{"id":14666,"date":"2023-08-29T08:05:27","date_gmt":"2023-08-29T02:35:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=14666"},"modified":"2025-04-02T22:10:45","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T16:40:45","slug":"baltic-nations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/baltic-nations\/","title":{"rendered":"Baltic Nations"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><strong>About Baltic Nations<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>The Baltic nations, often collectively referred to as the &#8220;Baltic States,&#8221; are a <strong>group of three countries in Northern Europe located along the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>They are <strong>Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>They are <strong>bounded on the west and north by the Baltic Sea<\/strong>, on the <strong>east by Russia,<\/strong> on the <strong>southeast by Belarus<\/strong>, and on the <strong>southwest by Poland<\/strong> and an exclave of Russia.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li><strong>Capitals: Tallinn (Estonia), Riga (Latvia) and Vilnius (Lithuania).<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Languages<\/strong>: Spoken languages are <strong>Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. In Estonia and Latvia,<\/strong> about <strong>one-quarter of the population are ethnic Russians.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Independence<\/strong>: They <strong>gained their independence<\/strong> first <strong>from the Russian Empire at the end of World War I<\/strong> <strong>in 1918<\/strong> and<strong> later from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>The Baltic States have been<strong> members of the European Union (EU) since 2004.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>\u00a0<\/h3>\n<h3>Who are the Wagner Group of Mercenaries?<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>The Wagner Group, also <strong>known as PMC Wagner, is a Russian paramilitary organization.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Origin<\/strong>: The group is believed to have been <strong>founded in 2014 by a Russian veteran of the Chechen war <\/strong>who so <strong>admired Hitler he named the group after Richard Wagner, the f\u00fchrer&#8217;s favorite composer.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>The skull is the symbol <\/strong>of the Wagner Group.<\/li>\n<li>The organization first <strong>came to the world&#8217;s attention in 2014, fighting alongside Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>The organization has also been <strong>active across Africa in recent years<\/strong> \u2014 Libya, Sudan, Mozambique, Mali and the Central African Republic.<\/li>\n<li>Today, there are t<strong>hought to be some 10,000 Wagner Group members.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>The U.S. government has called Wagner a &#8220;proxy force&#8221; of Russia&#8217;s defense ministry.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1)\u00a0Which are the countries bordering the Baltic Sea?<\/h3>\n<p>There are nine countries with a shoreline at the Baltic Sea: Denmark, Germany, Poland, Russia (at the Gulf of Finland, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast), Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Sweden.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source:<\/strong>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wionews.com\/world\/poland-and-baltic-states-urge-belarus-to-expel-russian-fighters-629988\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><u>Poland and Baltic states urge Belarus to expel Russian fighters<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Baltic nations are a group of three countries in Northern Europe located along the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":14667,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14666","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}