President Trump’s interest in going to Moscow to celebrate the end of World War II worries NATO allies who fear that his visit might help the Kremlin mask aggression against Lithuania.
“It’s our worst nightmare coming true, actually, an American president going to celebrate something that is not a celebration for all the Soviet-occupied countries at all,” Dovile Sagatiene, a legal adviser to the Lithuanian Supreme Court, told the Washington Examiner. Sagatiene fears that an “unpredictable” Trump would make an agreement with Putin that might jeopardize Lithuania’s security.
Sagatiene’s comments were in response to Trump saying he might accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invitation to visit Moscow in May to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. “I am thinking about it,” Trump said on Nov. 9. “It’s a very big deal, celebrating the end of the war.”
But celebration is premature, the Lithuanian Defense Minister Raimundas Karoblis said Friday at his country’s embassy in Washington.
“The war is not over,” Karoblis said at an event highlighting Soviet crimes in post-war Lithuania. “At least for Lithuania and its Baltic sister countries, this fight remains a war with an opponent who has never followed the rules nor the customs of traditional warfare.”
During his presentation, Karoblis likened the Soviet Union to the Third Reich, equating them as totalitarian regimes that committed grave human rights abuses in the countries they occupied. As such, Karobilis argued against commending Russia’s role in ending World War II.
“We are not celebrating,” Karoblis said Friday.
The embassy event was a salvo in the “memory wars” that have erupted around the history of the Cold War. Putin touts the Soviet Union’s role in defeating the Nazis as a point of national pride. Simultaneously, Kremlin propagandists brand Russia’s critics in former Soviet vassal states as fascists and neo-Nazis. Karoblis rebutted that argument, while implicitly making the case against Trump’s trip.
“Up to the very day, the end of the Second World War in Lithuania has another meaning,” Karoblis said in his prepared remarks. “It was the beginning of our war against Soviet occupation and national genocide.”
Trump was not mentioned in formal remarks, but the officials and experts involved said privately that they are troubled by the idea of the trip.
Trump would not be the first American president to attend such an event. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush made similar trips during their presidencies. But Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine has stoked fear of aggression against other former Soviet satellite states.
“We can see this as a symbol of something happening. Something … new Ribbentrop and Molotov?” Sagatiene, the legal adviser, said, referring to the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement in which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to divide Europe. “It’s too strong to say this, but this symbolic gesture is very strong. It’s very strong.”
The embassy event put a spotlight on “the Nuremberg that never happened,” lamenting that Soviet officials were never prosecuted by the type of tribunal that punished Nazi human rights abuses. Karoblis, in explaining the reason for the event, departed from his prepared remarks by referring to “the time of Russian occupation” as opposed to the Soviet occupation.
