As someone who spent 16 years of his life growing up in the Soviet system, I know what state silence sounds like. In the Soviet Union, silence was not the absence of a response. It was the response. When the state refused to answer a question, the refusal was the answer: the question had touched something the state could not afford to acknowledge. The technique was not subtle. It did not need to be. It relied on a single calculation: that the person asking would eventually stop asking. I learned this as a child. I am watching Lithuania rely on the same calculation now.

Dillon Hosier, CEO of the Israeli American Civic Action Network, wrote recently about the formal letter he sent on March 15, 2026, to the Lithuanian consul general in Los Angeles, demanding answers about Lithuania’s criminal prosecution of the Jewish citizen Artur Fridman and about the institutional machinery behind that prosecution. He asked specific questions. He provided documentary context. Lithuania has not responded.

Congressman Brad Sherman has written three times to the Government of Lithuania — in 2019, in 2021, and again in March 2026, regarding a specific, documented fabrication: the repeated false claim by Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Center that the United States Congress had “completely exonerated” the Holocaust perpetrator Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. That exoneration never happened. Lithuania did not answer in 2019. It did not answer in 2021. It did not answer in 2026. Not once in seven years.

Rabbi Ahud Sela, President of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, wrote directly to Lithuanian Consul General Sandra Brikaite expressing serious concern about the Fridman prosecution and requesting an update. No response followed.

A sitting member of Congress. A national civic advocacy organization. The President of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California. All wrote. Lithuania answered none of them. I recognize this pattern. I grew up inside it.

In the Soviet Union, we had a phrase for institutions that operated this way. We called them “deaf offices”, bureaucracies that could hear perfectly well but had made a policy decision to not respond. The Soviet version was at least honest about its nature: it was an authoritarian state and did not pretend otherwise. Lithuania is a member of the European Union and NATO. It has signed the relevant human rights instruments. It participates in the relevant commemorations. It collects the relevant charitable subsidies from Brussels. And it operates a deaf office indistinguishable in function from the one I knew in Riga, except that the one in Riga did not claim to be a democracy.

The facts of the Fridman case are not in dispute.

On May 9, 2024, Fridman visited Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius to honor his grandfather, a man who fought against Nazi Germany during the Second World War. While there, he posted a Facebook message raising historical questions about partisan commander Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, whom Lithuania has elevated to head-of-state status. On January 8, 2025, Lithuanian authorities imposed a written pledge preventing Fridman from leaving the country. On October 30, 2025, prosecutors filed charges under Articles 170-2 §1 and 313 §2 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code, Case No. 02-2-00512-24. The indictment runs to 220 pages. The prosecution’s own evidence partially corroborates the historical question Fridman raised while simultaneously charging him for raising it. Lithuania also takes issue with the date itself: May 9, the date the Red Army’s advance made it impossible for Lithuanians to continue murdering Jews with impunity. For Lithuania’s nationalist establishment, May 9 marks the beginning of Soviet occupation. For Lithuanian Jews like Fridman, May 9 marked the end of the killing season, the day survival became possible, however brutal the Soviet regime that followed. That Lithuania treats the date Jews stopped being murdered as an occasion for national mourning tells you everything about the institutional perspective the Fridman prosecution serves. I grew up under Soviet rule. I do not romanticize it. But I am alive because it arrived. So was Fridman’s grandfather. Lithuania prosecutes a Jew for honoring the man who survived what Lithuanians did to his neighbors.

A state does not take seventeen months to construct a criminal case because it is racing to neutralize imminent danger. It takes seventeen months because it is building a show trial. I use that term advisedly. I know what a show trial looks like. I grew up in a country that produced them. The Lithuanian version is more polished. The underlying logic is identical: when historical speech collides with protected national mythology, it is the speaker, not the falsehood, that will be put on trial.

Lithuania’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Audra Plepyţė, was a direct recipient of Sherman’s 2021 letter. She received documented notice of a false claim made in her government’s name to American institutions. No response followed. On April 2, 2026, while Sherman’s three letters still sat unanswered, while the Fridman prosecution advanced, and while Hosier’s inquiry remained unacknowledged, Plepyţė met with a delegation of senior advisers from the United States Senate and House of Representatives. Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry publicly celebrated the meeting. Plepyţė thanked Congress for “consistent political and financial support” and praised the presence of U.S. military forces in Lithuania as a “major deterrent factor in the Baltic Region.”

I have spent decades studying how Baltic states handle the gap between their international positioning and their domestic conduct. Latvia, my country, has its own failures. I do not minimize them. But Lithuania has elevated the gap between presentation and practice to an art form that would have impressed the Soviet information bureaus I grew up reading. Plepyţė received a documented exposure of her government’s fabrication in 2021. In 2026, she was thanking Congress for support and deterrence. Lithuania wants Congressional backing without Congressional oversight. It will engage American legislators to request protection. It will not engage American legislators who demand accountability. In the Soviet system, we had a word for governments that operated this way: we called them client states. Lithuania behaves as one while claiming the privileges of a sovereign democracy.

As I have previously observed, Lithuania has already created a reputational wound it cannot close. If it withdraws the prosecution, it confirms it was prepared to proceed until scrutiny became inconvenient. If it loses, its methods are exposed. If it wins, it declares that Holocaust-related historical dissent can be punished by the state. As Michael Kretzmer has argued, Lithuania has put itself, not Artur Fridman, on trial. The Fridman prosecution was intended to silence. Instead, it created a documentary exhibit of state antisemitism that Lithuania cannot retract and the international community cannot unsee.

Today, I am American. I say that without qualification or apology. I grew up without civil rights, without the freedom to speak, to publish, to leave, to vote for anything that mattered. I understand what America represents because I lived inside the system it was built to oppose. I love this country with the ferocity of someone who knows what the alternative looks like from the inside. I will defend it, its institutions, its principles, its alliances, with everything I have. America is also the anchor of NATO, and that is not an abstraction for me. It is the reason I can write this article without fear of prosecution. Lithuania’s conduct implicates that alliance, and therefore it implicates me.

The North Atlantic Treaty was not designed as a territorial insurance policy for countries that treat democratic norms as optional. Article 1 requires members to settle disputes by peaceful means. Article 2 commits them to strengthen their free institutions. Those clauses are often treated as decorative language. They are not. They define the kind of alliance NATO claims to be. A state that uses criminal process to police historical speech is not strengthening free institutions. A state that refuses to answer documented exposures of falsehood sent by a member of the United States Congress is not behaving as a reliable democratic partner.

I spent the first decades of my life inside an alliance, the Warsaw Pact, that demanded unconditional solidarity from its members while exempting itself from every principle it claimed to uphold. I know what happens when alliance membership becomes decoupled from the values the alliance was created to defend. The alliance degrades. Its credibility erodes. Its strongest members begin to question whether the commitment is worth the cost. Lithuania is not yet at the point where its conduct threatens the structural integrity of NATO. But it is at the point where serious observers are entitled to ask whether the political and security support Lithuania receives is conditioned on anything at all or whether Lithuania has correctly calculated that its geography alone entitles it to unconditional protection regardless of its institutional conduct.

Lithuania occupies exposed geography. That creates urgency. It does not create immunity. The policy question is whether the United States is prepared to continue extending unqualified support to a government that has shown a sustained pattern of fabrication, silence, and coercive historical management, a government that answers its critics with prosecution and its allies with silence. At a minimum, Lithuania should be required to answer the record already before it. If it will not, then calls for unquestioning solidarity become progressively harder to sustain.

My family left the Soviet Union because we believed the West meant what it said about the values it defended. I believed that alliance membership carried obligations, not just benefits. I believed that democratic states answered questions rather than prosecuting the people who asked them. Lithuania is testing whether any of that was true, or whether it was simply a more sophisticated version of the system I left, one in which the vocabulary of freedom serves the same function as the vocabulary of socialist brotherhood: to provide cover for conduct that contradicts it.

NATO was created to defend a political order, not merely territory. If Lithuania wants the protection of Article 5, it must answer for conduct incompatible with Articles 1 and 2. An ally that demands protection while refusing accountability is not strengthening the alliance. It is weakening it from within. The silence Lithuania has chosen is not strength. It is the tell of a country that knows its record cannot survive examination and has decided that the safest course is to say nothing and hope the questions stop. I grew up in a system that operated on exactly that assumption. It did not end well.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)