TALLINN, September 25. /ITAR-TASS/. Estonian cabinet of ministers on Thursday issued an instruction to stub and demarcate the border in the country’s east, the government press service said.
Appropriate instructions will be given to the State Department for Forestry Management, Department of the Police and Border Guard Service, as well as to the Land Tenure Department.
In the course of the works, the departments will have to clear and clean a provisional control line where all the trees and shrubs will be removed and soil will be leveled. The borderland will be 136 kilometers long.
The cabinet’s plan say Interior Minister Hanno Pevkur is expected to set up a working group for implementation of the project. One of the problems is that 25% to 30% of the land to be taken up by the control strip is privately owned.
Estonia plans to demarcate the border unilaterally, since a border treaty that the two countries signed in 2005 after almost eleven years of negotiations has not been ratified by the Russian and Estonian parliaments yet.
After the signing of the treaty in 2005 and its submission for ratification to Riigikogu, the Estonian parliament, the MPs included a mentioning of the Soviet-Estonian Tartu treaty of 1920, which meant Estonia might potentially have territorial claims to Russia.
Moscow called off its signature then and the process remained legally unaccomplished. Talks on the problem resumed at the end of 2012.