Estonia will press ahead with its claims to a contested border region with Russia and sees "room for maneuver" in the dispute, in spite of President Boris Yeltsin's refusal to negotiate, an Estonian official said Thursday.


Riina Kionka, head of the policy department at the Estonian Foreign Ministry in Tallinn, said Estonia would carry on pursuing its claims for 230,000 square kilometers of land inside Russia through the International Court in the Hague and the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe.


At the same time Kionka said Tallinn did not blame Yeltsin for his high-profile visit Wednesday to a border post in the Pskov region where he said "this border was, is and will be Russian" and that he would "not give up one centimeter" of Russian land.


"We weren't really surprised by the remarks. We know that President Yeltsin has to make statements like this to satisfy his domestic constituency," he said.


Kionka conceded that it was "not really" realistic to hope for the return of all the territory, which belonged to Estonia between 1920 and 1940 under the Tartu Treaty and is part of the Leningrad and Pskov regions of Russia.


But, she said, Tallinn could be flexible in its negotiations with Moscow.


"I wouldn't say that we're pessimistic," Kionka said. "Whatever kind of new agreement comes out of this, the border is quite irrational. There are places in Estonia you can only reach through Russia and places in Russia you can only reach through Estonia. There's more room for maneuver than President Yeltsin is suggesting."


Tallinn is also concerned about the status of the 2,500 ethnic Estonians who live across the border in the Pskov region. If they take up an offer of Estonian citizenship they will have to move out of the five-kilometer border zone, where foreigners are not allowed to live.


The Russian press applauded Yeltsin's trip to the border Thursday. The government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta in an article headlined "the gates to a new Russia" said the frontier had been fixed under the Helsinki accords.


"The border with Helsinki was fixed in Helsinki -- and therefore there is no question of reconsidering it," read the sub-heading.