Vilijampolė, Kaunas, winter. The project “Being a Jew”. A group of thirty teachers led by a Jewish guide are standing in the former Kaunas ghetto. Houses, garages, storage spaces, wood piles where, during the war, thousands of Jews were herded like animals by the Nazis, where Jewish children played, and from where they were later taken to a square or to one of the Kaunas forts and shot. […]
Lithuania is very likely to be the only European Union country to completely boycott the end of World War Two commemoration event in Moscow on 9 May. Unlike our closest neighbours – Latvia and Estonia – we will not be even sending a diplomat to the ceremony. […]
I purposefully chose a title for my piece to evoke the notorious phrase from 1949 by the then US Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal: “The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming. They’re right around. I’ve seen Russian soldiers.” […]
Nobody takes much notice when the leader of any Western country stays out of the public eye for a period of time. And this is because the state has a governance structure which provides for substituting one official with another, if need be, all the way to the top. […]
Tomas Venclova, a prominent Lithuanian author, poet, translator and professor of literature at Yale University, delivered the following remarks at a conference on Holocaust education held at Vilnius City Hall on April 17, 2015, the final event in the Being a Jew project. […]
The “Fifth Column” is a term often used by Kremlin propaganda against political rivals and civil society, generating myths, and spreading mistrust and fear among citizens. European media, and especially officials in the EU, should be very clear about what they mean when using the term, if use it at all. […]
I would like to present an innovative way of seeing how the welfare state can mitigate wide-spread socio-economic risks and measure individual vulnerability to poverty. This will help address the issue of whether we are living in a society of risk and anxiety or whether the welfare state, with its social protection system, can mitigate these risks and safeguard people from falling into poverty. […]
Sweden’s unilateral decision to cancel its large-scale defense agreement with Saudi Arabia has attracted considerable international attention. It canceled the agreement on moral grounds, refusing to continue military cooperation with one of the world’s most hardline dictatorships – a regime that violates human rights and sentences dissidents to public whippings. […]
Scaremongering is bad, but so is the wishful thinking which has fuelled the West’s approach to Russia for decades. So it is worth pondering what a world would look like in which we lose, and Vladimir Putin gets what he wants. […]
The decision of the Lithuanian Seimas to re-introduce conscription was welcome. It was a crucial step not only because of the growing geopolitical threat but more importantly because it builds a healthy, solid and Western society and a state that has confidence in itself. […]
The world has truly entered a new era. Even Russia‘s nuclear blackmail has become such an everyday occurrence that it sometimes passes underappreciated. One concludes thus after last week’s reports in British dailies The Times and The Independent about a meeting between Russian and US generals in March where Russia voiced threats of a nuclear response should NATO continue to deploy forces in the Baltic states. […]
It would be hard to imagine Athenian generals worrying about the reporting of Spartan news or even, twenty-four centuries later, Douglas MacArthur caring much about media broadcasts from the land of the rising sun. But when General Philip Breedlove, the Supreme Commander of NATO, recently called on the West to make a greater effort to counter Russia’s toxic war of disinformation against Ukraine and its western allies, his concern made perfect military sense. In a world in which the dissemination of information is a key tactical element in violent conflicts, the West and America have remained far too passive in confronting both the insidious campaign of lies on Russian state-controlled media and the notoriously effective internet recruitment efforts of terrorist groups. […]
Ukraine’s social order, characterized by limited access, has been an obstacle in the country’s attempts to create democracy and market economy during its entire post-soviet history. Recent Russian military aggression changed the balance of power within the country and opened a window of opportunity for Ukraine to transform itself from a limited access to open access order. Whether Ukraine will use this opportunity depends on relationship between the president and oligarchs. […]
On 26 March, fifteen years ago, Vladimir Putin was elected the president of Russia. The moment coincided with the start of a global oil price boom that brought billions in additional revenue to Russia. […]
Companies should pay a fair share of taxes on the money they earn, and governments should not favor certain businesses by giving them advantages not available to others. This sounds straightforward, but the reality is not. […]
On 26 March, fifteen years ago, Vladimir Putin was elected the president of Russia. The moment coincided with the start of a global oil price boom that brought billions in additional revenue to Russia. […]
Russia’s euphoric and triumphalist celebration all this week, marking the one year anniversary of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, has already drawn crowds of people, national flags in abundance, and veterans marching in various cities. Meanwhile, Russia-backed militants continue their attacks in eastern Ukraine testing the fragile truce between Kiev and the separatist forces. A year later since Moscow’s foray into Crimea, there is little evidence of Russia is willing to back down or back out of its aggressive campaign in Ukraine. What often gets blurred in Moscow’s nationalist rhetoric is that fact that Russia’s economic and military interests in Ukraine run deep, making Russia’s pull out from Ukraine unlikely in the medium to long-term. […]
What kind of war will Lithuania’s conscripts be preparing for? Hybrid conflicts that evolve into local mixed wars? People who talk about hybrid wars usually mean a phase of armed skirmishes with foreign army detachments with no discussion of how hybrid conflicts develop, how they impact on a conscript army and the challenges that army will face. […]
I would like to share my celebration with you. Some of you might have noticed me wearing amber today – this is not to say that I am not an amber fan in general, but this time I was wearing my grandmother’s necklace for a reason. I thought I would share with you some thoughts that I wrote for my international friends. […]
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