“The Lithuanian ambassador to the US has received Walmart management’s letter containing a pledge to remove merchandize with Soviet symbols from sale soon,” Rasa Jakilaitienė, spokeswoman for the foreign minister, told BNS Lithuania on Tuesday.
The Lithuanian ambassador and politicians from the three Baltic states had recently called on Walmart to remove T-shirts and other items of clothing with the hammer and sickle and the USSR sign from sale.
They said that “hundreds of thousands of our citizens were killed, exiled, tortured, raped, separated from their families” after the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania.
Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union during WWII and the Soviet deported over a quarter of a million of people from the country to forced labor camps and remote areas of the Soviet Union. Over 20,000 partisans and their supporters were also killed during an armed resistance.