Russia was unexpectedly catapulted to the top of the discussion around the EU leaders’ table on Friday when Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda used his first intervention to warn about alleged efforts by the Kremlin to rewrite World War II history.
Leaders have gathered in Brussels for the first time in months to try to thrash out a deal on the EU’s landmark €1.82 trillion budget-and-recovery package. But before the agenda moved on to that, Nausėda warned fellow leaders about moves by Vladimir Putin’s government to minimize the Soviet Union’s occupation of neighboring countries during World War II.
“I would like to draw your attention to Russia’s recent revisionist actions to divide the world and rewrite the history,” Nausėda told fellow heads of state and government, according to a transcript of his remarks provided by Lithuanian diplomats. “All of us and EU institutions have to take necessary steps to give proper answer to those actions.”
Lithuania, and other countries, especially Latvia, Estonia and Poland, have complained in recent months about what they allege are efforts by Moscow to whitewash the history of World War II, in particular by minimizing the significance of the secret 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, agreed between Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Putin angrily denounced as “complete nonsense” a European Parliament resolution late last year that said the secret accord had helped pave the way to the war. That prompted Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to accuse Putin of deliberately lying about Poland’s role.
At the summit on Friday, Nausėda noted that a recently approved overhaul of the Russian constitution included a new provision on “historical truth” that makes it illegal for anyone to diminish Russia’s role in the war, and the Allied victory over Nazism.
“The developments in Russia are worrying,” Nausėda said, adding: “We consider these actions as directed against the sovereignty and independence of the neighboring states.”
He also expressed concerns about the Ostrovets nuclear power plant being built by Russia in Belarus, close to the Lithuanian border.
“Russia‘s attempts to establish a global order based on spheres of influence, not on the international law, is a threat to the whole democratic world,” Nausėda said. “The EU should send a clear signal that such actions would further impact EU-Russia relations.”
Arriving at the summit, Nausėda said: “We should choose more proactive policy, I mean European institutions, in order to explain to our Russian partners that we cannot tolerate such efforts.” He added, “Lithuania suffered a lot during the second World War and other countries, Baltic countries, Poland too.”
In the running feud, Putin has accused the Western Allies of placating Hitler. He has cited the 1938 Munich Agreement between the U.K., France, Italy and Germany which allowed Berlin’s annexation of the Sudetenland — a region of what was then Czechoslovakia with mainly German-speaking inhabitants — as a bigger factor in precipitating the war than the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
Regarding the main topic on the summit agenda — the budget-and-recovery plan — Nausėda said that Lithuania was generally supportive of the proposal. But he also said Lithuania would push for the EU to keep a promise made in 2013 regarding an increase in agriculture payments for countries that receive less than others.
“We know very well that we are lagging behind as amount of direct payments per hectare and we should increase this level,” he told reporters.