States are the three countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea in northeastern Europe, grouped together for their shared history of Soviet and, before that, German and Russian imperial rule, and their parallel paths to independence and eventual membership in the European Union and NATO. Despite the shared grouping, the three countries differ substantially in language and ethnic heritage, with Estonian belonging to the Finnic language family while Latvian and Lithuanian are Baltic languages, one of the oldest surviving branches of the Indo-European family.