‘Putin [is] a war criminal, and his gang is other war criminals — they are very determined for very long confrontation.’
‘Putin [is] a war criminal, and his gang is other war criminals — they are very determined for very long confrontation.’
A top Lithuanian official warned that the Kremlin’s ambitions, driven by a “fascist ideology” espoused by Vladimir Putin and those around him, will not stop at Ukraine. Russia, he said, is bracing for a prolonged confrontation with the West that no peace deal is capable of halting.
“We still hear some voices that maybe we can find some solution, some sort of peace agreement, and then probably, that could lead us to business as usual,” said Lithuanian vice foreign minister Egidijus Meilūnas. “That thinking is very dangerous, because Putin being a war criminal, and his gang is other war criminals, they are very determined for very long confrontation.”
He added that Russia is aided in its assault on the world order by China — whose defense minister Dong Jun recently made comments abandoning Beijing’s previous claims to neutrality in the conflict. Other dictatorships, such as North Korea, are playing a more direct role in arming Russia, he said, adding, “That is really very difficult and very dangerous situation.”
Meilūnas, the country’s second-most senior diplomat, delivered these warnings during an interview with National Review today, against a worrying backdrop. The war in Ukraine is grinding to a virtual stalemate, and Congress remains slow to approve new U.S. assistance for Kyiv’s war effort. Meanwhile, a Russian military reorganization could set the stage for the opening of new fronts. Estonia’s foreign intelligence service recently assessed that Russia might double the number of troops on its border, while also surging forces to its border with Finland in the coming years.
“What is most dangerous in Russia today is a totalitarian state. Putin and his gang of criminals [are] controlling 100 percent. And they were very successful to indoctrinate Russians with this — we must name a spade a spade — fascist ideology, which they call ‘Russian World,’ in the Russian language ‘Russkiy Mir,” he said. He tells Western officials that Russia is now a totalitarian state.
Meilūnas said he first encountered this concept of Russian World in 1997 after reading The Foundations of Geopolitics, by Aleksandr Dugin. Some analysts argue that Dugin is the architect of Putin’s worldview. Meilūnas said the book was being taught in Russian schools for military officers when he read it. He believes that Dugin’s influence helps explain Russia’s willingness to inflict brutal attacks on Ukrainian civilians:
The core of the Russkiy Mir, Russian World, is the thesis of Russian supremacy of [the] Russian nation against other nations and the idea that they have some special civilizational mission. And that means, again coming back to this textbook from 1997, that other nations just have no right to exist and the only choice for them to survive is just to join [the] great Russian nation. That is fascist ideology, and 80 percent of Russian people today openly support Putin. That’s a very dangerous situation.
Meilūnas added that reaching a “mutually beneficial solution” with Russia would only encourage further aggression.
To foreign audiences, Putin has tried to tamp down on the perception that he has any territorial ambitions beyond Ukraine. During his interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin explicitly denied that he will one day attack Poland or other NATO countries.
Asked about this, Meilūnas alleged that Putin was lying. He cited Russia’s accession to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, according to which post-Soviet Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for security assurances from Moscow:
Two decades later, we see what it means when Russians guarantee your security — they attack you and kill you. That is Russian understanding of protecting security of other people of other nations. My message to American friends: Never trust Putin, never trust Russians. They are lying.
Yet U.S. skepticism of support for Ukraine’s war effort is rising, and congressional efforts to pass a tranche of new funding for Ukraine have stalled. Meilūnas said that Lithuania remains optimistic that the U.S. will continue to support Ukraine, though, and that his government — which spends over 2.7 percent of GDP on defense — is working to convince Western skeptics of NATO. “We’re trying also to say to our Western partners that there are not so many options to stop Russia, in fact only one: to support Ukraine and to stop Putin right now.”
Meilūnas also told National Review about Lithuania’s growing diplomatic push in the Indo-Pacific. Before traveling to New York, he met in Tokyo with officials from the U.S., Japan, and other Baltic countries this week. There was agreement that Chinese aggression against Taiwan must be a “red line,” he said.
In 2021, Lithuania was the first country to exit an economic partnership between China and 17 European countries. The same year, Beijing imposed punitive trade measures on the country after it invited Taiwan to establish a representative office in Vilnius. Lithuania has no regrets, according to Meilūnas, who noted that last year, 86 percent of Lithuanian-origins exports went to “likeminded countries,” with only 0.9 percent going to Russia, China, and Belarus.
“Many governments have started to think and to speak loudly about ‘de-risking’ with regard to China, but our suggestion is to seriously think about decoupling,” to decrease dependence on the country, Meilūnas said.