Social Democrat candidate for prime minister Inga Ruginienė confirmed she had travelled to Russia after its annexation of Crimea and said she has family roots in both Ukraine and Russia.
Ruginienė, 44, currently serves as minister of social security and labour. In an interview with BNS, she said the trips to Russia were personal and occurred before the start of the war in Ukraine.
“I have visited [Russia] in my life, and I’m not going to hide that,” Ruginienė said. “My husband and I looked into the dates, because I suspected this question might come up. As far as we recall, we went in 2018 and possibly also in 2015. Both trips were purely private.”
She said her maternal grandmother’s family lived in Ukraine, and her grandfather was deported to Siberia following World War Two, where her grandparents met.
“After the war, the family split – it was the Soviet Union then – and a small part ended up in Russia,” she said.
Ruginienė acknowledged talks about her Russian accent but emphasised she was born in Lithuania.
“I was born in Trakai and grew up in Vilnius, in a neighbourhood where both Lithuanian and Russian were commonly spoken,” she said. “I spent every summer in my childhood in Ukraine, in the Kharkiv region, in the now-destroyed city of Kramatorsk. People spoke Russian there, not Ukrainian. I heard a lot of Russian – maybe that’s why my Lithuanian isn’t perfect, and why people raise questions.”
She emphasised that she maintained no ties with Russian trade union organisations during her tenure at the Lithuanian Confederation of Trade Unions, and declined to attend training events held in St Petersburg.
“There was a time when we, as trade unions, were part of the global organisation, the International Trade Union Confederation, which included Russia, until the war in Ukraine began,” Ruginienė said. “I was very glad that, in cooperation with our Scandinavian partners, we managed to remove Russian unions from these organisations. We now have a completely different composition.”
Ruginienė voiced firm support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion.
“There can be no other position,” she said.
On Wednesday, the presidium of the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP) nominated Ruginienė as its candidate for prime minister.
The party has been searching for a new candidate after former chairman and Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas stepped down amid growing scrutiny of his past and business dealings. Paluckas announced his resignation last week following a police search at his brother’s apartment.
Ruginienė was elected to the Seimas for the first time in October 2024 and was appointed minister the same year. She previously worked at the Lithuanian Confederation of Trade Unions and the Federation of Lithuanian Forest and Wood Industry Workers’ Unions.
Distant relatives in Moscow
Ruginienė later specified that her family ties in Russia consist of several “distant relatives” in Moscow.
“They are pensioners who live in Moscow. That’s all, I don’t know if there’s anything special to say about it,” she told TV3 on Thursday.
According to the politician, she hardly communicates with those relatives “for objective reasons”, such as divergent views on the war in Ukraine.
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