Extract from ABC News
More than 12 months before the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin over alleged war crimes, the city authorities in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius made it clear where they thought the Russian President belonged.
Key points:
- Lithuania was the first country to label Russia a "terrorist state" over its actions in Ukraine
- The country's Soviet history means the war in Ukraine is familiar territory
- Grassroots organisations have provided essential support to Ukraine's forces
In March last year, they draped a giant banner over the top of the city hall's office tower that read "Putin, The Hague is Waiting for You".
It remains there to this day.
In case the Russian authorities didn't get the message, the then-Mayor of Vilnius Remigijus Šimašius changed the name of the street where the Russian embassy is based to "Ukrainian Heroes' Street".
As the Mayor said at the time: "From now on, the business card of every employee of the Russian embassy will have to pay tribute to Ukrainian heroes."
The small Baltic nation doesn't just have a talent for trolling Putin and his enablers.
At all levels of Lithuanian society, there has been a united front to try and help Ukraine deal with the horrors of the past year.
In recent weeks, a crowdfunding exercise raised $22 million to buy high-tech radars that will provide air defence for Ukrainian citizens under attack from missiles and drones.
"You know, our hearts and minds and wallets are with Ukrainians," Lithuania's Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis told the ABC from his office in Vilnius.
"It's not just politicians. It's not just the NGOs. It's everybody you meet on the street."
Combining generosity with an innovative spirit, Lithuania keeps finding new ways to help Ukraine that puts some of its larger western allies to shame.
The security start-up that has raised tens of millions of dollars
From a modest office in an old Soviet railway depot in Vilnius, Jonas Ohman runs one of the most influential charities providing aid to Ukraine.
When Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, the filmmaker says he knew that Mr Putin would eventually invade all of Ukraine and that he had to do something about it.
"I understood that what was happening was extremely dangerous for a country like Lithuania because if they manage to pull it off in Ukraine, they will most probably come here at some point," he told the ABC.
Mr Ohman set up a not-for-profit called Blue/Yellow and started providing non-lethal equipment for Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers.
He described the organisation as "kind of like a security start-up", and estimates Blue/Yellow has raised a staggering $80 million.
From the beginning, he made contact with volunteer battalions inside Ukraine and helped identify what they needed.
By the time Mr Putin invaded the rest of the country in 2022, Mr Ohman had the infrastructure and contacts in place to get the right kind of support to the right people.
"At the beginning of the war, there was a huge need for body armour, for helmets, for medical kits," he said.
"Later, the war changed in other ways, and at this point, our priorities are drones — including anti-drone equipment, optics, including night vision, thermal vision and transport vehicles of various kinds.
"At this point, we are adding another priority, and that is training."
Oleg Abramychev, a deputy on the Kharkiv Regional council who runs a volunteer military unit in Ukraine's second-largest city, has been working with Blue/Yellow since 2015.
He said the equipment provided through donations from ordinary Lithuanians helped local units hold the city in those crucial early weeks.
"On the 27th of February last year, in Kharkiv, our unit repelled an advance of Russian Spetsnaz forces," he told the ABC.
"They were supposed to enter the city centre, show that the town was captured, and to raise a flag. These Ukrainian volunteers stopped them.
"The unit that defended Kharkiv was in a big part equipped with stuff that was provided by Blue/Yellow.
"We received more than 300 pieces of body armour, walkie-talkies, which was important to ensure good and stable communications, optics that helped us easily identify enemies to destroy them.
"Their input was huge, and it played important role in stopping the Russians."
Mr Ohman said while some people contributed around $5 a month to Blue/Yellow, others have donated tens of thousands of dollars. He said every donation matters.
"If you can identify the right kind of people doing the right kind of things and you provide them with the equipment, your contribution is, relatively speaking, much, much bigger than what you would think it would be," he said.
"$10,000 can sometimes be worth much, much more than $1 million if you know how to use it properly."
Crowdfunding hi-tech radars to combat Russian missiles
The Lithuanian charity Strong Together was set up in the hours after the invasion of Ukraine.
Journalist and member of the Lithuanian Rifleman's Union Edmundas Jakilaitis is one of the organisation's founders and said they began by trying to find decent accommodation for refugees fleeing the invasion.
"The war started at 5:00 in the morning. Our campaign started at 7:00, and at 12:00, we already had 1,500 apartments ready all over Lithuania," he said.
"We accommodated 40,000 refugees through our organisation. Lithuania as a state accommodated almost 80,000 people.
"So, we got more than 3 per cent of our population in a month."
When winter began, and Mr Putin targeted Ukraine's energy grid to freeze the civilian population into submission, Strong Together started sourcing heaters and generators and delivering them to the Ukrainian people. It's become the biggest initiative of its kind in Europe.
As he helped fill up a bus destined for Ukraine, basketball commentator and Strong Together volunteer Linas Kunigelis said he believed the donations were making a difference.
"We alone brought 600 generators to Ukraine. It means a lot to the people to help get them warm, give them an opportunity to charge their phones; to live as normal life as possible under those conditions they are living in," he told the ABC.
It was the Strong Together team who came up with the initiative to crowdfund radars for Ukrainian air defence.
Working with Blue/Yellow, they sourced a company in Israel that made high-tech radars and was willing to sell them.
For four weeks individuals made donations that were matched by local companies.
The initial target was around $8 million, but they ended up raising around $22 million, enough to purchase 16 radar systems.
"It will make a huge, huge impact," Mr Jakilaitis said.
"Those radars are the most modern radars in the world, and if you connect them with the anti-aircraft systems, it can function very well."
"We can see that Russians are targeting civilian infrastructure. They are targeting hospitals, power plants, they're trying to start a humanitarian catastrophe there in Ukraine, and radars can deal with that."
The first country to designate Russia as a terrorist state
Since Russia's war on Ukraine began the Lithuanian government has been a frontrunner in taking action against Russia.
It became the first European Union nation to suspend all gas imports from Russia, having diversified its energy supplies over the past decade in a bid to end its reliance on Russia.
In May last year, its parliament unanimously passed a resolution declaring Russia to be a state sponsor of terrorism, and was the first nation to do so.
Mr Landsbergis said it was the right thing to do.
"When the shocking events were revealed in Bucha, Irpin and later in autumn in other reconquered cities, there's no other way than to call those actions committed in Ukraine as terrorist acts," he said.
"It's not an act of war when you're targeting civilians; when you're targeting children; when you're targeting women and the elderly."
Lithuania has already provided over $640 million in military assistance to Ukraine and plans to give more.
Like Poland, Estonia and Latvia — other countries which have a deep understanding of Russia — Lithuania was providing military aid to Ukraine before last February's invasion.
History has a lot to do with why Lithuanians have given generously to Ukraine at both an individual and government level.
It was just over 30 years ago that then-president Mikhail Gorbachev sent tanks to Vilnius to try and crush its independence. Fourteen unarmed civilians were killed before people-power triumphed.
Mr Jakilaitis said the Lithuanian people did not want to return to an era where Moscow called the shots in the region.
"Every family in Lithuania has at least one member that was sent to prison, killed or tortured during Soviet times," he said.
"So that's why we know what Russians do when they come."
Mr Landsbergis's grandfather, Vytautas Landsbergis, was one of the key political leaders who drove the independence movement in Lithuania that saw them become the first Soviet republic to break away from the USSR in 1990.
Speaking from his grandfather's experience, Mr Landsbergis said there were lessons from the past that had taken a while for western allies to learn.
"I would not have imagined how his words and opinion, how true it would ring still, 30 years after our independence," he said.
"The fact that Russia is an empire of the 19th century that just forgot to fall and did not modernise into a modern European country, it still has the same ambition."
"[His grandfather] said, 'Look, it's still the same; the mentality there is still the same'.
"And we for three decades have to had to explain this to all our partners where we were, in some cases, ridiculed or belittled, like, you know, you have this traumatic experience [leaving the Soviet Union], and it drives your political decision making."
Mr Landsbergis said he and his colleagues were doing all they could to ensure this was the last time Russia attacked one of its neighbours.
"There is a wide consensus, a broad consensus in the country that if Ukraine is not able to win, then, as in 2014, the next stage begins," he said.
"And again, who knows who will be under attack. It could be us."
No comments:
Post a Comment