Restarting an unconditional dialogue with Moscow too fast would be dangerous and allow Russia to avoid its commitments, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius has said during a visit in the USA, delfi.lt reports.
“There have been calls to reset the Russian relations with the West. The reset should not start with deleting the entries of violations and with the old ‘operating system.’ We should learn the lessons from 2008 war with Georgia when we were too quick to restart the dialogue before Russia had met its obligations,” Linkevičius said during a meeting with US security experts in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
The minister also invited to search for ways of offsetting the propaganda, which has lately been the focus of Russia’s resources and attention. In Linkevičius’ words, upgrading the information activities on Russia’s side has revealed that the Western world is lagging behind in this battle.
Speaking in an interview with BuzzFeed News after an appearance at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, Linas Linkevičius said that Russia is “testing” what it can do, and said that Russia’s alleged abduction of a security officer in neighboring Estonia is part of a pattern.
“This is testing,” Linkevičius said. “This is [a] method of testing what kind of reaction — could be political level, practical level, public mood — and this increases tensions.”
Asked whether Russia was spreading its influence by funding NGOs or other groups in the country, Linkevičius said, “I shouldn’t say about extremist groups in Lithuania because they’re not existing so far, but when it comes to the information propaganda machinery, this is really definitely true.”
Russia is “financing propaganda sources” in Lithuania, he said, and using companies like Gazprom to influence issues in Lithuania, spending “billions of dollars” along the way.
“It’s a big big deal,” he said.
“You cannot occupy so easily NATO territory but you can conflict, make tensions, use some minorities,” Linkevičius said, adding that he didn’t think Russia would be able to use the Russian minority in Lithuania because they are well-integrated and loyal to the state.
“I don’t think we could be manipulated so easily,” he said. But “we do feel this influence really quite quite strongly.”
