Vilnius – Lithuania’s president likened the tactics of Russian President Vladimir Putin to those employed by Stalin and Hitler, and said in a magazine interview that Moscow was trying to persuade Baltic states to leave NATO in exchange for cheaper oil or gas.
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Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March said Putin’s incursion into Crimea was akin to moves Hitler made in the years before World War Two, though she said the following day that she was not making a comparison.
Asked whether such comparisons to Hitler or Stalin went too far, Dalia Grybauskaite told German news magazine Focus on Sunday: “(Putin) uses nationality as a pretext to conquer territory with military means. That’s exactly what Stalin and Hitler did. Such comparisons are spot on.”
Grybauskaite said Russia wanted to maintain its influence in territories that were once part of the Soviet Union and added it particularly wanted to keep the Baltic states dependent on it economically and in terms of energy policy.
She said Russia wanted the Baltic states – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – to become “unreliable members of NATO and the EU”.
“According to our information, there are Russian offers in other Baltic states to reduce the prices for oil or gas if these countries leave NATO,” she said.
Grybauskaite said the West should seek to become economically independent of Russia and diversify, because it was “too risky” for countries to continue to depend on Russia.
“Putin has a missionary vision to defend the eastern hemisphere. He has in mind a Russia like that of the time of Catherine the Great. His character has developed strangely,” she said.
The West has accused Russia of supporting the insurgency in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine that followed Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.
INVASION UNLIKELY
She said Russia and Putin were “characterised by aggressiveness, violence, and a willingness to overstep boundaries” and added that Baltic states and Poland “constantly” experienced this, with military exercises taking place almost every week in Kaliningrad, Russia’s western exclave.
She said a Russian invasion of the Baltic states was unlikely given their NATO membership, but added they needed to be better prepared so no one would even consider it.
She said they were increasing military spending and called on NATO to have more of a presence in the region in the future.
Baltic leaders said on Saturday they would back further sanctions against Russia at a European Union summit this week unless there was a de-escalation in eastern Ukraine where Kiev is trying to quell a pro-Russian insurgency.
Really, this is unfortunate to see that such evil from the past is courtesy call to realign the future. But in light of the Lithuanian excision from time’s incongruency of hate, we must really realize that the pain of her experiences and her people is such that such a “spot on” example might be a reality of what is really scary in a place where the hate and intolerance of today’s russia is only a footstep away.
Lithuania’s history during WWII reveals its affinity for Hitler. Lithuania and Latvia should be thrown out of the UN for their crimes during WWII
Putin is a brutal megalomanic dictator. But he is nothing like Hitler or Stalin. He is more like Czar Alexander II.
Lithuanian and Latvian SS divisions killed Jewish children , women and men during WWII. Their countries are the latrines of human society
I thought the Lithuanians liked hitler.
Russia and the Baltics committed evil acts such as murdering Jews in equal measure during the war, and Russia for much longer after the war. If on this basis we were to demand to exclude Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia from the UN or the EU or NATO or the so called “family of civilized nations” then we should as well exclude France, England and certainly Poland and Germany. It’s just that France’s and England’s crimes are older than Baltic’s, but that’s the only substantial difference.
If you can get past the notion that no member of any nation that treated us horribly in the past, you may realize that what Dalia has to say is worth listening to. Her nation was occupied by Stalin and his Russian successors 50 years, and she is in much better position than the wise men of this blog to recognize that Putin is an unusually, even for a Russian, evil man, cold blooded murderer, if not yet on the same scale as Stalin and Hitler, yimach shemam vzichram, and that he would, if he could, reconstitute the Soviet Union and reoccupy the lands that Reagan and Bush liberated. Her country most certainly included.