The LRT Investigation Team and DebunkEU.org have analysed a disinformation network disseminating pro-Russian narratives in Lithuania about the war in Ukraine. Seemingly run by a handful of individuals, it comprises over a hundred Facebook groups and pages linked to movements, politicians, and esoteric religious communities.
The investigation focused on pro-Russian disinformation on Lithuanian social media over the first two months of the war in Ukraine. In all, LRT Investigation Team and DebunkEU.org looked at 194 Facebook groups and pages. Analysis shows that 105 of them make up networks that fall into four blocks. They differ in the intensity of pro-Russian rhetoric.
Block 1 comprises 41 pages and groups linked through administrators and main authors: Laurynas Ragelskis, Marius Jonaitis, Jonas Kovalskis, Kazimieras Juraitis, Dmitrijus Glazkovas, Algirdas Paleckis, Erika Švenčionienė, Vaidas Žemaitis Lekstutis. This group of channels has long been posting content that praises Russia, Vladimir Putin, the USSR, Stalin. At the same time, it denigrates Lithuania, the European Union and NATO.
Block 2 has 28 Facebook groups and pages. Although administered by different pages and fictitious profiles, they are run by one person, Rimantas Janavičius, who has so far managed to keep a low public profile. In addition to pro-Russian and pro-Soviet content, this block also includes groups that are seemingly unrelated to politics: sales ads or book groups.
Block 3 is linked to the Family Movement, a loose network of people and groups who were behind a series of rallies opposing pro-LGBTQ+ legislation and pandemic restrictions last year. Although the 19 groups and pages in this network share less openly pro-Russian content, some posts are critical of Ukraine and blame the US for causing the war. There are users, however, that criticise pro-Russian posts. Pages and groups in this block often promote more general conspiracy theories, such as “the Great Reset” which alleges that a “group of world leaders orchestrated the pandemic to take control of the global economy”.
Block 4 comprises 11 Facebook groups linked to the Lithuanian People’s Party, a marginal political grouping that got 0.25 percent of the vote in 2020 parliament elections and advocated leaving the EU. The most popular topic discussed in these groups – lowering requirements for calling a referendum.
Spreaders of Russian narrative
To varying degrees, all these Facebook groups and pages were spreading messages justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, diverting attention from attacks on civilians in Mariupol and elsewhere. Another group of posts were directed against Ukrainian refugees coming to Lithuania.
One popular video purportedly showed a Ukrainian driver assaulting a Lithuanian man because his car had Russian license plates. Comments accompanying the video suggested Lithuania should not accept refugees. It is unclear who first posted the video. In early April, the pro-Russian groups shared links to the 2016 documentary Donbass by a French reporter, Anne-Laure Bonnel, alleging that Ukrainians were killing peaceful residents of the eastern regions since 2014.
Two messages spread particularly wide, in terms of likes and shares on social media. On February 25, the second day of the invasion, one of the biggest pro-Russian disinformation pages Russkaya Litva (Russian Lithuania) shared a video of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying that Ukraine was violating the rights of Russian speakers.
The post garnered some 23,000 comments and 73,000 reactions. Closer analysis showed, however, that at least some of the reactions came from fake accounts, presumably to boost the post’s visibility on Facebook.
Russkaya Litva was created in late 2020 by Vladimir Kirilenkov and, according to analysis, is administered from Belarus. It posts exclusively pro-Kremlin propaganda messages and disinformation.
Another runaway post appeared on April 5, the day after the world learned about atrocities against civilians in Bucha. The Facebook page of Minfo, a website administered by Marius Gabrilavičius-Maksimalietis, posted a video in which Artur Sita – a self-identified wellness and consciousness guru – shares his thoughts about the Ukraine war. He alleged that closed-door peace negotiations were focused on economic issues rather than peace and that, unbeknownst to them, Russians and Ukrainians were killing each other for money.
The post garnered 121,000 reactions, which is three times more than the Minfo page has followers and an unusually high number for any Lithuanian Facebook page. There were some 4,400 comments under the post, but most of them appeared to be automatically generated from fake profiles.
Spirituality, Stalin, and disinformation
Rimantas Janavičius, an otherwise little-known personality, is behind a network of 28 Facebook groups and pages, some of which post pro-Russia, pro-Soviet and anti-Lithuanian, anti-EU content. However, other pages he administers apparently have nothing to do with that, including groups for sales ads, expat Lithuanian communities, and pages about spirituality. However, even here periodic posts promote the disinformation channels and pro-Kremlin messages.
One of Janavičius’ pages is called Sveikatos Harmonija su Belojar (Health Harmony with Belojar). According to its official page, Belojar is a method developed by merging ancient Slavonic wisdom with the knowledge of contemporary Russian psychiatry. One of its coaches is Natalya Erkelenz, who also runs a publishing house, Baltosios Gulbės (White Swans). In addition to esoterica, it publishes revisionist history books about Stalin by Nikolai Starikov, including Who Forced Hitler to Attack Stalin? and Stalin. Remembering Together.
Erkelenz herself, who posts pro-Stalin messages on her social media, is a follower of Anastasianism, an esoteric religious movement inspired by a book series of the Russian author Vladimir Megre. One of the tenets of the movement is setting up kinship homesteads, land parcels allowing families to live without reliance on modern urban civilization.
The movement has followers in Lithuania, too. According to their website, there are 14 Anastasianist settlements in Lithuania where they are setting up kinship homesteads and schools for children.
Another new-age community centres around the so-called “Sovereign World” ideology and is led in Lithuania by Žilvinas Užkuraitis, who calls himself an ayurvedic nutritionist and is the founder of the Naujieji Lažai Community in Kėdainiai District, central Lithuania. The community issues its own alternative passports, IDs, birth certificates, and even car license plates.
Užkuraitis, his son Adas Užkuraitis, and another associate, “life coach” Gintaras Lunskis were in the self-appointed “citizen delegation” that went to Minsk on May 9 and met with the authoritarian Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko. According to Lunskis, the Lithuanian government is deliberately trying to provoke war with neighbouring countries.
Other members of the delegation are linked to the former politician Algirdas Paleckis, who has recently been convicted on spying for Russia charges, and his unofficial party, Tesingumo Aušra (the Dawn of Justice).
Defending family with conspiracy theories
The social media network linked to the Family Movement is the least openly pro-Russian. The movement emerged after the Big Family Defence March last year, a rally opposing the Istanbul Convention and initiatives to introduce same-sex civil partnership. Most of the Facebook groups were created to coordinate the event and self-organise transportation.
Most of their content initially focused on LGBTQ+ issues, the civil partnership bill, but also pandemic restrictions, Covid-19 vaccination and the green pass. However, the groups also started spreading popular conspiracy theories, such as the Great Reset, injecting people with tracing microchips, or reducing the world’s population.
Groups linked to the Family Movement also regularly post links to known Russian propaganda channels, such as Sputnik, Russia Today, or Baltnews. They also spread disinformation from Lithuanian sources, including Respublika and Minfo.
At the outset of the Ukraine war, these groups remained silent on the topic. However, there soon appeared posts critical of Lithuania’s support for Ukraine, asking why it showed no solidarity with victims of the wars in Syria or Yemen.
The Family Movement groups also started spreading conspiracy theories about Ukraine, such as those suggesting that the war was coordinated to coincide with the Covid-19 pandemic or that Putin attacked the country in order to stop the “Great Reset”. Later on, the groups started posting comments about Ukrainian neo-Nazis or the alleged genocide of Russian-speakers in Donbas by the Ukrainian government.
However, many members in these groups regularly criticize pro-Russian posts about Ukraine.
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