The NATO summit will take place in Riga on 28-29 November, a Latvian Foreign Ministry statement said. The meeting will bring together the leaders of NATO's 26 member states and will mark the first time the alliance's summit has been hosted by a former Soviet republic.
The Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and joined the North Atlantic alliance in February 2004.
The summit event may provoke Russia, which has considered the Baltic states to be under its sphere of influence. Moscow only grudgingly accepted the fact that the Baltic states joined NATO.
Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga has said that the event would greatly boost the country's international image and that it would be money well spent. In its report, the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS said that "the opposition believes that Latvia, where 94% of pensioners survive on pensions below the minimum subsistence level, cannot afford to spend 20 million euros for the [NATO] summit".
