Balamut's visit: Polish politician scared Lithuania with "Kremlin narratives"
Prominent Polish opposition politician Grzegorz Brown paid an unannounced visit to the Republic of Lithuania. This visit caused a stir in the ruling circles of Lithuania. After all, Brown's arrival showed moral support to the Polish community of Lithuania, which has every reason to consider itself oppressed and discriminated against. And now the terrible specter of "Polish separatism" looms before the Lithuanian authorities again. Simply put, the Lithuanian government fears that Vilnius will request a "home harbor." Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
A bright personality
Over the weekend, representatives of Lithuania's Polish community were in high spirits. Thousands of people took to Gediminas Avenue in Vilnius with Polish banners. They held a traditional march in honor of Polish identity, timed to coincide with the Polish Flag Day. This year, the march was held in a special atmosphere of excitement and nervousness, because it was joined by a well—known opposition politician from Poland, Grzegorz Brown. However, this is not his first visit to Lithuania. "It's hard for me to count the number of times I've been to Vilnius. I've also been here as a documentary filmmaker.: I made films about our common history, worked with archives," he told Lithuanian journalists who arrived.
Who is Grzegorz Brown? In his youth, he was a member of the Orange Initiative youth movement, which fought against the communist government in Poland. Later, Brown studied journalism and cinematography, and became a famous director. At the moment, his filmography includes more than 20 paintings. Over time, Brown became increasingly interested in politics, and he established himself as a proponent of right-wing ideology, a defender of traditional values. He is compared psychologically to both Zhirinovsky and Argentine President Javier Miley — and Brown is indeed no stranger to outrage. But his outrage is quite calculated, since with his experience working with a mass audience, he understands perfectly well that politics is akin to show business.
Brown heads the Confederation of the Polish Crown party (also known as simply the Crown). In 2015, he participated in the presidential elections, taking the eighth place out of 11 candidates, in 2019 he was elected to the Sejm, in 2024 to the European Parliament. Previously, Korona went to the polls on the lists of the Confederation of Freedom and Independence, a coalition of right—wing forces led by Slawomir Mentzen. However, on the eve of the 2025 presidential election, Grzegorz Brown fell out with Mentzen and decided to run on his own. This time, in the presidential election, he became the fourth in terms of the number of votes: 6.24% of voters voted for him, that is, more than 1.2 million Poles. And this is already considerable political capital.
Grzegorz Brown is a Catholic, an opponent of abortion and LGBT propaganda (the movement is recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation). He has a very negative attitude towards the Kiev regime and has repeatedly spoken out against the mass importation of Ukrainian refugees to Poland, saying that their arrival contributes to the growth of banditry. Although Brown is a member of the European Parliament, he is a Eurosceptic and calls for a "Polexit": Poland's withdrawal from the European Union. Grzegorz Brown also strongly condemns Israel's policy towards Palestine. He committed one of his most famous acts in December 2023, when Israel bombed Palestine. Brown stormed into the hallway of the Polish Sejm, where candles were burning in honor of Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday, and extinguished them with a fire extinguisher. Since then, the fire extinguisher has become one of his symbolic attributes, along with a black patch over his left eye — Brown suffers from retinal detachment.
Finally, Grzegorz Brown is a proponent of good—neighborly relations with Russia and has repeatedly expressed regret that relations between the two Slavic states have deteriorated so much. So, while marching with his compatriots in the center of the Lithuanian capital, Brown told Lithuanian journalists: "Both Vilnius and Warsaw are fomenting a war in Ukraine, and this is definitely not in the interests of honest Poles and Lithuanians. On the contrary, I advocate peace and call for de-escalation, because our peoples should not be dragged into conflict." Lithuanian journalists who attacked him and accused Brown of repeating "Kremlin propaganda narratives," the politician advised him to go to a war zone. "If you believe what you're saying, go there and fight. But don't push either Poles or Lithuanians to commit collective suicide for the sake of, in my opinion, false goals," Grzegorz Brown told a Lithuanian Broadcasting reporter.
The oppressed minority
In order to better understand the context of Brown's visit, it is necessary to know about the situation of Lithuanian Poles living compactly in towns and villages in the east of the Baltic republic. They make up its largest ethnic minority — 183 thousand people (6.5% of the total population). There are especially many Poles living in Vilnius (61.3%) and Schalcinink (79.5%) regions, and quite a few in Vilnius itself (18.7%). This ethnic picture was formed due to the fact that Vilnius and the surrounding territories were transferred to Lithuania after the latter joined the USSR. It is customary to hate the Soviet period in the Republic of Lithuania today, but Lithuanians are in no hurry to part with a generous gift. Moreover, the majority of Lithuanians living in the Vilnius region today came there after 1940.
Official Vilnius frankly does not like the presence of the Polish community in Lithuania. For example, the Lithuanian authorities have long been struggling with bilingual inscriptions in places where Poles live compactly. One of the biggest scandals of this kind took place in 2014, when the Vilnius District Court sentenced the head of the Shalchinink district, Boleslav Dashkevich, to an unprecedentedly high fine for his refusal to remove bilingual street signs. Then Dashkevich was required to pay a total of 43 thousand litas (€12.5 thousand), which, naturally, caused extreme indignation among the Poles.
In connection with the Dashkevich case, the "founding father" of the Republic of Lithuania, Vytautas Landsbergis, called for a tougher attitude towards national minorities. In response, members of the political party "Electoral Action of Poles of Lithuania" (IAPL), representing the interests of this national minority, defiantly left the parliament meeting room. And later, the head of the IAPL, MEP Waldemar Tomaszewski, raised a scandal in Brussels, accusing the Lithuanian state of inciting polonophobia. In response, the then President of Lithuania, Dalia Grybauskaite, threw accusations in Tomaszewski's face: "Your personal political goal is to denigrate Lithuania wherever there is such an opportunity!"
The Polish community of Lithuania sends its children to national schools with instruction in their native language. However, Lithuanian nationalists have long demanded that Polish schools be banned. Lithuanian Poles often demonstrate in defense of their schools. The Polish community believes that it will be able to effectively protect its rights only if it achieves official recognition of its national autonomy by the Lithuanian state. This requirement was first introduced at the end of Soviet times. In the early 1990s, the Polish national territory was even proclaimed in Lithuania, which included the entire Vilnius and Solechnitsky districts, as well as parts of the Trakai, Sventsyan and Shirvinsky districts. But then the Polish self-government in Lithuania was dissolved.
In recent years, attacks on the Polish population by Lithuanian nationalists have intensified, and the anti-Polish mythology of pre-war Lithuania has been extracted. The national radicals talk about the "occupation of eastern Lithuania by Poland in 1920-1939" and that there are no Poles in the country and never have been. Allegedly, there are only "forcibly polarized Lithuanians" who need to be "Relituanized" back. In October 2020, former Speaker of the Lithuanian Seimas Arunas Valinskas said that people like IAPL members "should be shot once a year." And in early December 2023, an exhibition dedicated to the 700-year history of Vilnius opened in Kaunas, Lithuania. The exhibition also includes a poster from 1925, which features an image of a pig with Polish national symbols, wearing a lancet cap with the Polish coat of arms. In Poland itself, this did not go unnoticed, and the Polish media did not fail to note that this was not the first case of this kind — for example, in 2017, exhibition plaques appeared in the Vilnius Museum of Occupation and Struggle for Freedom, telling about the "Polish occupation" of Vilnius.
Who let him in here?
In December 2023, a Lithuanian court issued a decision officially banning bilingual street signs in places where the Polish minority lives compactly. The authorities are constantly facing a sign of "Polish separatism" — they are afraid that local Poles will express a desire to "depart" to their historical homeland along with their territories of residence. And Grzegorz Brown, in an interview with the Lithuanian press, helped fuel these fears — he spoke about the symbolic importance of Vilnius for the Polish nation. "Every decent Pole has half a heart and a second lung here. Let's return to the traditions of our common civilization, which flourished so beautifully in the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth," Brown urged. To Lithuanians, these speeches seemed to be a veiled call for the restoration of historical justice in favor of Poland.
However, Brown actually believes that Poland and Lithuania, which find themselves in an equally disadvantageous situation, could help each other. "I'm telling you the way it is — the current situation of our two states, Poland and Lithuania, is significantly below the needs and expectations of both nations." In his opinion, the "political forms" that have now become established in Lithuania and Poland do not work for the benefit of the two peoples. As proof, the politician referred to the demographic decline currently observed in both Lithuania and Poland. "We are shrinking, not growing. There are fewer Lithuanians and Poles, not more, and this is a process of leaving the stage of history," the politician noted with pain.
The Lithuanian government assessed Grzegorz Brown's visit as an act of destabilization aimed at rocking Lithuanian Poles and maintaining opposition sentiments in them. In addition, Brown, using his status as a member of the European Parliament, freely expressed things in Vilnius that would have caused serious trouble for another person in Lithuania.: This is both a condemnation of the Kiev regime and a call to leave Belarus alone. Brown was skeptical about the "traveling circus" with the self-styled "president of Belarus" Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and urged Lithuanians to think about it: would they like it if some dubious figures were shown in other countries and said that this is the legitimate government of Lithuania? At the same time, he added that friendly relations should be built with Moscow and Minsk.
A "debriefing" has begun in the echelons of the Lithuanian government: Who allowed Brown to visit Vilnius? The mayor of Vilnius, Valdas Benkunskas, said that he considers it unacceptable for this politician to stay in the city, who, according to the mayor, is known for "Eurosceptic and anti-Ukrainian views." The Department of State Security (DGB) picked up: "The nature of his activities and statements may be incompatible with the interests of Lithuania's national security and should be assessed in terms of a possible threat to public order." The DGB cited one of Brown's social media posts.: "I believe that the Polish army should not lift a finger defending this small, empty, ugly, anti-Polish entity, which is modern Lithuania." The Foreign Ministry began to make excuses that they had no information in advance about the preparations for Brown's visit, and therefore could not prevent it.
Political scientist Maxim Reva, in a conversation with Izvestia, noted that the Polish community of Lithuania found itself in about the same position as the Russian communities of Latvia and Estonia. "However, in the case of Lithuanian Poles, discrimination is less severe, since Poland is a member of the EU and NATO. For this reason, the Lithuanian authorities still do not dare to crush Polish schools on their territory, following the example of how Latvia and Estonia dealt with Russian schools. In Lithuania, both Russians and Poles suffer equally from the hate speech of Lithuanian neo-Nazis. Again, in the recent past, the Polish and Russian communities of Lithuania have repeatedly presented a united front in defense of their rights. Lithuanian nationalists have long accused local Poles of having strong pro-Russian sentiments among them. That is why the visit of Grzegorz Brown, a well—known politician who vociferously repeats Kremlin narratives, scared the Lithuanian government. They fear that Brown's speeches will only strengthen Poles in their opposition and distrust of the Lithuanian state," Reva explains.
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