Lithuania’s parliament has approved amendments to the country’s laws that stipulate relocating Soviet soldiers' burial places by including them in a list of public venues that promote banned ideology.
The amendments were initiated by residents of the Lithuanian city of Siauliai, who earlier called to relocate the remains of 52 Soviet soldiers buried at the entrance to the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.
Cases of vandalism against Soviet monuments in the Baltic states ramped up after the beginning of the Russian special military operation in 2022.
In Estonia, the Russian Embassy earlier this month expressed indignation about Tallin’s move to demolish the monument to Hero of the Soviet Union Yakov Lyakhov, which the Russian diplomats described as "another blasphemous act of vandalism" by local authorities.
The fact that the monument to Yakov Lyakhov was demolished reflects double standards of the Estonian government, who "pointedly cares for monuments to Nazis, in particular, those from the 20th Waffen-SS Division," the embassy stressed at the time.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova earlier said that the demolition of six steles to Soviet soldiers in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius in December 2022 is nothing but an attempt by the Baltic states’ authorities to settle historical scores with Russia and erase the memory of the Soviet Union’s victory in the 1941-1945 Great Patriotic War.
Commenting on the matter, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov slammed the incidents as "international insolence."
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, for his part, cautioned that the decisions made by the authorities in the Baltic states to demolish Soviet-era monuments would damage the fate of these countries. According to him, Russia condemns and does not accept the Russophobic position of the Baltic states’ leaders. "It will eventually dawn on people [in these countries] how absurd it is to fight against their history," Peskov pointed out.