President of Latvia Vaira Vike-Freiberga has received a letter from the President of Croatia Stjepan Mesic:
"I have received your letter and the enclosed Declaration related to the forthcoming celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of Victory Day in Europe.
I understand your mixed feelings and, therefore, welcome sincerely your decision to come to Moscow in order to attend the Victory Day celebration. I am familiar with the history of your country and I know the grievous fate which, befell it after the infamous Ribentrop-Molotov Pact. At the time my country, Croatia, also went through a terrible ordeal although it was nominally independent."
"Under the cloak of the anti-Nazi struggle, and after its successful end, there were events deserving explicit condemnation, and that is an irrefutable truth. Today, I believe, nobody fosters any doubt about that. It is also true that in the Second World War, as you have also noted, the Soviet Union bore the brunt and suffered the greatest casualties. This is also an unequivocal fact. I fully agree with your assessment that the road of any nation to the future can only be successful if it fully and bravely faces its past," says Mesic.
President's Chancery
