Justas🇱🇹

We live in a weird world nowadays. I would accept a leader who embraces the weirdness to navigate the current situation.

But I would never vote for right wing populists.

Russia will be issuing them all “work” visas soon enough.

Some languages depend not on a specific order of words in a sentence and everyone you meet on the internet is not a speaker of native English.

The Russians should know better than leave their stuff unattended in rural Romania.

For context, LRTK is an oddly authoritarian institution which, for example, tried to make every Lithuanian content creator and also others to register as a television network and every online commentator to adhere to journalist’s code of ethics.

Ah yes Russia, please antagonise the country with one of the highest artillery shell stockpiles and production capacities in the world, what bad thing could result from that?

Yes, but now their propaganda machine can say that they want to stop the war.

You can’t really destroy an insurgency via military means. See: Iraq, Afghanistan.

Same with Lithuanian Visvaldas Matijošaitis, owner of Vici group and mayor of Kaunas.

Yep, in their mind Russia is great and is the future. Meanwhile, countries west of them are decadent and temporary.

To play the devil’s advocate, Poland and the Baltic states received a lot of third country refugees (from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, etc.) from Russia and Belarus before the war in Ukraine.

It was a hybrid warfare campaign where Russians would advertise how easy it is to cross the border and how good life is on the other side. They would also help them get to the border.

Those refugees quickly overran Baltic refugee centers and caused political instability.

Most of Eastern European politics can be boiled down to “Pro-western elitists vs. pro-russian populists”

Meanwhile, Vilnius-Lublin portal is working with no incidents.

The armoured assault shed has shed it’s skin in an act of wartime ecdysis, like a scrapyard butterfly.

We were never out of it.

A nation is easier to define by what it is not, than by what it is.

Lithuanian nation since 1860s became defined as “those who refuse to be Polish”.

All that Putin has done is made it easier for Ukrainians, collectively say “we are Ukrainian, because we refuse to be Russian.”

Lithuania instead built its own liquefied natural gas terminal, named “independence”, which allowed it to break from its dependence on Russian gas.

Independence is not the name of the terminal, it’s the name of the ship used to transport gas. The terminal is called “Klaipėda Liquefied Gas Terminal”

They also do not highlight the difference between Vytautas Landsbergis (the grandfather) and Gabrielius Landsbergis (the grandson). They are an important political family with a large group of people who openly dislike them for destroying the Soviet Union, botched collective farms and constant fearmongering about Russian aggression.

Discussion about what effects that family had on the country are one of the best ways to start a fight in Lithuania, but they were still right about Russia.

Here’s what stories I remember from USSR-Afghanistan war, told by actual veterans:

They would punish extremist acts by throwing women and children out of a helicopter, Pinochet style. The person who told me that drank ever since he got back from the war and never stopped.

There was one man who left his tent for a midnight leak and came back to his entire tent with their throats slit. Had insane PTSD.

My father-in-law got his legs messed up by machine gun fire, got airlifted to East Germany to get put back together, doesn’t talk much, but still drinks a lot.

Yes, it’s not encouraged for people with other mental disorders to seek autism diagnosis because of how likely those people are to get a false positive for autism.

A lot of unseen costs of this war will take decades to be seen.

Reduced education spending? Less qualified workers to create added value.

Reduced social services? More people getting sick and dying.

Reduced infrastructure spending? Increased prices of transport and goods.