On May 9, 2024, a Jewish citizen of Vilnius went to Antakalnis Cemetery to stand at the grave of his grandfather Aron Fridman, who fought Nazi Germany in the Red Army, and posted on Facebook. Seventeen months later prosecutor Kristina Minko signed a criminal case against him. The pre-trial file runs to roughly 220 pages. On August 26 the Vilnius City District Court sits again in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24.

Artur Fridman is innocent and the prosecution against him is illegitimate. He is charged under two provisions. Article 313 §2 concerns defamation of a deceased person and is not my subject. My subject is Article 170² §1, and the test Lithuania’s own Supreme Court has given it.

The provision’s official English heading is Public Condonation of International Crimes, Crimes Committed by the USSR or Nazi Germany against the Republic of Lithuania or Inhabitants Thereof, Denial or Gross Trivialisation of the Crimes.[1] I set out its fifteen-year construction in Lithuania Built the Memory Crime.

The post was written in Russian on Victory Day. It reads, in part:

“Separate gratitude and respect to the citizens of Lithuania, grandfathers and fathers, who fought against the fascist filth and against the forest bandits. Despite the fact that enemies of the people have for many years tried to rewrite history and to make heroes out of bandits, all adequate people know that the greater part of Lithuanians fought on the side of the Red Army, and did not hide in the forests and did not rob and did not kill their own and did not take part in the genocide of the Jews.”[2]

And on the man at the center of the case: “All those who heroize Adolfas Vanagas apparently do not know that this pseudo-hero, born in America, collaborated with the KGB and handed over all his cutthroats.” It closes on his grandfather, who went to the front as a volunteer, and on four hashtags, the last of which is freedom of speech.

Forest bandits. After Paleckis that phrase carries obvious Article 170² significance, and I am not going to walk past it.

On December 9, 2025, seven weeks after Fridman was charged, the Supreme Court of Lithuania upheld the Article 170² conviction of Algirdas Paleckis. The ruling is final and not subject to appeal.[3] The path there is worth noting. Kaunas District Court acquitted him under that provision in November 2024. Kaunas Regional Court quashed the acquittal and convicted in March 2025. Lithuanian judges did not agree about where the criminal line falls.

The Court set out the elements. The prohibited speech is condonation, denial or gross trivialisation of specified crimes, and liability arises only where it is delivered in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner, or where public order was disturbed as a result. The first of those limbs is where the Court did its work.

International crimes, it held, may be denied or minimized not only in direct language but through omissions, and behind cautious formulations or hypotheses that do not change the substance of what is being said. Denial of significant and proven circumstances — among them the persons responsible, the scale and the consequences — is essentially equivalent to denial of the crime itself. The Court took those propositions from Strasbourg and applied them to Paleckis: he assigned the partisans only negative motives, passed over in silence the aim of the resistance, shifted responsibility to the United States, produced a victim figure unsupported by research, and mentioned the destruction of the resistance only in the abstract without specifying the number of Soviet victims. Characterizing partisans as criminals, the Court said, corresponds to the occupying power’s own assessment of the partisans as bandits.

Lithuania has therefore given itself a serious analytic instrument. It does not require a numerical denial. It reaches silence, framing, cautious wording, misattributed........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)