Vilnius has expressed a “strong protest” after Russian authorities closed down The Jurgis Baltrušaitis House, a Lithuanian cultural centre in Moscow.
The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry said it summoned a diplomat from the Russian Embassy on Wednesday and presented a protest note following reports that the Russian authorities imposed restrictions on a cultural centre run by the Lithuanian diplomatic mission in Moscow.
According to a press release by the Foreign Ministry, it received information on Wednesday morning that Russia’s Federal Agency for State Property Management (Rosimushchestvo) had “restricted access” to the Jurgis Baltrušaitis House.
The ministry provided no further comment to BNS on Russia’s actions regarding the museum.
Russia suspended the activities of the cultural centre in Moscow back in 2022, along with its decision to expel Lithuania’s ambassador Virginija Umbrasienė.
The Jurgis Baltrušaitis House used to host cultural events for Lithuanians living in Moscow and Russian intellectuals.
Baltrušaitis, after whom the centre is named, was a symbolist poet and diplomat who lived in Moscow in the early 20th century. Writing in Lithuanian and Russian, he associated with figures like Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, and Konstantin Stanislavsky. His writings and translations are part of the canon of both Lithuanian and Russian literature.
In the protest note, the Foreign Ministry said it referred to the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations that maintains premises used by diplomatic missions to be “inviolable” and out of reach for “the agents of the receiving state […], except with the consent of the head of the mission”.
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