“These were my hypothetical reflections. If you read the interview, you saw that the words I used were ‘could have’, ‘can’. These were hypothetical,” Paulauskas, the chairman of the parliamentary National Security and Defence Committee, told LRT on Monday.
In an interview to LRT.lt in early April, Paulauskas suggested that Russian troops could have landed near the village of Juodkrantė on the Lithuanian part of the Curonian Spit during a military exercise.
He was commenting on a statement in a recent national security report claiming that “there are signs that Russia’s special military units are conducting peacetime penetrations into foreign states”.
“This is all they said to the Committee [of National Security and Defence] – that there is some likelihood that it has happened. How high is the likelihood is hard to tell, because the evidence has not been verified 100%,” Paulauskas then said.
Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevičius said he could not comment on classified information, but added that “the services responded promptly and adequately”.
President Dalia Grybauskaitė later said that politicians should not be commenting on classified intelligence data.
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