Russia has added Kamilė Šeraitė, an adviser to the Lithuanian minister of defence and a member of Vilnius City Council, to the list of wanted persons, according to the Russian media outlet Mediazona. The politician is an active advocate of removing Soviet-era monuments and street names and chairs the Historical Memory Commission.
The Russian Ministry of the Interior has announced that Šeraitė is “wanted under an article of the Criminal Code”, but it is not clear what charges she is facing.
Implementing the recently passed “desovietisation” law, Vilnius City Council announced in July it would seek to rename the names of streets and squares named after Soviet-era writers, including Liudas Gira, Salomėja Nėris, and Petras Cvirka. The Historical Memory Commission, chaired by Šeraitė, is in charge of it.
“We are looking at what these symbols say to us in today’s context. With this decision, we are scrapping the memorial plaques in Russian and replacing them with the new standard Vilnius memorial plaques. We will get rid of the imprints of the hammer and sickle ideology,” she said back then.
Moreover, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova earlier this week threatened Lithuanian Foreign Ministry Gabrielius Landsbergis with criminal prosecution for allegedly calling for a change of government in Russia by force.
“This is not the first time that Landsberg has allowed himself to express such extremist ideas, which is why he has already been added to the list of people banned from entering our country,” lenta.ru quoted Zakharova as saying.
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