The Kremlin Method, Practiced in Vilnius
Lithuania’s Genocide Centre defends claims it knows to be false, answers evidence by designating the people who carry it, and has adopted the technique it condemns in Moscow.
Lithuania is right about Russia. The Kremlin chooses its conclusion first and disciplines the evidence afterward. It repeats claims after they are disproved and treats a document producing the wrong national meaning as an attack rather than a correction. The question is not whether something is true. It is whom the answer serves.
Lithuania knows that method intimately because it is one of Russia’s targets. That makes the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania worth examining. In the field where honesty was not optional, the Lithuanian state built the same machine and pointed it at its own archives.
Russia is an authoritarian aggressor. Lithuania is a democracy inside NATO facing a real enemy. Nothing here equates the regimes. This is about method, and Lithuania has documented the method itself.
The information-war designation is Lithuania’s
The Centre’s official competition for Director General required a permit to access information classified visiškai slaptai: top secret. A clearance may be legitimate where classified archives are held. It becomes revealing beside the language Lithuania uses to describe the institution.[1]
Council chairman Arūnas Streikus said the Centre was failing to exploit its opportunities in the contemporary geopolitical and information-war environment. Parliamentary committees questioned Donata Kabelkė about the Centre’s response to information-war threats. From the floor of the Seimas, the chairman of the Commission for Freedom Fights and State Historical Memory asked whether she was truly a person capable of working with secret information. [2]
Not whether she would withdraw false claims. Not whether disputed findings would survive independent review. Not whether evidence would prevail when it injured a national hero.
The question was whether she was reliable inside the security perimeter.
Historians ask what happened, what the documents prove, and what conclusion remains defensible. Combatants ask who is friendly, who is hostile, what strengthens the state, and what information must be contained. Lithuania calls the Centre a research institution but speaks about it as a combatant.
The standard I accept
Fraud is a serious word. Historical disagreement is not fraud. Interpretive error is not fraud. A wrong conclusion honestly drawn from thin evidence is not fraud.
Institutional historical fraud requires four things: a materially false representation of fact; decisive documentary correction delivered to the institution; the power to amend the record; and a continuing decision to distribute the representation as fact anyway.
That is the burden. Here are the counts.
Count one: Brazaitis
The Centre represented that Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis had been completely exonerated by the United States Congress. He was not. Congressman Brad Sherman told Lithuania so in writing in 2019, again in 2021, and a third time in March 2026. [3]
The Centre publishes its own findings and has never lacked the power to withdraw one. The claim stands.
A member of the United States Congress has informed Lithuania three times across seven years that its account of congressional action is false, and Lithuania carries the claim into American offices anyway. This is no lingering misunderstanding. It is a decision renewed whenever the correction arrives.
Count two: Škirpa
The Centre extended that imaginary American exoneration to Kazys Škirpa, founder of the Lithuanian Activist Front. His organization’s March 1941 instructions declared that it was important to get rid of the Jews and set as the objective that Lithuania free itself from them. [4]
The exoneration never existed for Brazaitis, so there was nothing for Škirpa to inherit. The Centre extended an invention to a man whose movement put its intention in writing before the German invasion. The extension stands.
Count three: Noreika
Jonas Noreika signed Šiauliai County Order No. 3687. It is not a Russian forgery. It sits in the Lithuanian Central State Archive at fonds R-1099, in Lithuanian, over his signature. [5]
Lithuania’s own international historical commission rejected the Centre’s exoneration in April 2019. The Centre did not correct the record. It returned to the file repeatedly, issuing seven affirmative rulings, and in December 2019 portrayed Noreika as a rescuer of Jews. In September 2023, Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan stood inside the Seimas and named Noreika, Škirpa, and Juozas Krikštaponis. [6]
Nothing was withdrawn.
Proof of intent
Seven rulings is not an error rate. An institution that got Noreika wrong once may have made a mistake. An institution that examined him repeatedly, received fresh evidence, and reproduced the same conclusion seven times did not make the same mistake seven times running.
Errors scatter. Seven identical outcomes is a policy being executed.
The Centre cannot plausibly claim ignorance. It has reviewed the documents, received the objections, and reaffirmed the result. Its refusal to correct is not the absence of a decision. It is the decision, taken and retaken under official signature.
Former director Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė described the institution’s epistemology herself. She said she was not a historian and spoke of requiring specialists to believe in the results of their research. She did not identify method, peer review, or openness to correction as the standard. She identified belief in the result. The Centre’s conduct has followed that formulation ever since.[7]
The method: designate, do not rebut
Russia’s durable technique is not merely forging documents. It is stripping genuine documents of authority when they produce the wrong meaning, by changing the question from whether a fact is true to whom its truth serves.
Watch Lithuania perform it.
In November 2015, the Centre published a statement describing critics of Lithuanian national heroes through a formulation rendered as “agents of the East, Jews, and other stupid people.”[8] In July 2018, it warned that my research might violate Lithuania’s Constitution and Criminal Code.[9] From the Seimas tribune, Mindaugas Puidokas called me an etatinis juodintojas, a salaried blackener of Lithuania.[10] At Butrimonys in February 2025, Laurynas Kasčiūnas called me a Russian agent and trash and shoved the historian working on the Noreika file seven times.[11]
There is no archival rebuttal in any of this. No forged document is exposed. No competing evidentiary chain is produced. The identity of the person holding the document is changed.
Once the critic has been designated a foreign agent, the archive no longer has to be answered. Moscow calls its critics Western agents. Vilnius calls Holocaust-accountability critics Russian agents. Both call unwelcome history an information attack.
The flags differ. The epistemology does not.
The asymmetry
Lithuania considers historical distortion serious enough to convict people over. On February 26, 2026, a Vilnius court convicted pro-Russian activist Erika Švenčionienė for minimizing Soviet crimes in her account of the Medininkai massacre. Prosecuted, tried, convicted, fined. [12]
I do not dispute that she distorted. The point runs the other way. Lithuania possesses the statute, prosecutors, expert witnesses, courts, and will. The machinery works.
Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania, wrote about Lithuanian historical memory at Antakalnis Cemetery and now faces a 220-page indictment under provisions addressing denial or gross minimization of international crimes. The state relies upon historical material produced by the Centre. [13]
When Soviet crimes against Lithuanians are minimized, criminal law wakes up. When Lithuanian participation in the murder of Jews is minimized, the institution doing the minimizing becomes the state’s historical authority.
This is the Genocide Equalization Doctrine at its terminus. It is not two memories protected equally. It is asymmetry disguised as equivalence: one memory defended with criminal law, the other handed to the body that falsified the American record.
Lithuania’s own council supplies the indictment
None of the following comes from me, foreign diplomats, or Russian media. Parliament created an expert council in 2024 to supervise the Centre.
In March 2026, the council told the Speaker and three parliamentary bodies that it could not obtain cooperation from the Centre’s leadership. Recommendations were ignored. Documents arrived days before approval deadlines or did not arrive. Requests were avoided. Streikus said there was no feedback from the leadership. Council member Algis Vyšniūnas said that de jure it was a research centre and de facto a bureaucratic institution. [14]
The council found that the Centre had operated without properly approved research directions until 2025. Of roughly 152 positions, approximately thirty performed historical research. It then declined to approve the Centre’s 2025 annual report.
A body with 152 posts and thirty researchers is not a research institution that slipped. It keeps a research department for display while doing something else.
The verdict Parliament delivered
The council conducted the first public selection in the Centre’s history, heard three candidates, and chose Donata Kabelkė by seven votes of nine. Streikus carried her nomination to Speaker Juozas Olekas on April 20. [15]
The mechanism produced an answer, and the answer was not Arūnas Bubnys.
On June 11, the Seimas rejected Kabelkė by secret ballot: 28 for, 43 against, 18 abstaining. Eighty-nine members voted and not one can be identified.[16]
The outcome is public. Responsibility is classified.
Bubnys’s term expired in April. He remains acting Director General.
The institution now has a director whose mandate has lapsed, holding office without a defined end; a successor selected by his statutory supervisors and rejected by Parliament; an annual report those supervisors declined to approve; and supervisors telling Parliament that they cannot obtain timely documents or meaningful answers from the leadership he heads.
On June 19, the council asked Parliament to examine the Centre’s 2024 and 2025 reports before staging another competition, recording that the committees had examined neither those reports nor the council’s own. [17]
Lithuania built an accountability mechanism, ran it once, and killed it when it returned an answer.
The reform was the alibi.
What I will not allege
I applied for the directorship on February 22, 2026, and sent a developed thirteen-page dossier directly to the council on March 6, two weeks before the deadline. Bubnys acknowledged it that day: “Got it, thanks.” [18]
On April 8, Streikus rejected the application because all required documents had not been submitted on time and in the proper manner. The letter identified no missing document and no defective submission method. [19]
The announcement required documents in Lithuanian and imposed signature conditions. The record does not establish that I was excluded because of my historical positions, and I will not manufacture a motive the documents will not carry.
The record establishes opacity. A state that rejects an application but will not identify the missing document or defective method has created no explanation capable of meaningful review.
Relief sought
Ordinary Lithuanians did not build this and are not charged with it. The responsibility belongs to named institutions and officials who received notice and chose preservation. The political class has spent a decade collapsing criticism of the state into hostility toward the nation, conscripting ordinary citizens as shields for officials who do not want their files opened.
Lithuania murdered its Jews at the highest rate in Europe. Roughly 220,000 lived there before the German invasion. Roughly 212,000 were murdered, between 95 and 96.4 percent. [20]
The institution charged with researching that history has defended men attached to persecution, dispossession, confinement, and murder. It has received the archives, historians’ objections, three congressional corrections, rejection by Lithuania’s own commission, the Chairman of Yad Vashem speaking inside Parliament, and the findings of its own supervisors.
The falsehoods remain.
At that volume of notice, silence stops being uncertainty and becomes the product.
No American official should cite this institution without disclosing its condition and independently testing its evidence. The Brazaitis claim, Škirpa extension, and Noreika rescuer claim should undergo independent international review. What cannot survive the record should be withdrawn. Any future appointment should be decided by recorded vote.
Moscow lies. So does the Centre. Neither excuses the other. Truth does not belong to Russia, Lithuania, the Seimas, the security services, national heroes, or an institution carrying the word genocide in its name.
It belongs to the record.
Lithuania has not punished a single Lithuanian for the murder of Jews.
[1] LGGRTC Council, announcement of the competition for Director General, updated February 19, 2026: https://www.genocid.lt/centras/lt/4843/a/. Archived notice: https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/02/Pranesimas-atrankai.docx.
[2] Arūnas Streikus on the Centre’s information-war environment and the parliamentary questioning of Donata Kabelkė: LRT/BNS, April 20, June 8, and June 11, 2026: https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/lietuvoje/2/2904174/lggrtc-taryba-genocido-ir-rezistencijos-tyrimo-centro-vadove-siulo-skirti-donata-kabelke; https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/lietuvoje/2/2954165/seimo-komisija-nepritare-kabelkes-kandidaturai-i-lggrtc-vadovus; https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/kultura/12/2957243/seimas-atsisake-skirti-kabelke-gyventoju-genocido-ir-rezistencijos-tyrimo-centro-direktore.
[3] LGGRTC Letter No. 55R-21 (February 26, 2018) stated that Congress and the INS had ‘completely exonerated’ Brazaitis. Congressman Brad Sherman identified the Centre’s repeated assertions and rejected them in correspondence delivered in 2019, 2021, and 2026: Congress on Brazaitis. Letter No. 14R-52 is not relied upon for this count.
[4] Lietuvos aktyvistų frontas, Nurodymai Lietuvai išlaisvinti, March 1941. LGGRTC Letter No. 14R-82 (October 11, 2018) applied the alleged American exoneration in its response concerning Škirpa and Brazaitis.
[5]Šiauliai County Chief Order No. 3687, signed by Jonas Noreika, Lithuanian Central State Archive, fonds R-1099.
[6] The seven affirmative ruling dates are 1997, 2015, 2018, 2019 (two rulings), 2020, and 2024; see the primary-document chronology. The International Commission rejected the March 2019 exoneration. The Centre published the December 2019 rescuer certificate. Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan named Noreika, Škirpa, and Krikštaponis in the Seimas on September 21, 2023.
[7]Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė, then Director General of the LGGRTC, interview with LRT, December 27, 2019.
[8] LGGRTC statement of November 16, 2015. Contemporary report and English translation: https://vilnews.com/2015-11-20832.
[9] LGGRTC correspondence of July 22, 2018, catalogued in the Lithuania litigation inventory: https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/05/Lithuania_litigation_listing_as_of_5-5-26.pdf.
[10] Mindaugas Puidokas, Seimas plenary sitting, April 1, 2021. Official stenogram: https://e-seimas.lrs.lt/portal/legalAct/lt/TAK/15b0a821931411eb998483d0ae31615c.
[11] Laurynas Kasčiūnas, Butrimonys, February 2025. Contemporaneous account in Grant Arthur Gochin, ‘Selective Justice in Lithuania’: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/selective-justice-in-lithuania/.
[12] Vilnius court conviction of Erika Švenčionienė for minimization of Soviet crimes, February 26, 2026; discussed in ‘Selective Justice in Lithuania,’ The Times of Israel, February 27, 2026: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/selective-justice-in-lithuania/.
[13] Vilnius District Prosecutor’s Office, indictment, Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24, October 30, 2025, pp. 7–9, reproducing LGGRTC Letter No. 13R-645 in the evidentiary record. Background and source record: Truth Is a Crime in Lithuania.
[14] LRT/BNS, March 22, 2026 (cooperation, documents, research directions, and staffing); LRT/BNS, June 19, 2026 (the unapproved 2025 report and request for parliamentary review).
[15] LRT/BNS, April 20, 2026, reporting the Centre’s first public director-selection process, Kabelkė’s nomination, and support from seven of nine Council members.
[16] Seimas secret ballot, June 11, 2026: 28 in favor, 43 against, 18 abstaining. LRT/BNS: https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/kultura/12/2957243/seimas-atsisake-skirti-kabelke-gyventoju-genocido-ir-rezistencijos-tyrimo-centro-direktore.
[17] LGGRTC Council letter of June 19, 2026, asking Parliament to assess the 2024 and 2025 reports before another selection: https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/kultura/12/2968095/lggrtc-taryba-pries-nauja-vadovo-atranka-seimui-reiketu-ivertinti-veiklos-ataskaitas.
[18] Formal application filed February 22, 2026: https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/formal-application. The March 6 dossier was acknowledged the same day by Arūnas Bubnys: ‘Got it, thanks.’
[19] LGGRTC Council refusal of April 8, 2026, signed by Arūnas Streikus: https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/04/Gmail-Ats._-Ats._-Formal-application.pdf.
[20] Dov Levin, The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews in Lithuania (Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 240–241, documenting approximately 220,000 Jews in Lithuania before the German invasion, approximately 212,000 murdered, and a destruction rate of 95 to 96.4 percent, the highest in Europe.
