Free Republic

TURKEY will let Sweden into NATO once they are allowed to buy F-16 fighter jets from the US. Referring to the F-16 plan and Sweden’s application to join the Alliance, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is reported as stating this Tuesday, September 26: ‘If they fulfil their promises, our parliament will also fulfil its own and take its steps accordingly’ Pointing out that the Turkish parliament has the final say on Sweden’s NATO membership, Erdogan stressed: ‘When the issue comes to the agenda of parliament, we will see together what the decision will be’, according to aa.com.tr. Speaking on the Presidential...

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) – Lithuania on Monday announced that it will expel Russia’s ambassador and recall its envoy in Moscow in reaction to increasing signs that Russian forces may have committed war crimes in Ukraine. The Baltic country also decided to close a Russian consulate in the port city of Klaipeda. “Lithuania strongly condemned the atrocities committed by the Russian armed forces in occupied Ukrainian cities, including the brutal massacres in Bucha. All war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian armed forces in Ukraine will not be forgotten,” Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said in a statement...

Lithuania said Wednesday that it has closed its embassy in Beijing and pulled its last diplomat out of the Chinese capital, a move that came amid a spat over the European Union nation allowing Taiwan to open a representative office in its capital, Vilnius. The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the Baltic country would carry out its diplomatic activities in China, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory and does not give diplomatic recognition to nations that treat the island as a separate state. The ministry said it had recalled Lithuania's charge d'affaires — the deputy...

A recent surge in illegal migration into Lithuania represents a hybrid attack on that country and the region and European Union as a whole, defense minister Kalle Laanet (Reform) says. Laanet said Friday that: "Lithuania is our close ally, and our duty is to support them immediately in this crisis." "We are also ready to send three unmanned aircraft crews to Lithuania from August 1 to improve situational awareness at the border," he added, according to a defense ministry press release. Laanet made the remarks during a phone call with his Lithuanian opposite number Agnė Bilotaitė, while both ministers agreed...

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a document that became the "last prelude" before the outbreak of World War II. After 80 years, we’ll try again to look back into the past and remember how it all happened. At the end of June 1939, negotiations on the normalization of relations between the Soviet Union and Germany began. In July, there was the talk of a trade agreement and a plan to improve relations between countries, which included political rapprochement. During a meeting with the military on August 14, Adolf Hitler announced his intention to start a war with Poland, since "UK and...

Crowd sourcing please. I was listening to a BBc news feed in a ny cab about clashes with Russia and NATO - now I see nothing. Weird BBC reports Vilnius declares state of emergency. Bbc reporting clashes between NATO and Russia. "Something Major underway"

The consistent theme from my travels so far in Europe– the UK, Scandinavia, Lithuania– has been noticeably higher prices. Shockingly so, in some instances. London, where I spent a rather pleasant and rare sunny weekend with friends and colleagues, has gone from being ‘stupid’ pricey, to just plain absurd. Tube prices, taxi fares, food prices, restaurant bills, train fares… it all keeps going up. And to cap it all off, the British government’s VAT increases have ensured that absolutely everyone is paying a little bit more. Here in Lithuania, the buzz around town is the spiraling gasoline prices, which have...

A pistol-wielding guard, his snarling alsatian, a blinding spotlight in my face... why did I spend £25 to be tortured in this freezing KGB bunker? As a snarling alsatian growls at my heels, straining at its leash, the fierce KGB interrogator barks in harsh Russian for me to face the wall for a terrifying search. Once cleared, I am herded with the rest of this ragtag band of ‘dissenters’ to salute the Soviet red flag, our threadbare gulag-issue jackets offering scant protection against the biting Baltic chill. We are told to stop thinking ‘because the party will do that for...

If there were those in the West who hadn’t heard about Lithuania before, they almost certainly had by the end of the day, January 13, 1991. That was the day Soviet troops cracked down in Vilnius and the resulting bloodshed made headlines around the world. The action was apparently a bid to stop Lithuania’s independence drive in its tracks. By the time the firing stopped and the smoke cleared, more than a dozen people lay dead, and hundreds more were injured. The crackdown, and particularly the killings at the TV tower, not only brought fame and sympathy to Lithuania from...

February 27, 2007 -- Edward Cardinal Egan pulled a fast one on a lower Manhattan parish pastor yesterday, summoning the priest to meet with him - then dispatching security guards to permanently lock the cleric's church doors. The priest returned to Our Lady of Vilnius to find himself locked out - a brusque Egan move that left parishioners stunned and saddened. The cardinal's move also occurred right before a scheduled meeting with Lithuania's consul general, who was set to make a plea to save the church, parishioners and the Archdiocese of New York said. "Cardinal Egan again shows his true...

Vice President Dick Cheney recently visited Eastern Europe the following are links to his speeches and a photo essay of the trip. I WOULD RESPECTFULLY REQUEST THAT NO PHOTOS OR GRAPHICS ARE POSTED UNTIL I GIVE THE ALL CLEAR SO THAT WE KEEP A CHRONLOGICAL RECORD OF THE TRIP. QUOTE OF THE VISIT Vice President's Remarks at the 2006 Vilnius Conference Reval Hotel Lietuva Vilnius, Lithuania America and all of Europe also want to see Russia in the category of healthy, vibrant democracies. Yet in Russia today, opponents of reform are seeking to reverse the gains of the last decade....

VILNIUS - Few countries are so fortunate as to have an archaeological treasure trove preserving 10 millennia of human settlement. A discovery so impressive that it bears comparison to the Greek city of Troy, which had been consigned to myth until late nineteenth-century archaeologists dug up a hill in Turkey proving its existence, and showing that a stack of eight cities had been built on top. In the 1970s, Lithuanian archaeologists began following up rumours of a magnificent ancient city, stumbling across a site about 35 km from Vilnius unscathed by war and industrial development, which many now call Lithuania’s...

Two Sides of the Same Coin 15 December 2004 Zygmunt Błażejewicz and Tadeusz Cynkin—soldiers on opposite sides of the front line in World War II—are part of Poland’s complicated past. Both men were linked to cities belonging to Poland at the time, in its eastern borderland: Błażejewicz to Vilnius and Cynkin to Lviv. Both took part in the fighting of 1939, two of many defenders against German and Soviet aggression when, after Sept. 17, 1939, both Vilnius and Lviv were invaded by the Red Army. ■ War paths Błażejewicz avoided arrest and fought from 1943 in a unit led by...

No Big May Day Celebrations in Lithuania TodayBy Andrew L. Jaffee, May 1, 2003 You won't find any big May Day celebrations today in downtown Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. This country suffered brutal Russian communist occupation for 46 years. How many other peoples suffered (or are still suffering) under "socialism?" Why aren't Lithuanians celebrating May Day? There are still those die-hards clinging to the Marxist dream of a proletarian paradise. Today, those dreamers are celebrating May Day. In Berlin and London today, the dreamers got violent. Strange that people in developed, democratic societies overloaded with social programs and...