I made Baltic Truth because I could see what Lithuania was selling the West and I knew the product did not exist. Five years later, Lithuania is still selling it. The buyers have changed. The product has not.

I grew up in the Soviet Union. Sixteen years inside the Warsaw Pact — an alliance that required its members to perform solidarity while exempting itself from every principle it claimed to uphold. I know what a failing state’s sales presentation looks like. I sat through them as a child. The rhetoric was always values, virtues, shared struggle, democratic legitimacy. The reality was always a system that could not sustain itself and depended on external credulity to continue. Lithuania is that system now. Before examining what Lithuania is selling, examine what Lithuania destroyed in order to need a sale.

What Lithuania murdered

Of all the states in which the Holocaust was carried out, Lithuania achieved the highest murder rate of its Jewish population: 96.4 percent. Rwanda’s genocide against the Tutsi produced 86 percent. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge destroyed roughly 25 percent of its total population. No state, in any genocide, in any era, matched the proportional destruction Lithuania inflicted on its Jews.

The evidentiary foundation has been established by Grant Gochin, Silvia Foti in Storm in the Land of Rain, Michael Kretzmer, Dillon Hosier, and consolidated in the Foti Doctrine. What I am adding is what a state looks like after it murders its own future.

Between 1990 and 2023, over 1.16 million Lithuanian citizens emigrated. The country that regained independence with 3.7 million people now has approximately 2.8 million. The United Nations projects 2.28 million by 2050. The Centre for Eastern Studies documented the trajectory under a headline that requires no editorial comment: “Lithuania is losing people without a fight.” This was not emigration. This was a national referendum conducted with suitcases.

Lithuania has received over sixteen billion euros in European Union structural funds, cohesion payments, and agricultural subsidies, and contributes approximately a quarter of what it receives. The modernized hospitals, schools, and roads visible to visitors are a European gift. And the outcomes rank last in the European Union across nearly every measure of whether a state is meeting its obligations to its own citizens — lowest self-reported good health, highest suicide rate, highest cardiovascular hospitalization rate, largest income-related health gap.

EU accession was a transaction premised on shared values: rule of law, non-discrimination, honest institutional governance, historical accountability. Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung was not comfortable. Poland’s confrontation with Jedwabne was not comfortable. Both states moved toward the record. Lithuania moved away. Its flagship historical institution, the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, dedicated no exhibition space to the Holocaust until 2011 and still honors Jonas Noreika on its exterior wall. Tablet Magazine called it “Lithuania’s Museum of Holocaust Denial.” The name fits.

The Fridman prosecution is where all of this converges. Lithuania has demonstrated prosecutorial will, procedural infrastructure, and institutional coordination sufficient to bring a case against a Jewish citizen for a Facebook post. It has not demonstrated equivalent will with respect to punishing a single Lithuanian for the murder of 220,000 Jews. The machinery exists. The will is applied in only one direction. The case is, at its foundation, a freedom-of-speech case inside a NATO and EU member state — a visitor, scholar, or Jewish tourist who posts on social media in contradiction of the state’s protected narrative faces demonstrated criminal exposure. Grant Gochin has called for a State Department travel warning on those grounds. Western investors whose in-country employees, consultants, or partners speak publicly face the same exposure.

Lithuania claims to honor its Righteous Among the Nations — the 0.04 percent of its population recognized by Yad Vashem as rescuers. For every Lithuanian who rescued a Jew, roughly 2,500 did not. Lithuania treats this ratio as evidence of national virtue. The rest of the world is entitled to read it differently. The IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which Lithuania endorses, identifies the use of state power to deny, trivialize, or distort the Holocaust. Endorsement and compliance are separate obligations. Lithuania has decided to sustain only the first.

Now consider what Lithuania destroyed. Before 1941, Lithuanian Jewry comprised over 220,000 people, among the most educated, most productive, most professionally accomplished communities in Europe. Imagine those Jews and their descendants alive today. A quarter of a million Lithuanian taxpayers with the generational multiplication that three-quarters of a century produces. Physicians in Lithuanian hospitals. Engineers in Lithuanian industry. Scientists in Lithuanian universities. Entrepreneurs generating Lithuanian exports. Would that Lithuania rank last in European health outcomes? Would that Lithuania need European charity to build roads it cannot finance and hospitals it cannot staff? Would over a million of its citizens have chosen to leave?

Lithuania did not merely murder its Jews. It murdered its own future. The engineers Lithuania now imports with EU charity were the engineers Lithuania shot in its own forests. The physicians Lithuania cannot retain were the physicians Lithuania buried in its own pits. The tax base Lithuania cannot generate was the tax base Lithuania murdered in eight months.

The men who carried out this murder are today among Lithuania’s greatest national heroes. Noreika. Škirpa. Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Brazaitis. Pucevičius. The perpetrators are the pantheon. That fact alone reflects that Lithuania deserves the products of its own actions.

This is the foundation. Everything the state now sells rests on it.

What Lithuania now has to sell

A state that murdered its productive class and built nothing to replace it has very little left to offer a foreign counterparty. Lithuania has two exports. The Western charity it receives. The lies it tells to keep the charity flowing. That is the business model.

The state sends investment-promotion officials to Western chambers of commerce. It sends defense attachés to Israel. It sends foreign ministers to Yad Vashem. It sends ambassadors to synagogues. Each delegation carries the same pitch. Shared values. European kinship. Democratic solidarity. Strategic frontier against authoritarianism. The presentation is polished. It is rehearsed. It is a mirage.

A Lithuanian diplomat addressing a Western audience in 2026 is soliciting capital — financial, political, reputational, or security. Every such solicitation, under the norms any Western counterparty applies, requires disclosure of material facts that would affect the decision of the reasonable recipient. Lithuania’s presentations omit every fact set out in the first half of this article. The demographic trajectory does not appear. The last-place health-outcome ranking does not appear. The four-to-one EU-dependency ratio does not appear. The LGGRTC fabrication record does not appear. The Fridman prosecution does not appear. The unanswered Congressman Brad Sherman letters of 2019, 2021, and 2026 do not appear. The persistent, if slowly improving, corruption risks, slow judicial processes, and bureaucratic inefficiencies any sovereign-risk analyst would flag do not appear. The presentation is designed on the calculation that no one will check.

The fiduciary question

If a private Lithuanian company delivered this presentation to Western investors at a capital-raising event while omitting those material facts, the presentation would expose the company’s officers to personal liability under American federal securities law. Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5 prohibit material omissions in connection with any solicitation. The SEC enforces it. Private plaintiffs sue under it. Officers go to prison for it.

Does the sovereign face the same standard? No. Lithuania solicits capital in front of audiences that include investment professionals, philanthropists, defense procurement officials, and Jewish federation executives, and faces no regulator. There is no SEC for sovereigns. There is no fiduciary backstop.

Here is a question for the next investment event where a Lithuanian official takes the podium. Ask whether the presenter accepts a duty to disclose the material risk factors a reasonable investor would require. Ask whether the presentation he just delivered includes them. Ask whether his embassy, his ministry, or his head of state has ever answered a single one of the outstanding letters from Congressman Sherman, from the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, from Yad Vashem, or from IHRA. Watch what happens. I know what will happen. Silence. The silence is the answer. The silence is the state.

What is NATO defending?

Dillon Hosier asked the question directly in the Times of Israel in March 2026. What exactly are we defending in Lithuania? What does “shared democratic values” mean if historical truth is criminalized when it embarrasses the state? What does rule of law mean if official historical doctrine is too delicate for adversarial testing but sturdy enough to justify prosecution?

Lithuania’s position inside NATO rests on a bargain. In exchange for alliance protection, member states commit to the values the alliance was created to defend — rule of law, democratic accountability, historical honesty, non-persecution of minority citizens. Lithuania has selectively departed from each. Its courts criminalize Jewish speech about its Holocaust record while its historical-authority institution manufactures exoneration certificates for Holocaust perpetrators.

The operational case is weaker than the rhetoric suggests. Lithuania sits at the Suwałki Gap, the narrow corridor between Russian Kaliningrad and Belarus that NATO planners have long identified as among the alliance’s most indefensible positions — the West Berlin of this century. Lithuania’s railway infrastructure still runs on the wide gauge inherited from the Soviet era, directly interoperable with Russia and Belarus but not with Western Europe. The country that asks NATO to defend it is a country whose physical geography and logistical backbone remain more compatible with the adversary than with the alliance.

Alliances do not collapse because a member behaves badly. They collapse when member behavior erodes the founding justification to a degree serious observers can no longer ignore. Russia’s doctrine depends on the claim that Western rule-of-law rhetoric is selective, opportunistic, and hollow. Lithuania’s institutional conduct validates the claim. The more Lithuania insists on unqualified protection while running an apparatus of falsification, the more exposed the alliance becomes to the very argument it was built to refute.

I spent sixteen years inside a system that depended on its allies never examining it too closely. I watched it fail. I know how this pattern ends.

The sixteen billion euros in EU charity is not permanent. The 2028–2034 EU budget framework has already signaled cohesion-funding recalibration. Post-Ukraine reconstruction will compete for the same pool. Several net-contributor states have signaled reduced appetite for indefinite subsidy of states whose GDP growth should have graduated them out of recipient status years ago.

When the flow narrows, what sustains Lithuania’s economy? No domestic base sufficient to do it. The productive class has emigrated. The educated young do not return. The tax base cannot replace what it has lost. The institutional capacity to attract sustained foreign direct investment is compromised by the same factors that compromise every other institutional output. The state that depended on Western charity for its modern infrastructure has built nothing that can replace Western charity. It cannot. The people who would have built it are in the forests and deathpits, placed there by Lithuanians.

When the subsidy stream narrows after 2027, Lithuania faces a choice it has deferred for thirty years. Confront the institutional decay that produced the demographic collapse — reform the LGGRTC, withdraw honors from Holocaust perpetrators, release the perpetrator list, answer the Sherman letters, end the Fridman prosecution, tell the truth — or accelerate downward on the trajectory already visible in its population, health, and output data. There is no third option — but Lithuanians will do all they can to find one, because they do not consider truth an option.

The mirage is the method

Lithuania’s Holocaust fraud is not a separate issue from its investment pitch, its NATO posture, or its economic trajectory. It is the same issue observed through different lenses. A state that has spent eighty years falsifying its historical record, persecuting the citizens who contradict it, and performing “values” for audiences who do not verify them is a state whose entire public-facing presentation rests on one premise. The premise is that the audience will not check.

Almost everything the Lithuanian state produces for foreign consumption is designed to deceive. The historical narrative. The rescuer commemorations. The 157-point Action Plan on antisemitism. The investment-promotion slideshow. The defense attaché’s Tel Aviv portfolio. The diplomatic “values” vocabulary. Deception is the structural method. It is the only method available to a state that murdered its productive class and has no other story to tell.

Western investors and alliance partners looking for Baltic or Eastern European exposure are not short of alternatives. Latvia, Estonia, and Poland each offer a far superior risk model. An investor, a government, or a Jewish institution allocating political, financial, or reputational capital in this region has better options than a failing state whose only products are charity and lies.

Lithuania murdered its future and now has two exports. The charity it receives. The lies it tells. The charity is finite. The lies are the only domestic product of a state that liquidated its most productive citizens and has built nothing in their place. When the charity narrows and the lies stop working, there is nothing else. There never was.

I grew up in Riga. I watched the Baltic republics emerge from Soviet occupation. One of them is running out of its own people. I watched a system built on presentations its audiences could not verify. When the verification came, the system did not survive the examination.

I have seen this before.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)