Litouwen viert EU lidmaatschap 20 jaar na verkrijgen onafhankelijkheid (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The President of Lithuania has underlined the country's EU status as a marker of development on the 20th anniversary of its split from the Soviet Union.
"Breaking away from the USSR and the Soviet repressive system was the foundation stone of the achievements we have today. Lithuania is a free and democratic state, a fully fledged member of the EU and Nato," Ms Dalia Grybauskaite i, who came to power on the back of her reputation as EU budgets commissioner, said in a statement on Wednesday (11 March).
"We wanted to have a modern, European, well-educated, democratic and secure nation governed by the rule of law," she added. "Twenty years on we have freedom and welfare - which we created ourselves. Nothing was imposed upon us by enemies or by force."
Lithuania was the first former Soviet Republic to declare independence as the Kremlin's empire began to break up in the early 1990s.
But the real split came on 13 January 1991, on a day known as "Bloody Sunday," when Russian soldiers killed 13 protesters at the TV tower in the heart of Vilnius and - in one of the most iconic moments of the revolution - drove a tank over a young woman called Loretta on live television.
The heads of state of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Poland and Slovenia are to join Ms Grybauskiate on Thursday in Vilnius, where solemnities are to include a military parade. Fourteen other countries are fielding lower-rank VIPs, with Russia to send transport minister Igor Levitin.
A follow-up event in Brussels next week is to be attended by EU Council president Herman Van Rompuy i and Lithuania's president at the time of the upheaval, Vytautas Landsbergis, currently an MEP and a dogged Russia critic.
The reunification of Germany in 1990 and the accession of eight former Iron Curtain countries in 2004 are among the defining moments in the EU's short history.
Lithuania's relations with Russia are on an even keel after a low point in 2008, when Vilnius pleaded for EU sanctions against Moscow over the Georgia war.
But the Soviet Union's former vassals see their neighbour through different eyes to EU powers such as France and Germany, as crystalized in Lithuania's recent protests over French plans to sell high-end warships to Russia.
Russian Prime Minister Valdimir Putin i's decision to invite Poland to the site of a WWII-era anti-Polish massacre in the Katyn forest in April is being seen as a welcome sign of a new historical conscience.
But Moscow municipal authorities' plan to roll out billboards celebrating Stalin during Russia's 65th anniversary of the end of the war is causing offence in equal measure in the east.
"We are considering making an official demarche," a senior diplomat from one of the former Communist EU states told EUobserver.
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