Lithuania entered into a heraldic-diplomatic war with Belarus on the side of Latvia
The Vilnius City Hall today removed the national flag of Belarus from the flagpole in the city center, which hung among the flags of other neighboring countries of Lithuania, and replaced it with the red and white flag of Belarusian nationalists.
Thus, the authorities of the Lithuanian capital expressed solidarity with the mayor of Riga Martins Stakis, who removed the Belarusian flag hanging among the flags of the participants in the World Hockey Championship currently taking place in Latvia.
The demarche was associated with the arrest in Minsk of the founder of the extremist telegram channel “Nekhta” Roman Protasevich, who was among the passengers of the plane that made an emergency landing in the Belarusian capital due to mining, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
This immediately caused a huge diplomatic scandal. Belarus and Latvia mutually expelled all diplomats.
In the case of Lithuania, similar actions did not follow. Press Secretary of the Belarusian Foreign Ministry Anatoly Glaz only hinted that the mayor in Vilnius is not all right in the head.
“This question should be addressed not to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but to competent medical specialists,” Glaz said. And only the loyalist public reacted to the events in Vilnius in the same way as the day before to the events in Riga, holding a picket in front of the embassy.
Meanwhile, the scandal in Riga has reached a new level. The mayor's demarche was sharply condemned by the International Hockey Federation. (IIHF).
“The actions of the Belarusian government are not related to the hockey players competing under the flag of Belarus at this tournament. Hockey players were welcomed to Latvia as guests and should not be allowed to see their flag removed from the flags of the 16 participating countries without their consent,” the organization said in a statement.
The IIHF demanded that the Belarusian flag be returned to its place, but Statkis refused to do so. He was supported by Latvian President Egils Levits, who considered replacing the flag an “adequate reaction.”
Then the head of the IIHF, Rene Fasel, asked to remove the World Championship and IIHF flags from the streets of Riga, and this was done.
“The International Ice Hockey Championship is, first of all, a holiday for athletes, hockey fans, Riga residents and residents of Latvia. But we cannot forget that just a few hundred kilometers from here, an EU plane is being hijacked and people are being tortured and killed. The regime that commits these crimes behaves like a bandit at the national and now international level. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have received tens of thousands of letters from all over the world expressing gratitude for the display of the flag of a free Belarus,” Stakis said.
His fellow party member, Seimas deputy Aigars Bikše, went further and proposed taking the Belarusian hockey team hostage, and then exchanging them for “Belarusian political prisoners.”
“We can change flags, put flowers, freeze the money of regime supporters, but this will not change the course of events and will not give hope to every citizen. This can be done by detaining the “terrorist” Belarusian hockey team. We can influence more than we think, it just takes courage. We have nothing to lose,” Bikše wrote on his Facebook.
This attack was caustically commented by Belarusian political scientist Alexander Shpakovsky.
“I suspect that in this case, the “parliamentary deputy” will not have time to come to his senses before he will again find himself under “Soviet occupation,” he threatened in his Telegram channel.
Nikolai Shchekin, head of the department of sociology of public administration at the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences, called what was happening between Belarus and Latvia a war.
“We were attacked yesterday. When the national flag is removed in this way, it is a declaration of war. Everything is logical and fits into the system when Nazis walk the streets of Riga. Now these Nazis have taken down and thrown away our flag. This is disgusting! This has never happened in the world before. At one time, representatives of Latvia crawled on their knees in front of Alexander Lukashenko, begging to raise the Klaipeda port, begging us to transport our goods through them. And what have we got now? What is this, revenge?” Shchekin was rhetorically indignant.
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