Justas🇱🇹

She’s a veteran politician with her own cult of personality, she will be fine. She’s not planning to be the prime minister though.

This election had some weird surprises, like the young and progressive Laisvės Partija getting zero votes, but it could have gone so much worse.

That brings some memories.

When the referendum for Lithuania’s joining of EU started, the attendance was abysmal.

It picked up when a supermarket chain offered to exchange the “I voted” sticker for a bottle of beer, a chocolate bar or a small bag of laundry powder.

We’ve been at it since 2014.

Never have I ever seen more decay than when I looked across the river into Sovetsk, Kaliningrad Oblast.

I did step 3 and everyone left, what do I do now?

Russia will be issuing them all “work” visas soon enough.

Some languages depend not on a specific order of words in a sentence and everyone you meet on the internet is not a speaker of native English.

Ah yes Russia, please antagonise the country with one of the highest artillery shell stockpiles and production capacities in the world, what bad thing could result from that?

Yes, but now their propaganda machine can say that they want to stop the war.

You can’t really destroy an insurgency via military means. See: Iraq, Afghanistan.

Yep, in their mind Russia is great and is the future. Meanwhile, countries west of them are decadent and temporary.

To play the devil’s advocate, Poland and the Baltic states received a lot of third country refugees (from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, etc.) from Russia and Belarus before the war in Ukraine.

It was a hybrid warfare campaign where Russians would advertise how easy it is to cross the border and how good life is on the other side. They would also help them get to the border.

Those refugees quickly overran Baltic refugee centers and caused political instability.

Most of Eastern European politics can be boiled down to “Pro-western elitists vs. pro-russian populists”

Meanwhile, Vilnius-Lublin portal is working with no incidents.

Here’s what stories I remember from USSR-Afghanistan war, told by actual veterans:

They would punish extremist acts by throwing women and children out of a helicopter, Pinochet style. The person who told me that drank ever since he got back from the war and never stopped.

There was one man who left his tent for a midnight leak and came back to his entire tent with their throats slit. Had insane PTSD.

My father-in-law got his legs messed up by machine gun fire, got airlifted to East Germany to get put back together, doesn’t talk much, but still drinks a lot.

A lot of unseen costs of this war will take decades to be seen.

Reduced education spending? Less qualified workers to create added value.

Reduced social services? More people getting sick and dying.

Reduced infrastructure spending? Increased prices of transport and goods.

A lot of oil is used to produce energy or heat homes and to produce plastics. Moving towards renewables and better home insulation will have a much stronger and faster positive effect on reduced oil consumption than a move to EV’s would.

About 26 million.

Yep, this is the real reason why France threatened Russia with boots on the ground in Ukraine.