Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s visit in Vilnius has triggered a wave of emotional reactions that seem to have overwhelmed the critical thinking faculties and political sense of angry observers. Absolutely scandalous – Khodorkovsky dared not to say that he would immediately give back Crimea if he became Russia’s leader! […]
This January, the Vilnius-based Eastern Europe Studies Centre organized another big two-day international event for experts, politicians and intellectuals. The centrepiece of the second day of the conference was an address by none other than Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He was introduced by liberal Lithuanian thinker Leonidas Donskis who had taken great interest in supporting the prisoner during his term as a member of the European Parliament and had even received Khodorkovsky’s thank-you letter from prison. The prisoner had written he was touched by Donskis’ belief that he was fated for an important role in the history and politics of Russia. […]
There have been two positive developments in the so-called information war last week. On Friday, Vilnius Administrative Court rejected the request by the LRTK (Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission) to sanction a three-month licence suspension for Ren TV Baltic, a Russian TV channel, to broadcast programmes produced outside the EU. […]
For days now many in the global and Lithuanian media have locked horns over the terrorist acts in Paris. There are some who say that freedom to express one’s convictions is above any religious or social group interests; others contend that cartoons published by the likes of Charlie Hebdo made merciless mockery of believers’ feelings, that they cannot be subsumed under the “social group” category and have nothing to do with freedom of expression. […]
A retrospective look at the conflicts dominating the headlines in 2014 presents a grim picture of escalating conflict and human suffering. Underneath the headlines is a common thread connecting the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Ukrainian protesters in the Maidan, and the Nigerian families still desperately seeking someone to #BringBackOurGirls. That common thread is corruption, Mary Beth Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, writes on The Mark News. […]
In the 1950s, Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Forbes Nash invented a Machiavellian game entitled So Long Suckers. To win, a player had to game, and ultimately betray, his adversaries. Today, as they sit in frozen trenches in what was once aptly named the Wild Fields, it looks as if the soldiers of the ‘Union of People’s Republic’ are the ones that have been played. […]
I am not a fan of the social-democratic tradition of foreign policy, especially when it comes to perpetually unsuccessful attempts of the Lithuanian left to “turn a new page in relations with Russia” and base their policies towards Poland on promises about name spelling. I dare say, however, that Dovilė Jakniūnaitė’s criticism of Lithuania’s foreign policy in 2014 is unfounded. […]
What could we say about Lithuanian foreign policy last year? Most would likely agree that it was visible, audible and active. These words define the form very well, but what could we say about the content? […]
Do Lithuania’s ethnic Russian citizens make integration into the society a priority or do they do quite the opposite, using the privileges of Lithuanian citizenship and leaning nevertheless toward Mother Russia? Is being Russian not just a question of blood and faith but also of identifying with Russian civilization and a fragmented nation that must be united? […]
The first day of this year is the first day of Lithuania with the euro. It is an unavoidable fact, although probably everyone is already tired of hearing the word euro. I must admit: it is certainly much better that the euro is not in everyone’s lips but in everyone’s pockets. Soon enough the currency change fever will go down and we will be less concerned with the pros and cons of having the euro than with having as many euros as we can. […]
What kind of a country bids farewell to its currency for the third time over less than 25 years? […]
It is often said that politicians make for strange bedfellows. Moreover, people are judged by the friends or partners they have in life. In that light, one really should question Rolandas Paksas’ judgement when he invited UKIP’s Nigel Farage to his Order and Justice party congress in Vilnius. […]
As the saying goes, a pessimist is just a well-informed optimist. Russia‘s president is able to get any kind of information, but this is not enough: it is important how this information is processed and used. One can judge from Vladimir Putin‘s 3 hours and 10 minutes long press conference, where he answered 53 questions, that his mind is protected from reality by a very dense sieve which only lets through information that he anticipates. The rest is rejected or modified in such a way that it becomes unrecognisable. […]
Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine is well-oiled. That’s more or less what our media concludes from the ubiquitous lies diffusing from the Russian TV channels. When you work in communications, the operation of this machine seems even more menacing because it’s not only the final result that you see. You understand perfectly from this result the amount of people, resources and impact employed. […]
In the ideological part of his annual address, Vladimir Putin explained how spiritual Russia was and that it would never succumb to the West that has been trying to ruin it for centuries. In the economic part of the speech, he gave the recipe of what should be done to maintain prosperity. […]
Currently it seems that the on-going Ukrainian–Russian conflict in the East of Ukraine is drawing to a possible end. However, it looks as if a newly minted ‘frozen conflict’ zone is poised to appear on the world map. While the end of active fighting might seem as a positive development, a ‘frozen conflict’ might actually pose even greater threats to international security. […]
The spread of the Ukrainian crisis has aroused strong reactions of the USA and the European Union against Russian interference in Ukrainian politics. Russia is a strategic market for Europe and the close trades and financial links have pushed the European Union in the direction of a more moderate and careful response, at first. Because of the stalemate in the dialogue between Moscow and Kiev and the threat of a Russian military intervention in Ukraine, the EU has aligned its plan sanctions against Russia with the USA one, between July and September. […]
At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day 2015 the bell will toll, heralding the start of a new year and a new era for Lithuania. Yet the fireworks and jubilation will play out against a backdrop of sadness as Lithuania’s national currency, the litas, dies a death. […]
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