Different worlds
Thousands of Russians and Hungarians have already received asylum in Lithuania. Only a small part of them have left the two-headed mordor for political reasons, some for moral reasons - opposition to the war - but most of them are emigrants vulgaris - economic. Nothing new, because war is an opportunity, and the clever and the shrewd are able to take advantage of it, just as we were able to take advantage of the opening up of the European labour market, and thus, in part, to bring about real change in the country by our departure.
The movement of people has been a perfectly normal activity for thousands of years, since the beginning of our existence, and there is no finite number of them, because there have always been and will always be all kinds of challenges in the world. No matter what the catalyst is, people are always looking for somewhere better and the mystical sedentariness of the farmer is just an illusion of a fragile impermanence.
Most surprising are the scares of high-ranking members of the Seimas or prominent influencers about the threats of emigration. I agree that there are some, but all of them, or at least most of them, echo the narratives of Russian propaganda, which have infected even the brightest minds. Unfortunately, they and we are equally sick, only the stages differ. Slightly. Nobody wants to take unpopular decisions to make the rules of emigration clearer, and there is no vision of how we can use this to achieve our strategic goals. There is no common vision with clear criteria for our growth to meet the challenges of the demographic crisis.
In our press, the main stories are about what toilet Putin is defecating in, how Medvedev is throwing up, and how (or better, what) Galkin and Pugachyova are smoking or not. Someone has cancer, someone has sent a car, someone is singing "ja russkij (or riuzzkij)" and performing in Vilnius. The latter are sitting in the warmth and security of Vilnius, working in co-working or online pseudo-oppositional publications, telling jokes about unloading Jewish baby corpses from wagons... I'm summarising, you know.
Others pity the murderous victims 2in1, because they are innocent, they just haven't read Dostoyevsky, but they do remember the lines about the great oak tree by the Sea of Azov. Pushkin was just as much the herald of empire as today's Shendorovichs, Venediktovs or Khodorkovksy. They are all against Putin, but they are for an empire that must live, and it needs only a tiny repair - eliminate corruption and they will be able to hold on not only to the Caucasus, where they have been killing for hundreds of years, but also to conquer us again. They killed and deported there, too. Always.
Those sitting in Vilnius speak loudly in their own language, and Israeli musicians come to visit them, but for some reason they sing only in Russian and don't speak a word of Hebrew, or even Yiddish, given their places of birth. Those sitting in Vilnius have already graduated from universities here, and when my friends ask why, they say: give us your address, we will sue you. They reply in Russian and are very unhappy when we reply in Lithuanian, which Google's automatic translation translates in a slanted and difficult to understand context, where "nailiness" turns into nails.
We have put the pigs at the table, but they are already climbing on the table, as in Orwell's Animal Farm, and their manifesto has turned into a slogan: "We are innocent, you are Putin's agents!". This from a man who has no shame whatsoever in publicly displaying on his profile the symbol of the Russian fascists - the hated combination of the cock and the flag.
None of them want to hear what we say. We are just aborigines, who are not clear about the good they are bringing/were bringing, who are not clear that they are the tsars of the new Russian Vassyuks, and that we must already kiss their boots and lay red carpets under their feet. The victim is always to blame and it is everywhere to be seen, because they themselves always emphasise it.
It sounds like a threat to me, but do the MFA and the DSS understand it, or do the ministers who take photos with them understand it? I doubt it.
