A nasty encounter in the city had us once again assessing our house, or more specifically our basement, as to what we should do in case of an invasion. Russians are numerous in Vilnius and not all of them are friendly. Daina found that out yesterday when she was cut off at a parking meter by a burly Russian man who wanted to pay for his Land Rover. As he fumbled with the settings to find the Russian language, Daina asked in Russian if he had left his manners in Moscow. He turned on her with fiery eyes and asked if she had any education. She quickly saw it pointless to argue with him and took a few steps back and waited as he muttered in Russian while setting the time for his expensive SUV. The look in his eyes, she told me later, said it all. He acted like he owned Vilnius.
Russians pretty much laid low the first year in the city. No one knew how the war in Ukraine would turn out. In September of 2022 it looked like Ukrainian forces would push Russian forces into the Azov Sea, only for Elon Musk to pull the plug on Starlink as he fretted over Ukraine recapturing Crimea and setting off WWIII. As a result, Ukrainian forces lost communication and were unable to coordinate efforts, forcing them to pull back for fear of entrapping themselves inside enemy territory. Since then, Russians have been more open in their hostility as their forces have been able to hunker down along the new border they created and made it virtually impossible for Ukrainians to gain an inch with all the landmines they planted. Ukraine has had to resort to drones to penetrate Russian-held territory, as the military anxiously awaits the fighter jets it was promised last Fall.
There have always been Russians in Vilnius, most of them friendly, but we are beginning to see much more hostility emerge. A lot of it is directed at fellow Russians, as was recently the case when thugs attacked well-known dissident Leonid Volkov getting out of his car. Now that hostility is spilling over in any number of ways, which has the government scrambling to find solutions to this potential crisis before it gets out of control.
Some of this anger is more subtle. Daina was trying to get our neighbors to sign off on the coordinates for our plot of land so that she could get our parcel formally registered with the new coordinate system. When we bought our share of the property 20+ years ago it was a different coordinate system. There is some overlap in these two systems but the old coordinates are still considered valid. You just need to get your neighbors to approve the boundaries. That was easy enough with two of our neighbors, but two other adjoining plots were recently bought by Russians and they want to challenge the property lines.
The new Russian neighbors plan to add to their houses and want to build right up to the property lines, which requires our permission. The Russians saw it as a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" situation except that the property lines aren't the issue here, rather their wish to build right up to them. When Daina said no, the tone quickly became hardball, threatening to bring in lawyers. Daina said she could wait.
She never really felt any animosity toward Russians but after these two incidents she found herself hating Russians. Even the language now sounds offensive and she no longer wants to speak it, even out of courtesy. This is the collateral damage from a war that has dragged on far too long and has made Russians personas non grata throughout Eastern Europe. It even makes you question the motives of friendly Russians like the man who comes by each day with his little Corgi and we have a short chat while our Corgis sniff out each other between the metal rails.
She was immediately put off by a recent segment on 60 Minutes, in which Russian dissidents living in Vilnius referred to the capital city as "Free Russia." She said it implied that Vilnius was still part of Russia even if the dissidents meant well. We are already having to battle with Belarusians, who have made Vilnius their home away from home, and created their "Little Minsk" in the heart of the city. They've established their own schools and social centers. A little coffee shop on Šv. Mykolo St. with its indulgently priced sandwiches and desserts functions as one such social center. These are well-heeled Russians and Belarusians to afford 12 euro sandwiches. Daina and I split our sandwich. While a few of these Belarusians are here for political reasons, like opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya who is frequently interviewed on news networks, most are here for economic reasons. As foreign residents, they maintain ties to an EU market that they wouldn't be able to enjoy back in Belarus.
Russians have long had their own schools and churches and even lay claim to whole political districts inside Vilnius. For a while there, they even considered themselves a powerbroker in municipal elections, helping to form coalitions as long as they got plenty of favors in return. Now we see a very large "dissident" community forming, most of it probably legitimate, but you begin to wonder if a "fifth column" is being formed in Vilnius.
It seems like there is a rally of some kind every month calling attention to their plight. More and more you see the Vytis symbol incorporated into Belarusian opposition flags. After all, Belarus was once part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. However, Norman Davies made the case in Vanished Kingdoms that the Grand Duchy was a Slavic and not Lithuanian creation, going so far as to claim Lietuva is a cognate of Litva, which he noted was some marsh in the northeast corner of Belarus from which the name was derived. It didn't matter that Lithuanian predated Slavic languages by several hundred years.
For Lithuanians this was a very personal affront as they have long had their identity questioned by Russia, which absorbed the remains of the Grand Duchy into its empire in the early 19th century. It took more than a century to reclaim that identity in the aftermath of WWI, only to have it taken away again by the Soviet Union following WWII. As Lithuanian historian Alfredas Bumblauskas noted in his chapter in The Peoples of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, it is an identity we all share, referring to Belarusians and Ukrainians, as the kingdom stretched to the Black Sea at one point and used ancient Ruthenian as a lingua franca among the noble families. Still, the political center of the kingdom was in the Vilnius region because it was from Lithuania that this Grand Duchy grew outward in the 13th through 15th centuries. Not Belarus, or Gudija as Lithuanians call it.
With the new diaspora, there has been a great increase in the number of fancy cars and SUV's around the city. Teslas have become ubiquitous, seemingly the favorite car among the Russian and Belarusian bourgeois. Many of them still retained their countries' license plates until the government recently imposed a law that any vehicle in Lithuania more than 6 months has to be registered and have a Lithuanian license plate. I suppose that will help them hide their identity. As it is, many of them affix pro-Ukrainian stickers to their bumpers to soften their image. But, their true colors come out when you have an incident like Daina had with the burly Russian at the parking meter.
A lot of these Russians and Belarusians are in the IT business, like the young man who rented a flat from Daina. He is a really nice guy and pays his rent on time and very rarely has any complaints, but we kind of wonder what he is doing in Vilnius? He hasn't shown any pro Putin or Lukashenko sentiments. However, he recently visited his parents in Minsk after previously telling Daina that he was afraid to return to his country because he had been called up in the draft. This struck her as a red flag.
It puts us very much on the defensive, as we no longer feel we can trust any Russian, even those we have worked with on any number of projects. We realize it is unfair to them but you can't help but wonder where their allegiances would lie if Russia or Belarus were to invade Lithuania, which remains a very real possibility. So, we find ourselves once again assessing our basement as a potential fallout shelter because the government has yet to make any real investment in protecting its own citizens from an invasion despite having two years in which to do so.
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