NewsTracker Answers for week of Mar. 09, 2015

Q: Conscription into the armed forces is being reintroduced in Lithuania after Internet attacks and "threats and exercises practically every day" by Russian forces, says President Dalia Grybauskaite. Where is the Baltic nation Lithuania?

Circle the area on this map

Q: Amidst worries about Russia's aggressiveness in the region, European foreign ministers met last week in Riga, the capital of Lithuania's northern neighbor . . .

A. Estonia

B. Belarus

C. Latvia

D. Kaliningrad

C. Lithuania is bordered by Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, Poland to the south, and Kaliningrad Oblast to the southwest. Kaliningrad Oblast is a federal subject of Russia. It is an exclave, with no land connection to the rest of Russia, on the Baltic Sea coast. Estonia is just north of Latvia.

Q: The Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – have been alarmed by Russia's military actions against the Ukraine, another former republic of the old Soviet Union. But unlike the Ukraine, the Baltic states are all members of the . . .

A. European Union

B. Eurozone

C. NATO

D. All of the above

D. They belong to the political and economic European Union and all use the euro as their currencies. As members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), they are among 28 nations in North America and Europe – including the United States – which agree to mutual military defense in response to an attack by any external party.

Q: Which was the first Soviet republic to declare independence from the Russian-dominated communist union?

A. Estonia

B. Lithuania

C. Latvia

D. Ukraine

B. On March 11, 1990, a year before formal break-up of the Soviet Union, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare itself independent, resulting in the restoration of an independent State of Lithuania.

Q: Britain's defense minister last month called Russia's president a "real and present danger" to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and he said NATO was preparing to meet the threat. Who is Russia's president?

A. Vladimir Putin 

B. Boris Nemtsov

C. Dmitry Medvedev

D. Arseniy Yatsenyuk

A. Despite growing economic problems in Russia, the former Soviet spy Putin has remained popular largely because of his defiance in the face of Western sanctions and political pressure to stand down in Ukraine. Boris Nemtsov was the anti-Putin activist who was gunned down just outside the Kremlin last month. Dmitry Medvedev is Russia's prime minister, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk is Ukraine's prime minister.