Central and Eastern Europe Soviet Union; the independent states in former Yugoslavia (which were not considered part of the Eastern bloc); and the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (which chose not to join the CIS with the other 12 former republics of the USSR). The CEE countries are further subdivided by their accession status to the European Union (EU): the eight first-wave accession countries that joined the EU on 1 May 2004 (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia), the two second-wave accession countries that joined on 1 January 2007 (Romania and Bulgaria) and the third-wave accession country that
First-level NUTS of the European Union European Union. First-level NUTS of the European Union The Classification of Territorial Units for Statistics, (NUTS, for the French ""), is a geocode standard for referencing the administrative divisions of countries for statistical purposes. The standard was developed by the European Union. There are three levels of NUTS defined, with two levels of local administrative units (LAUs) below. Depending on their size, not all countries have every level of division. One of the most extreme cases is Luxembourg, which has only LAUs; the three NUTS divisions each correspond to the entire country itself. Below are the "first level NUTS regions"