Lithuania’s culture minister wants entry bans for artists performing in Russia, Belarus

Lithuania’s culture minister has backed a proposal to bar artists who perform in Russia or Belarus from staging concerts in the Baltic country, saying recommendations alone are no longer sufficient.

Culture Minister Vaida Aleknavičienė said she plans to discuss possible legislative changes with the Foreign Ministry later this week.

“We have a meeting scheduled with the Foreign Ministry this Friday to discuss the issue, explore the options and possibly start talking about introducing legal provisions or restrictions so that this would be set out in law,” Aleknavičienė told BNS.

“The same situation keeps repeating year after year and causes serious problems. Recommendations alone are not enough, so we probably need to take a more serious approach and consider regulating this by law,” she added.

Earlier this week, Vilnius Mayor Valdas Benkunskas urged parliament’s Committee on National Security and Defence to amend legislation to prevent artists who perform in Russia and Belarus from holding concerts in Lithuania.

Benkunskas has proposed changes to the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens to include public cultural, entertainment, commercial or other activities carried out in Russia and Belarus after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as grounds for an entry ban.

He said event organisers are often driven by profit and stressed the need for national-level legal tools to curb what he described as the spread of “hostile states’ soft power” in Lithuania.

Last week, Interior Minister Vladislav Kondratovič banned Russian rapper Georgiy Dzioyev, known by his stage name Gio Pika, from entering Lithuania.

The ban was imposed under the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens, which allows Lithuania to bar a foreign national from entry for up to five years if there are serious grounds to believe the person actively supports or participates in actions by a foreign state that violate international law.

Lithuania added Russian rapper Alisher Morgenshtern to its blacklist last November. The performer challenged the entry ban in court, but his complaint was rejected.