Word: lithuanian
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...doing so precisely at this moment. As President, I took an oath of office to uphold the constitution. Certain anticonstitutional developments are taking place. They began just as we started our Congress of People's Deputies. The congress considered the situation, declared the decisions of the Lithuanian parliament illegal and instructed me as President to uphold the constitution. As I said to Senator ((George)) Mitchell ((the majority leader)) when he visited me ((last April)), if an American President had been given that task, he probably would have accomplished it in 24 hours. But it's not like that here...
...Then the Lithuanian crisis complicated the work of Santa's helpers in Washington and steeled resistance in Moscow. The top brass of the military was already upset about "losing" Eastern Europe. Now it looked as though Soviet power might be humiliated even within the borders of the U.S.S.R. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, Gorbachev's personal military adviser, bluntly said that no setback would be more galling than "seeing our East German allies defect to NATO." Yevgeni Primakov, one of Gorbachev's closest associates on the Presidential Council, agreed in a conversation a few weeks ago: "A united Germany in NATO...
...Hinting at the offer he would make later in the week, Gorbachev stressed his commitment to seeking a "political solution" in the Baltics and said there were "new and encouraging signs" of a way to end the crisis. The next day the Lithuanian parliament suspended some of its secessionist legislation, though it stopped short of freezing its March 11 declaration of independence...
Last week Gorbachev spent considerable time trying to head off the election of his most influential critic, former Politburo member Boris Yeltsin, as president of the Russian federation. He met with Lithuanian Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene for nearly two hours in an attempt to persuade her that, at a minimum, her republic must suspend its two-month-old declaration of independence. It may be a measure of his domestic difficulties that Gorbachev's most solid accomplishment came in foreign affairs. After four days of talks between U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow...
...French President Francois Mitterrand and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Vilnius offered, in return for negotiations, to suspend all legislation it had passed since declaring independence. Prime Minister Prunskiene flew to Moscow to present the offer to Gorbachev. While she was still in the air, Gorbachev called the Lithuanian mission asking to see her as soon as she arrived. This was a gesture of compromise on his part, since he had insisted no talks were possible until the Lithuanians canceled their declaration of independence...