RIGA (AFP) -- Latvia is poised to sign a decade-old treaty outlining its border with Russia that has been in mothballs since it was initialed in 1997, the prime minister's office said.

"The government has now taken all the steps and we are waiting for official talks with the Russian side to specify the date," the prime minister's spokesman, Arno Pjatkins, told AFP.

At a meeting Tuesday, the government authorized Prime Minister Aigars Kalvitis to sign the border treaty, and also formally withdrew a declaration Latvia had attached to the treaty two years ago, which Moscow had interpreted as a claim on the Pytalovo region in Russia.

Kalvitis said after the government meeting that he expected to sign the treaty by the end of the month.

Pytalovo was Latvian territory before World War II but became part of the Soviet Union, along with the rest of Latvia, when the Baltic states were annexed by Stalin's USSR in the 1940s.

Latvia and its neighbors, Estonia and Lithuania, were Soviet republics until 1991, when communism crumbled in most of Europe.

Latvia's 276-kilometre-long (164-mile) border with Russia has become one of the easternmost frontiers of the European Union since the Baltic state joined the bloc in 2004.