Lithuania, marking 20 years since its declaration of independence from the Soviet Union on Thursday, remains wary of huge neighbour Russia and is looking forward to the “health insurance” of a new NATO Baltic defence plan, President Dalia Grybauskaite said.

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia joined NATO and the European Union in 2004 but were rattled by the August 2008 war in which Russia defeated another former Soviet republic, Georgia.

“The Baltics do not ask for anything special. Contingency plans exist for all NATO member states, and the Baltic states would like to have the same,” Grybauskaite told Reuters in an interview this week when asked why the three small countries needed a special NATO plan.

“It’s a kind of health insurance: it does not mean you will get sick, but it is better to have it.”

Asked whether Lithuania felt any immediate threat from Russia, she said: “Not an immediate threat, but we know that in Russia’s military doctrine NATO is named as enemy number one.”

Moscow’s new doctrine, issued last month, said one of the “main external threats of war” came from NATO’s eastward expansion to Russia’s borders.

Grybauskaite said NATO’s defence plan “was not finalised, but it was on the way”.

She also had conciliatory words for Moscow. “I do think that Cold War history is over and for all of us, the European Union and Russia, it is better to have closer and more constructive relations…Cold War never profits anybody.”

Lithuania’s 1990 independence declaration was a challenge to reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and was one of the first signals of the collapse of the Soviet empire.

In January 1991, 14 people were killed when troops and protesters clashed at Vilnius’s TV tower. The three Baltic states finally broke away from Moscow in August that year, but are now facing their deepest economic crisis since independence.

FREE, BUT FLEEING

After rapid post-EU entry growth, Lithuania’s economy slumped last year by 15 percent after the financial crisis. Unemployment hit nearly 14 percent in February. Even during the earlier boom, hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians left for western Europe.

But Grybauskaite said there still things to cheer about.

“We finally got our own real place in the global world, and this is the main achievement for such a short period of time.”

At least Lithuanians’ fate was in their own hands.

“We are making our own mistakes, and we are ourselves trying to clean up the mess we make,” she said.

Outside the presidential palace on the streets of Vilnius, opinions differed about the benefits of change.

“There is no stability and confidence. When there is such a situation, I don’t want to celebrate,” said Rasa, 27, an assistant at a law firm, who declined to gave her surname.

She said 80 percent of her acquaintances, most under 30, had already left and she was having similar thoughts.

But Alfonsas Makacinas, 72, a pensioner, said that even with his small pension he could still buy meat whenever he chose and compared this favourably with shortages in Soviet times.

Back then, he said, “shops were selling bones with little meat left on them, blood dripping off them, but we were still grabbing them and stocking them up for a week… Dogs would not eat them now.”