Authors

Rasa Cepaitiene¹;  ¹ Lithuanian Institute of History, Lithuania

Discussion

The report focuses on the reactions of Lithuanian politicians and historians to Russia's hostilities against Ukraine since 2014. It concentrates more on the use of the 2022 Ukraine war factor for domestic political purposes and in particular on developments in the field of historical politics. The latter is mainly related to changes in the evaluation of the memory and material legacy of the Second World War on Lithuanian territory. Two aspects are relevant here: 1) since 2012, accusations of Holocaust crimes against some of Lithuania's most prominent participants in the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet underground, both internationally and domestically, have become more frequent, and have proved to be unfounded or dubious; 2) the atrocities committed by the Russian army in Ukraine have led to a "third wave of monument translations", this time targeting the memorials and monuments to the Soviet soldiers from World War II. If the first aspect can be partly attributed to Putin's programme of "de-Nazification" of the countries of the region, the second one marks the efforts of Lithuanian society to finally purge its symbolic landscape of Soviet elements. This was also supported by the 2022 law on de-Sovietization, which will also be discussed in the report.