Putin’s drive to rewrite history traps a retired Lithuanian judge

Then the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant Last year, a Moscow court launched a surprise counterattack for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, ordering the arrest of a 70-year-old retired judge in Lithuania.

The judge, Kornelija Maceviciene, was not connected in any way the case against Mr Putin in The Hague or on investigations into Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Her “crime”, as the Moscow court sees it, was handing down “unjust” guilty verdicts against former Soviet officers, almost all of them Russian, for their role in the brutal crackdown on pro-independence demonstrators who had gathered at a television tower in Vilnius . , the Lithuanian capital, on January 13, 1991.

In a bloody episode that helped seal the demise of Soviet power, fourteen demonstrators – one of them a young woman crushed by a tank – were killed and hundreds of others injured when Soviet troops stormed the tower in a failed last-ditch attempt to prevent Lithuania escapes Moscow’s grip.

After examining extensive evidence showing who ordered the use of lethal force in 1991 and who carried out the order, Ms. Maceviciene and two fellow judges ruled in 2019 that dozens of Russians, along with some Ukrainians and Belarusians, were guilty had committed crimes against humanity, war crimes and other crimes.

That has put her in the crosshairs of Russian authorities, who are wedded to Putin’s view that the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about the unjust “disintegration of historic Russia” – a concern that forms the core of his military attack about Ukraine.

Setting the record straight – as Putin sees it – depends on redefining the demise of Soviet power as a tragic injustice in which Russians were innocent victims, never perpetrators, of violent crimes in defense of the Moscow empire.

And achieving that means overturning, or at least discrediting, the guilty verdicts handed down by Ms. Maceviciene in Lithuania against former Soviet military and security officials.

Ms Maceviciene’s sentence was “manifestly unjust”, according to an August ruling by the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, which ordered her immediate arrest. Two fellow judges and the lead Lithuanian prosecutor in the Vilnius TV tower case have also been declared criminals and placed on Russia’s wanted list for “persecuting” Russians.

In an interview in Vilnius, Ms. Maceviciene expressed her disbelief and concern that Russia, more than 30 years after the bloodshed at the TV tower, is now trying to extract inconvenient facts and punish her for her assessment of the events of 1991.

“I really don’t understand their logic,” she said. “The facts of the case are clear.”

Saulius Guzevicius, a former special forces commander and expert on hybrid threats, said Russia’s pursuit of judges and prosecutors in recent months was a years-long campaign “to rewrite the history of 1991 and discredit us as fascists.” has escalated sharply.

“They are sending us a message: ‘We never forget those who stood against us,’” Mr. Guzevicius said. During the 1991 Vilnius confrontation, he was part of a security detail assembled by pro-independence activists to protect the Lithuanian legislature.

Under Putin, Russia has gone to extraordinary lengths to present itself as a guilt-free victim of Western powers and foreign “fascists.” rewriting history books and punishing historians who delve into Moscow’s past crimes.

Yuri Dmitriev, an amateur historian in northwestern Russia found a mass grave containing hundreds of people murdered by Stalin’s secret police, was jailed for 13 years in 2020 on what his family dismissed as trumped-up charges of pedophilia. Pro-Kremlin historians claimed, against all evidence, that among the bodies were many Soviet soldiers killed by Finnish fascists.

Lithuania, which was brought into the Soviet Union in 1940, was the first Soviet republic to declare its independence from Moscow. In March 1990 it set an example that was later followed by Ukraine and thirteen others.

For Putin, that process, which culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, was a disaster. the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.

Lithuania’s efforts to hold accountable those who took part in the 1991 Vilnius massacres began with a 1996 trial of six Lithuanians who had collaborated with the Soviet military.

Of the 67 suspects convicted by Ms Maceviciene and fellow judges in 2019, only two appeared in the dock: Yuri Mel, a Russian tank commander; and Gennady Ivanov, another Russian officer in the Soviet army.

The others, including former Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Dmitry T. Yazov, were found guilty in absentia of using “military acts against civilians prohibited by international humanitarian law” and sentenced to years in prison. Marshal Yazov died a few months later in Moscow at the age of 95.

Vilmantas Vitkauskas, director of Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Center, said Moscow did not really expect to get its hands on Lithuanian judges and prosecutors and was involved in a “psychological operation aimed at spreading fear and caution” to deter others from trying to hold citizens accountable.

Among those Russia wants to deter, he said, are Lithuanian prosecutors and police officers active in international investigations into war crimes in Ukraine. “They are sending a message: don’t mess with Russia,” he said.

Russia has also opened criminal cases against three judges and the chief prosecutor in The Hague who were involved in the case against Putin.

For Lithuania, a Baltic nation that shares a border with Russia’s Kaliningrad region, getting the facts straight about 1991 is not just a matter of defending the country’s heroic, peaceful resistance, but also of national security .

Like other former Soviet countries, Lithuania has always had some citizens who regret the end of Moscow rule. But the war in Ukraine has turned what was once seen as a largely harmless fringe into a source of serious concern.

Russia’s large-scale invasion, justified on the pretext that Moscow had a duty to protect Ukrainians from fascism, has caused great alarm in the Baltic states that pro-Kremlin groups, however small, are from Moscow could invoke. That’s what happened in 1991 when a so-called Civic Committee made up of Soviet loyalists in Lithuania begged Moscow to intervene to crush “fascists” seeking independence.

Last year, a court in Vilnius ordered on security grounds the liquidation of the Good Neighbors Forum, a small group of mainly left-wing activists seeking good relations with Moscow and the departure of NATO troops.

Erika Svencioniene, a member of the forum, was charged in December endangering national security by “helping Russia and Belarus and their organizations to act against the Republic of Lithuania.” In an interview in her hometown of Jieznas, southern Lithuania, she denied working against her country and accused the West of luring the country into an unnecessary confrontation with Russia.

“We were given Western sweets, but they turned out to be very bitter,” Ms Svencioniene said. “I know there is no democracy in my country,” she added.

Algirdas Paleckis, co-founder of the forum, is a former left-wing MP whose grandfather was the puppet leader of Soviet-occupied Lithuania in the 1940s.

Before the grandson was found guilty of spying for Russia in 2021, he was at the forefront of a Russian-orchestrated campaign to deny that Soviet military personnel were responsible for the 1991 bloodshed. He insisted that Lithuanian nationalists were secretly sniping at the TV tower had sent to shoot their own supporters.

As Putin took an increasingly authoritarian and nationalist turn over the past decade, Moscow went beyond defensive denials and went on the offensive, with Russian intelligence gathering confidential information on Lithuanian prosecutors and judges involved in the TV tower case.

Among the helpers on the scene was Mr. Paleckis, who was jailed for five and a half years for espionage after it emerged that he had collected information about where the prosecutors lived and other personal data at the behest of Russian intelligence. He denied working for Russia and said he had collected information for a book.

Simonas Slapsinskas, one of the prosecutors targeted by Russian intelligence, said he was unnerved by an announcement in September by Russia’s Tass news agency that he was wanted by Moscow for criminal charges over his “persecution” of those involved when storming the television. tower.

He has stopped traveling abroad, he said, and has limited his family vacations to the territory of Lithuania. “The whole family has had to restrict their movements,” he said.

Ms Maceviciene, the retired judge, has also curtailed her travels.

She said she was appalled that Russia would try to undo established facts. Regarding her own position as a target for Russian revenge, she added: “I don’t know whether to cry or be proud.”

Tomas Dapkus reporting contributed.