Lithuanian center unable to find specialist to calculate Soviet occupation damages – daily

“We cannot pay the salary Latvians receive in this field. We do not have a person who would only do this job,” Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė, director of the center, told the daily.

In her words, the center would pay a salary just above the average and the researcher with sufficient experience and motivation would have to search for and analyze archival documents. Burauskaitė said the center would need a historian for the task for at least a year.

She said the center’s staff were doing some of the work in the field: “However, not to the extent we need a single person do, if he was just doing this. It is a complicated field.”

Gatis Krūmins, rector of Latvia’s Vidzeme University of Applied Science, said during a visit in Vilnius last year that Lithuania used to earmark about 6 percent of its budget to the Soviet Union, which proves that Lithuania and other republics were donors, not dependents of the Soviet Union.

In June, Russia’s Ambassador to Lithuania Alexander Udaltsov stated Russia would not consider possible compensation of damages caused to Lithuania by the Soviet rule, adding that it was Russia that was entitled to compensation of 72 billion US dollars in Soviet-era investments in the Baltic state.