Lithuania has spent decades telling the world what is wrong with Russia. The description fits Vilnius.

On August 17, 2026, a Moscow court sentenced Romas Liutkus, a Lithuanian citizen, to seven years in prison in absentia, and barred him for five years from administering websites and telecommunications networks. The convictions were for damaging soldiers’ graves outside Russia and for insulting the memory of Soviet soldiers. He received no summons. He learned of the verdict from press reports.

Liutkus had removed three Lithuanian-language plaques from a communal cemetery in Krekenava, in the Panevėžys district, where 119 Soviet soldiers killed in 1944 are buried. He says he damaged no grave and handed the undamaged plaques to the local elder. Lithuanian police investigated. So did the Department of Cultural Heritage. Neither found a violation of Lithuanian law. In 2024 Lithuania’s own Desovietisation Commission concluded that the monument at that site, an obelisk topped with a star bearing inscriptions in Lithuanian and Russian, breached Lithuania’s statutory prohibition on promoting totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

One obelisk. To Lithuania, an unlawful glorification of a totalitarian regime. To Moscow, the same monument generated two criminal convictions, including one for insulting protected memory. The stone did not move.

The second conviction treats the memory of Soviet soldiers as legally protected and makes a citizen’s contrary assignment of historical meaning a matter for criminal law.

Six years ago I published “Lithuania and Russia: Two Peas in a Pod?” Moscow has now supplied the test.

Lithuania’s own charge sheet

On April 7, 2020, the Seimas adopted Resolution No. XIII-2847, “On Historical Revisionism Perpetrated by the Russian Federation” (Draft No. XIIIP-4563), unanimously, with ninety-seven votes in favor. The Seimas condemned Russian historical revisionism and disinformation deployed to deny the Soviet role in starting the Second World War and to shift blame onto the victims of aggression. Presenting the draft, Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius told parliament that the end of that war brought Lithuania........

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