Russia has placed Lithuanian Culture Minister Simonas Kairys, Klaipėda Mayor Arvydas Vaitkus, and several dozen other Lithuanian politicians and public figures on its wanted list, Mediazona, a Russian independent news website, reported on Tuesday.
Mediazona says it has collated publicly available information on wanted persons – almost 100,000 wanted notices – from the Russian Interior Ministry’s database.
It has emerged that Russia has announced a “search” for 29 Lithuanian citizens linked to the dismantling of Soviet monuments and the January 13 Soviet crackdown case.
“Lithuanian officials are under similar scrutiny, with 25 individuals, including Klaipėda’s Mayor Arvydas Vaitkus, his deputy, 13 city council members, officials, and two historians who supported monument demolitions, appearing in the wanted database,” the Mediazona report reads.
“Six Vilnius city council deputies and the Culture Minister Simonas Kairys faced similar persecution for dismantling a Soviet soldier monument,” it adds.
Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas is also included in the wanted database. It also featured former Latvian Interior Minister Marija Golubeva, 67 Latvian MPs, 15 members of the Riga City Council, and others.
The database does not indicate under which legal article the search was declared. However, the Kremlin announced on Tuesday that it had placed Estonian prime minister and other Baltic officials on the wanted list for hostile actions against Moscow.
“These are people who are taking hostile actions against historical memory and our country,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
‘War zone’
Lithuanian culture minister, included in the wanted list, says that Russia is continuing to fight against democracy and human rights.
“I’m glad that my work to dismantle the ruins of Sovietisation has not gone unnoticed,” Kairys told BNS on Tuesday.
“On a serious note, the regime is doing what it has always done: it is trying to stifle any breath of freedom, to fight against democracy, against human rights and freedoms, and to continue to create its own story that does not fit any facts or logic,” he added.
According to the minister, culture, heritage, and memory “are also a war zone in which imperialism pursues its own goals”.
“My duty as culture minister is to prevent the achievement of these malicious goals, to prevent the distortion of these themes both in Lithuania and in the international arena,” Kairys said.
Later, the minister told journalists that he had learned about the case from the media.
Last year, the desovietisation law came into force in Lithuania prohibiting the promotion of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and their ideologies in public spaces.
As a result, symbols of totalitarianism and authoritarianism – monuments, street names, square names, and other symbols – started to be removed from public spaces.
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