Two Peas in a Pod, Six Years Later
Lithuania has spent decades telling the world what is wrong with Russia. The description fits Vilnius.
On August 17, 2026, a Moscow court sentenced Romas Liutkus, a Lithuanian citizen, to seven years in prison in absentia, and barred him for five years from administering websites and telecommunications networks. The convictions were for damaging soldiers’ graves outside Russia and for insulting the memory of Soviet soldiers. He received no summons. He learned of the verdict from press reports.
Liutkus had removed three Lithuanian-language plaques from a communal cemetery in Krekenava, in the Panevėžys district, where 119 Soviet soldiers killed in 1944 are buried. He says he damaged no grave and handed the undamaged plaques to the local elder. Lithuanian police investigated. So did the Department of Cultural Heritage. Neither found a violation of Lithuanian law. In 2024 Lithuania’s own Desovietisation Commission concluded that the monument at that site, an obelisk topped with a star bearing inscriptions in Lithuanian and Russian, breached Lithuania’s statutory prohibition on promoting totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.
One obelisk. To Lithuania, an unlawful glorification of a totalitarian regime. To Moscow, the same monument generated two criminal convictions, including one for insulting protected memory. The stone did not move.
The second conviction treats the memory of Soviet soldiers as legally protected and makes a citizen’s contrary assignment of historical meaning a matter for criminal law.
Six years ago I published “Lithuania and Russia: Two Peas in a Pod?” Moscow has now supplied the test.
Lithuania’s own charge sheet
On April 7, 2020, the Seimas adopted Resolution No. XIII-2847, “On Historical Revisionism Perpetrated by the Russian Federation” (Draft No. XIIIP-4563), unanimously, with ninety-seven votes in favor. The Seimas condemned Russian historical revisionism and disinformation deployed to deny the Soviet role in starting the Second World War and to shift blame onto the victims of aggression. Presenting the draft, Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius told parliament that the end of that war brought Lithuania a second Soviet occupation rather than liberation.
On May 18, 2026, Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry recorded that Minister Kęstutis Budrys had raised with the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities his concern at Russia’s rewriting of history and its destruction of the memory of those killed by the Soviet totalitarian regime.
Three months later, a Moscow court sentenced Romas Liutkus to seven years on two counts, one of them insulting the memory of Soviet soldiers.
Those are Lithuania’s charges against Russia. Apply the charge sheet in Vilnius.
The state owns the meaning
Article 170² §1 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code criminalizes public approval, denial or gross trivialization of designated historical crimes, including crimes committed by the USSR against Lithuania or its residents, where the conduct is threatening, abusive or insulting, or where public order was thereby disturbed. The penalty runs to a fine, restriction of liberty, arrest, or imprisonment for up to two years. Article 313 §2 separately criminalizes publicly disseminating false fabrications about a deceased person capable of causing contempt or undermining respect for that person’s memory. It is a criminal misdemeanor carrying public works, a fine, restriction of liberty, or arrest.
Lithuania has charged Artur Fridman under both.
On May 9, 2024, Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania, went to Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius, where his grandfather is buried. His grandfather fought Nazi Germany. Fridman wrote a Facebook post praising those who fought fascism and challenging Lithuania’s elevation of the partisan commander Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas to head-of-state commemorative status.
On January 8, 2025, Lithuanian authorities imposed a written pledge restricting his departure from the country. On October 30, 2025, seventeen months after the post, the First Division of the Vilnius District Prosecutor’s Office, within the Vilnius Regional Prosecutor’s Office, filed the indictment in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24 under Article 170² §1 and Article 313 §2. The counts are legally separate. Failure of the Article 170² charge would not by itself dispose of Article 313 §2.
Article 313 §3 sets a further condition. Liability under §§1 and 2 arises only on an injured person’s complaint, a legal representative’s statement, or a prosecutor’s demand. The indictment records that Algirdas Ramanauskas complained on July 16, 2024, and elsewhere records no data under “injured party.” The public file does not resolve whether Ramanauskas was treated as the injured person for purposes of Article 313 §3 or whether prosecutors relied on another statutory gateway.
Artur Fridman is innocent. Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24 is illegitimate. The accusation runs against the state that filed it.
Seventeen months is not a reflex. The prosecution made a decision.
April 6 and April 7
April 6, 2020: Lithuania’s Supreme Administrative Court held in administrative case No. eA-1768-624/2020 that my demand to compel the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre to research and revise its historical conclusion on Jonas Noreika did not concern activity classified as public administration, and terminated that part of the case.
April 7, 2020: Lithuania’s parliament unanimously condemned Russia for historical revisionism.
The direction of the statute
When Seimas member Valdas Rakutis attributed perpetration of the Holocaust to Jews in an article published on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2021, Lithuanian authorities declined to open a pre-trial investigation. When Fridman challenged Lithuania’s heroization of Ramanauskas-Vanagas, Article 170² appeared in a 220-page indictment. That is the Selective Enforcement Index reduced to two files.
Lithuania had the highest murder rate of Jews in Europe. The Lithuanian state has never punished a Lithuanian perpetrator of the murder of Jews.
Algis Vyšniūnas, a member of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre’s own Council, wrote in LRT in July 2025 that the Centre is de jure a research centre and de facto “some kind of bureaucratic office”. He asked who could deny that it is an institution of managed historical memory. In 2018 the Centre warned that the conclusions I sought could possibly violate Lithuania’s Constitution and other laws. Seven years later, prosecutors charged Fridman.
The answer Lithuania will give
Lithuania is not Russia, and the reply will arrive in that shape: free elections, NATO, the European Union, an independent judiciary, an independent prosecution service, IHRA membership, academic freedom, a research centre rather than a ministry of truth, an annual day of remembrance.
None of it reaches the point. The independent judiciary held that my demand to compel revision of the Centre’s Noreika conclusion did not concern public administration. The independent prosecution service declined to investigate Rakutis and indicted Fridman. IHRA membership does not answer the Centre either: in 2019 the Chair of IHRA, its Honorary Chair Yehuda Bauer, and the chairs and recent chairs of its expert working groups and committees expressed “grave concern” at the Centre’s justification of Noreika’s wartime conduct toward Jews, and set the Centre’s text against IHRA’s own Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. Academic freedom does not explain a travel restriction imposed in the criminal case arising from a private citizen’s Facebook post.
The comparison was never between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Lithuania across every characteristic. It is between what each government believes it is entitled to do with the past. Different heroes. Different victims. The same claim of ownership.
The mirror
Lithuania’s case against Moscow supplies the principle. It condemns Russian historical revisionism and the reassignment of blame through a state historical narrative. Apply that standard at home. A monument does not become truthful because a state protects it. Naming a man a hero does not settle what he did. Criminal prosecution does not settle a historical dispute.
Russia is not the subject of this article. Russia is the mirror Lithuania has been holding up since 1990, and Lithuania told us what to look for in it: managed history, protected heroes, institutional mythology, and a prosecutor standing at the edge of permissible speech.
Lithuania left the Soviet Union in 1990. The Soviet proposition that historical truth belongs to the state did not leave with it.
