Budrys Wrote the Rule for Serbia. Lithuania Wrote Its Own Exemptions.

Lithuania’s foreign minister says glorification dishonors victims and falsifies history. At home, the LAF founder and the Šiauliai County chief who signed the Žagarė ghetto order have received certificates, procedural escape routes and heroic substitution.

On September 8, 2026, Lithuania’s foreign minister, Kęstutis Budrys, condemned the glorification of Ratko Mladić. Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reposted him. Budrys wrote: “Ratko Mladić was a convicted war criminal. His legacy is one of the Srebrenica massacre, genocide and crimes against humanity. Any attempt to glorify him dishonors the victims, disrespects the survivors, and falsifies [sic] the truth. History cannot be rewritten, and justice cannot be erased.” Lithuania stated the rule abroad while its own state memory system continued to publish exculpatory material about Kazys Škirpa, founder of the Lithuanian Activist Front, and Jonas Noreika, the Šiauliai County chief who signed the Žagarė ghetto order.

Mladić died on August 27, 2026 while serving a life sentence after convictions for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. At his September 7 funeral, Serbian army soldiers carried his flag-draped coffin and several serving ministers attended; the Serbian government had already sent a plane to return his remains from The Hague. Associated Press described the burial as a hero’s funeral with military honors. The European Union said glorification of convicted war criminals and genocide revisionism have no place in the EU or candidate countries. Budrys applied that rule to Serbia. Lithuania had already written almost the same rule for itself.

On March 19, 2016, the Holocaust sub-commission of Lithuania’s presidentially established International Commission condemned public commemoration where reliable evidence shows that a person participated “in any way” in the persecution or murder of Jews, regardless of later conduct. In 2023, Lithuania enacted the Law on the Prohibition of the Propagation of Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes and Their Ideologies, covering the Nazi as well as Soviet occupations. Under the statute, the Seimas forms the expert commission on the Genocide Centre’s nomination; the Centre provides its technical servicing; and after the commission reports, the Centre’s Director General issues the binding removal or retention decision.

Based on the record I have documented over decades, I do not regard the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC) as a presumptively reliable historical authority. In my assessment, its publications have repeatedly functioned as instruments of national historical advocacy and, in material instances, as vehicles for distorted or fictionalized history. Accordingly, I assign no independent evidentiary weight to a historical claim merely because it has been published by the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre. Any material proposition originating with the LGGRTC must be independently verified against primary documentation or credible external historical scholarship before it is relied upon. Until such verification is obtained, the LGGRTC’s assertion is treated as unverified and presumptively unreliable, with particular scrutiny for omission, selective quotation, exculpatory reframing, or factual distortion. Its admissions against its own exculpatory position are cited here for that reason.

On February 28, 2024, the interinstitutional commission, acting on a Vilnius City Council Historical Memory Commission request for a plaque on the Court of Appeal building at Gedimino Avenue 40, asked LGGRTC for a historical certificate. Activists installed an unauthorized plaque on June 21. Vilnius removed it on June 23. On June 25 the Centre issued Report No. 9R-598, signed by Director General Arūnas Bubnys and prepared by Alfredas Rukšėnas.

The report reproduces antisemitic LAF material, then concludes that Škirpa was not a collaborator, that no information connects him personally to the murder of Jews, that he publicly forbade persecution of Jews, and that the proposed plaque text was correct. For the supposed prohibition it relied on a June 25, 1941 report in the American-Lithuanian newspaper Draugas. LRT’s September 15 review recorded Saulius Sužiedėlis saying that no such prohibition appears in primary archival sources or memoirs and that contemporaneous Draugas issues contained numerous reports inconsistent with reality. Simonas Jazavita said the chronology did not add up: if Škirpa learned of the massacres only in 1942, he could not have forbidden them in 1941. Valdemaras Klumbys said the report’s source choices leaned toward exoneration and called for the same collaboration criteria to be applied to Nazi and Soviet occupations. A favorable newspaper item did work the archive did not.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community rejected Report No. 9R-598 on August 23, 2024 and invoked the 2023 law. On September 19, the commission failed to reach the two-thirds majority required for a statutory conclusion but unanimously recommended refraining from new memorial signs to Škirpa. In November, Bubnys said he could not decide because the commission’s conclusion “does not comply with the law” and asked it to produce a new “lawful conclusion.” The commission had already suspended its work in August after losing confidence in the technical servicing supplied by LGGRTC.

On June 27, 2025, the commission announced its resignation in corpore after repeated public expressions of distrust from senior political leaders. LRT reported the commission’s description of politicians who “stand as a wall” to defend remaining memorial signs to “the highest-level collaborators.” No replacement was appointed, so despite the resignation the members remained formally appointed until their statutory term ended on June 1, 2026. On May 31, 2026, chairman Vitas Karčiauskas told BNS that failure to form a new commission would create a legal gap; he said the Seimas had “simply ignored us” and called that “a consciously chosen position.” Arvydas Anušauskas’s separate Bill XVP-679, registered August 8, 2025 to impose 30-day replacement rules, is listed by the Seimas as rejected. On November 13, 2025, the Seimas voted 61 to 37, with six abstentions, to advance the governing Social Democrats’ bill abolishing the commission and transferring decisions to municipalities, which could still request historical and archival certificates from LGGRTC. The package was assigned to the National Security and Defence Committee. As of September 8, 2026, the principal bill remains pending and no successor commission has been named; the current consolidated Seimas resolution still lists the expired 2024 composition.

February request. June certificate. September deadlock. November refusal. June 2025 resignation. The law became known politically as the “de-Sovietization law”; a Centre certificate displaced the victim-centered rule; procedure displaced a merits decision. Soviet collaboration remains the familiar removal frame while a Nazi-era commemoration dispute passes through exemption and delay.

On April 11, 2019, the Holocaust sub-commission answered LGGRTC’s March 27 statement. It identified Noreika’s August 22 and September 10, 1941 orders as ghettoization and expropriation measures, recorded that nearly all the Jews assembled under them were later murdered, rejected “following orders” as a defense, and called the Centre’s exculpatory arguments and obfuscations “utterly unacceptable” and in some instances offensive to the victims’ memory. It also said Noreika’s later anti-Nazi activity was irrelevant to his documented anti-Jewish actions as Šiauliai County chief.

On December 17, 2019, LGGRTC dated a new certificate; on December 18 it announced that “Jonas Noreika organized the rescue of Jews in Šiauliai”. The Centre built the claim principally on Father Jonas Borevičius’s 1986 deposition in a United States denaturalization case. On December 19, 15min reported that the certificate’s author, Dalius Egidijus Stancikas, was a geologist by training and a publicist working in the Centre’s secretariat. On December 20, LRT reported criticism that his job description covered public relations and communication. On December 23, Alvydas Nikžentaitis called the certificate “void”; Nerijus Šepetys said it would receive a poor grade as student work. The signed ghetto and property orders remained. Later resistance and a rescue narrative were placed beside them as substitution.

In April 2019, IHRA’s chair, honorary chair and expert leadership expressed grave concern over the Centre’s Noreika treatment and said its rescue suggestion lacked evidence of his direct role. On September 21, 2023, Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan told the Seimas that zero tolerance must apply to the glorification of war criminals associated with the murder of Jews. He named Noreika, Škirpa and Juozas Krikštaponis. Lithuania had the rule, the warning and the names before Budrys sent the rule to Serbia.

The courts did not resolve the historical merits. The Vilnius Regional Administrative Court dismissed my case on March 27, 2019, Case No. eI-534-281/2019. On April 1, 2020, the Supreme Administrative Court dismissed the appeal because the requested revision did not concern LGGRTC activity falling within public administration and ordered me to pay €950 in costs. The Centre’s historical conclusion remained public; the administrative route produced no merits judgment.

Budrys wrote that justice cannot be erased. Lithuania had the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe. Of roughly 220,000 Lithuanian Jews, approximately 212,000 were murdered. The independent Lithuanian state has not punished any Lithuanian for the murder of Jews. Kazys Gimžauskas was convicted of genocide in 2001, but no sentence was imposed after he was found mentally incapable. Algimantas Mykolas Dailidė was convicted of crimes against Jews in 2006, but no sentence was imposed because of age and infirmity; on July 4, 2008, the Court of Appeals upheld that result and declared him “not dangerous to society.” The state’s failure to punish cannot be converted into proof that the people it commemorates were cleared by justice.

On May 12, 2026, Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Vidmantas Verbickas, in Letter Ref. (19.2.3)3-2806 to Congressman Brad Sherman, stated that describing Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis as having received “complete exoneration” in the United States was legally imprecise because the American disposition was administrative, not judicial. Ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis transmitted the letter the next day. On August 26, LGGRTC deleted one use of “rehabilitated” from a public Brazaitis text. Lithuania can correct state history when it chooses.

As of September 8, 2026, Report No. 9R-598 and the Centre’s December 2019 Noreika rescue announcement remain online. On August 18, 2026, LRT reported Bubnys’s nomination for the 2026 Prize of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience; PEMC later confirmed that LGGRTC itself made the nomination. The first round of voting closes September 10.

No Serbian propagandist wrote these Lithuanian documents. Lithuania’s own commission wrote the anti-glorification rule. Its Seimas wrote the statute. Its Genocide Centre wrote the certificates. Its courts supplied the procedural boundary. Its Foreign Ministry supplied the correction. Budrys supplied the standard.

Allies who accept Lithuania’s representations about its own history at face value are accepting certificates that the state’s own Holocaust sub-commission called “utterly unacceptable.”

Name the Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrator who served punishment for murdering Jews. There is no name to give.