Forbes: How Lithuania Is Kicking Russia To The Curb

It wasn’t that long ago, yet it seems so foreign. In fact, Russia has become nothing but a bad memory in Lithuania. There’s nothing Russian here except anti-Putin graffiti and a few Russian citizens investing here and there and carrying out their private lives in a country that, well, kind of hates them. If not them, then their government.

Walk the streets of Vilnius with a Lithuanian aged 30 to 70 and sad stories of Siberia abound. Russian soldiers telling grandpa and other forced laborers to go jump in a lake before getting back to work cutting down trees in the forest while dripping wet. And not in the summer time either. Yeah, there is no love lost in Lithuania for the Russians. The former Soviet state, the largest of the Baltic trio, was the first to happily claim independence from the U.S.S.R., and is now the first to declare energy independence from them too.

Sort of. While Lithuania is still an importer of Russian natural gas, it is weaning itself fast and furious from what has become the bad boy of European gas markets: Gazprom.

Read the full article HERE.