No Punishment for Dailidė. Up to Two Years for Fridman.
Lithuania has never punished a Lithuanian for the murder of Jews. It threatens a Jewish citizen with prison for speech.
On March 27, 2006, the Vilnius Regional Court found that Algimantas Mykolas Dailidė had intentionally and systematically persecuted Jewish civilians. The Prosecutor General’s Office requested five years in prison. The offense carried imprisonment from five to twenty years, or life. The court released him from criminal responsibility under Article 36.
The prosecution appealed. In 2008, the Lithuanian Court of Appeal upheld both the finding and the refusal to punish.
On October 30, 2025, the Vilnius Regional Prosecutor’s Office signed a 220-page indictment against Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania, over a Facebook post written after visiting his grandfather’s grave. Article 170² §1 carries up to two years’ imprisonment.
A country’s real criminal law is not the text of its code but the punishment its institutions choose to impose, and Lithuania’s institutions have made that choice twice on the same subject. Confronted with an adjudicated Lithuanian perpetrator of the persecution of Jews, they produced exemption. Confronted with a Jew who challenged Lithuania’s heroization of a state-recognized partisan, they produced a prosecution. Fridman is innocent, and the case against him is illegitimate. What follows measures the second file against the first.
What the courts found Dailidė did
Dailidė did not stand near the machinery that killed Lithuania’s Jews; he operated it. From 1941 to 1944 he served in the Vilnius district branch of the Lithuanian Security Police, the Saugumas. American courts found specific acts of persecution: he took part in arrests of Jews who had escaped the Vilnius ghetto, after which they passed into Saugumas custody and were handed to Nazi security forces. A federal court in Cleveland revoked his citizenship on January 29, 1997, after establishing that he had entered the United States in 1950 by telling immigration officials he had been a forester during the war. He left for Germany before a removal order could be executed, and the Eleventh Circuit later upheld the order. The United States established his removability. Lithuania imposed nothing.
The American immigration court recorded where that transfer led. The court found that the Jews Dailidė arrested were either shot at the execution pits at Paneriai, where its record estimated that approximately fifty thousand Jews were murdered, or returned to the Vilnius ghetto for confinement under conditions it described as “inhumane and grotesque.” Nearly all were ultimately killed. “Persecution” is the legal word; the pits at Paneriai are what the word names.
Lithuania’s own findings were separate and unambiguous. Its courts found that Dailidė arrested Jews, searched their homes, detained them, and seized two who had escaped the ghetto. The Court of Appeal confirmed that he had intentionally and systematically persecuted Jewish civilians. Two judicial systems, working from the same archive, reached the same finding.
Having proved the crime, Lithuania declined the sentence. The offense of treatment of persons prohibited under international law, under Article 100 of the Criminal Code, carried a five-year minimum and permitted life imprisonment. Prosecutors requested five years, the statutory minimum, saying that Dailidė’s age and illnesses justified seeking no more. His defense requested acquittal. The court rejected acquittal, found the offense proved, and then terminated the case under Article 36 of the Criminal Code without imposing a sentence. Article 36 permits release when changed circumstances have left the person, or the act, no longer dangerous.
Lithuania did not deny what Dailidė had done; the crime remained proved. It declared instead that the man who had systematically persecuted Jewish civilians had, through age, illness, and changed circumstances, ceased to be dangerous.
The exemption followed additional medical evidence and express consideration of the crime’s gravity. The Court of Appeal weighed Dailidė’s health, age, changed way of life, living environment, the expert conclusions, and the gravity of the offense. It then affirmed zero punishment. The appellate record expressly records the prosecution’s Article 36 challenge and the commissioning of further medical evidence. An American immigration judge, confronting the same passage of time, had reached the opposite conclusion: “Although sixty years have passed, it is important that [Dailide] be held accountable for his actions.” Confronted with the same elderly, ailing defendant, the American court treated elapsed time as no reason to abandon accountability. Lithuania used changed circumstances to erase criminal liability. The choice, not the calendar, produced the result.
The state legislated for accountability and delivered exemption
Lithuania cannot present age, illness, and absence as unavoidable procedural barriers. It had already amended criminal procedure twice to keep genocide proceedings alive despite those obstacles. On December 23, 1997, the Seimas amended procedure to permit a genocide case to continue despite the accused person’s medical condition. On February 15, 2000, it amended the code again to allow a first-instance genocide trial in the defendant’s absence. Alfonsas Eidintas, a Lithuanian diplomat and historian, described the second measure as without precedent in Europe or the world.
Those amendments did not abolish Article 36 and did not compel punishment in Dailidė’s case. What they establish is priority. A state that writes unprecedented procedure to keep wartime cases alive has declared that wartime accountability matters enough to bend its ordinary rules. When Dailidė’s case reached an adjudicated finding of intentional and systematic persecution, that same state reached for age, illness, and changed circumstances and imposed nothing.
Dailidė was not an isolated outcome but the pattern’s clearest instance. Aleksandras Lileikis, who commanded the Vilnius district Saugumas in which Dailidė served, died before judgment. His deputy Kazys Gimžauskas was convicted of participating in genocide in 2001 and received no penalty after a medical commission found he could not comprehend his actions. Adolph Milius, stripped of American citizenship for arrests of Jews carried out with Dailidė, died in Lithuania in 1999. Four Vilnius Saugumas officers lost their American citizenship and returned to Europe; none was punished by Lithuania. In Dailidė’s case the prosecution requested punishment and appealed when the first court imposed none, and the courts preserved the exemption anyway. The full record is in The Murder Was Administered.
What the state alleges Fridman did
Set against that record, the conduct Lithuania now prosecutes is a Facebook post. On May 9, 2024, Fridman visited Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius to honor his grandfather Aron Fridman, a Jewish soldier who fought Nazi Germany in the Red Army. He wrote a post praising those who fought fascism and questioning Lithuania’s heroization of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, whom the Seimas acknowledged on November 20, 2018 as “the Head of the Lithuanian State, which was fighting the occupation.” Ninety-one members supported the declaration; seven abstained.
The cemetery itself frames the charge. Ramanauskas-Vanagas lies in the Pantheon of State Leaders at Antakalnis. Fridman stood in that same ground to honor a Jewish grandfather who had fought the Nazis, wrote about the distance between the two men, and Lithuania answered with a criminal file. The honored partisan and the Jewish Red Army soldier lie in the same cemetery. Only the Jewish soldier’s grandson faces prosecution for what he wrote there.
The government’s own description of the charge completes the inversion. Lithuania’s diplomatic summary states that Fridman is charged under Article 170² §1 for public approval, denial, or gross trivialization of crimes committed by the USSR against Lithuania. A Jewish citizen honored a grandfather who fought Nazi Germany. Lithuania’s diplomatic account described the resulting charge as public approval, denial, or gross trivialization of Soviet crimes.
The procedural sequence is deliberate and documented. On January 8, 2025, it placed Fridman under a written pledge not to leave the country. On October 30, 2025, prosecutor Kristina Minko signed the indictment in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24 under Article 170² §1 and Article 313 §2.
Article 170² §1 provides for community service, a fine, restriction of liberty, arrest, or imprisonment for up to two years. Article 313 §2 is a misdemeanor, carrying community service, a fine, restriction of liberty, or arrest. The prison exposure comes from a single count, which forecloses any claim that it is an artifact of stacked charges.
The government confirmed the possibility of imprisonment in writing without stating the maximum prison exposure. In an April 13, 2026 letter to the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, Lithuania’s Consul General in Los Angeles confirmed both charges and stated that the provisions carry penalties including fines, restriction of liberty, arrest, or imprisonment. Dillon Hosier had asked for the exact penalty exposure. The government confirmed that imprisonment was available but did not provide the maximum term. Article 170² §1 supplies the omitted figure: up to two years. The same letter placed the case before the Vilnius City District Court as of that date.
Set the two ranges side by side. Dailidė faced a five-year floor and possible life imprisonment for an offense Lithuania’s courts found proved, and received zero. Fridman faces up to two years for an offense the state merely alleges. The floor for the systematic persecution of Jewish civilians stood at two and a half times the ceiling for Fridman’s alleged speech. Lithuania used none of the punishment available in the first case. It spent seventeen months and 220 pages building the second.
Lithuania’s tariff for words
Lithuania has already fixed the price of speech about Ramanauskas-Vanagas. In 2019, Viačeslav Titov was fined ten thousand euros after prosecutors sought imprisonment over statements about him, and he lost his elected office. The state has a working tariff for words about this figure, and it collects.
The same statute reveals its logic in what it declines to reach. Lithuania refused to open a pre-trial investigation into Valdas Rakutis after his January 27, 2021 International Holocaust Remembrance Day article attributed Holocaust perpetration to Jews. Article 170² was not invoked when Jewish complainants challenged speech accusing Jews. It was invoked when the accused was Jewish. Lithuania’s courts refused punishment for the adjudicated persecution of Jews; Lithuania’s prosecutors readily found criminal process for a Jew’s Facebook post. Speech about the state’s honored dead triggers criminal process. The persecution and murder of actual Jews produced no punishment.
The independence answer fails on Lithuania’s own record
Lithuania’s standing reply is to invoke the rule of law, judicial independence, due process, and fundamental rights, and the Consul General’s letter opens on that ground, asserting those protections are fully ensured. The assertion can be tested against the file the state itself produced.
Every state decision that produced the two outcomes at the center of this comparison belongs to Lithuania. Lithuania’s courts released Dailidė and preserved the exemption; Lithuania’s prosecutors brought the case against Fridman. The Vilnius Regional Court found the persecution. The Court of Appeal affirmed the finding and the exemption. The Seimas wrote the amendments. The Prosecutor General’s Office requested five years and appealed, and the courts preserved the exemption. Judicial independence can coexist with impunity. It places a decision beyond outside interference, not beyond judgment.
The letter states that Lithuania fully upholds freedom of expression, including open and critical discussion of historical figures and events. It immediately adds that Lithuanian law distinguishes legitimate historical discourse from denial or justification of totalitarian crimes. That distinction is not self-applying. The prosecution must prove that Fridman’s words crossed it; the government cannot convert criticism into criminal denial merely by repeating the statutory label. Yet the same diplomatic reply confirms criminal charges arising from his public discussion of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Lithuania stated the right, stated the exception, and used the exception against the critic.
After confirming the charges, the available forms of punishment, and the court hearing the case, the government turned to the author. The letter described my publications as taking a consistently adversarial position toward Lithuanian state institutions. It identified no error in the Dailidė findings, the Article 36 exemption, the sentencing ranges, or the charges against Fridman. I do not act for Artur Fridman, speak for him, or write at his direction. This comparison rests on American and Lithuanian judicial findings, Lithuanian statutes, and the Lithuanian government’s own correspondence.
The accusation is aimed at the state apparatus, not at Lithuanians as a people, and the record enforces the distinction. Gita Kaplan and her six-year-old daughter Fruma survived as long as they did because two Lithuanians, Adolfas and Juozapatas Domeikas, chose to hide them. The target is the institution that employed Dailidė and the postwar state that decided whom to punish, whom to excuse, and whom to honor. That institution generated the records preserving the names of victims later identified in American federal court: Gita and Fruma Kaplan, murdered on December 22, 1941; Chaja Lapyda; and Saulius Varsavskis, eighteen, one year into an economics degree. Their names survive because the apparatus recorded their arrests, imprisonment, transfer, and destruction as administrative work.
The state has published its priorities
The case against Fridman fails on its own evidence, but that is not the argument here. The prosecution’s own materials undermine its accusation, and the element-by-element case for dismissal is already public. This article rests on the comparison, which is what indicts the state.
Lithuania held an adjudicated finding that Dailidė intentionally and systematically persecuted Jewish civilians, and its courts imposed nothing. It has not punished any Lithuanian for the murder of Jews. Against that record of exemption, it assembled 220 pages to place a Jew before a criminal court for a Facebook post.
The evidence produced culpability and the courts produced exemption. That was the disposition for the man who persecuted Jews. For the Jew who challenged the state’s account of its honored partisan, the same state opened a criminal file and named a possible sentence. Lithuania has now shown, in its own courts and over its own signature, which of the two it is prepared to punish.
Case status stated according to the Lithuanian government’s letter of April 13, 2026. A public web search conducted on July 25, 2026 located no publicly accessible later disposition.
