“The war of fakes and provocations” is, unfortunately, continuing.  Special services, either Russian or Belarusian, posted a video on the Internet to cause a stir among the Lithuanian society and provoke it to put pressure on Lithuanian politicians so that they would restrict rights of Belarusian refugees in Lithuania even more.

The provocation itself is not a very sophisticated one. In a short video (which is available at Our House), three gunmen in a camouflage holding machine guns, with faces covered with masks, in a bunker-type room, are saying a prepared text in the Lithuanian language.

The essence of their statement is as follows: allegedly, they are Belarusian migrants, who have escaped from the regime of Lukashenka and are now fighting it with arms in their hands, and are also defending Ukraine. And those gunmen said that they don’t like that the MPs of Lithuania are allegedly “taking away historical memory from Belarusians” by forbidding Belarusian migrants to discuss ideas of the so-called “Litvinism” and also by appropriating the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the benefit of the modern Republic of Lithuania.

Moreover, the authors of the text have piled everything up: the fabled “Litvinism”, training bases in Poland and Lithuania, weapons, the head of Our House Olga Karach, “Pagonia” and Navahrudak. They finished with a couple of insults addressed to ancestors of the modern Lithuanians and with a threat of physical violence against Lithuanian officials.

The International Centre for Civil Initiatives Our House and personally its director, Olga Karach, declare that we strongly reject and do not support such statements. We consider such threats against the deputes of the Seimas of Lithuania to be a direct provocation aimed at planting and inciting hatred between people of Belarus and Lithuania in this hard, critical historical moment. The history of the Great Duchy of Lithuania should be discussed by scientists-historians at conferences, and not by anonymous gunmen in a concrete bunker.

It is a classical provocation typical both of the Kremlin and of the enforcers working for the regime of Aliaksandr Lukashenka. By the way, the authors slipped up, after all. The gunmen are holding AK-100 (100 series Kalashnikov assault rifle). In our region, they are in service only with Russia: neither Ukraine, nor Belarus, nor Lithuania, nor Poland have them.

“People, be vigilant!” – this mid-twentieth century slogan, unfortunately, still remains relevant today. Do not succumb to this kind of provocations!

Our House