![]() ![]() (In Vilnius, the blue and yellow flag of its embattled neighbour is ubiquitous, more visible even than Lithuania’s own.) ![]() The restaurant is appropriate in another way: its signature dish is chicken Kyiv, and our conversation is inevitably going to focus on Ukraine. Simonyte can laugh now, but the stories are pretty grim. She laughs a lot as she tells such stories, but only now that she can afford to. At that time, they were sort of rewinding the tapes and listening to what who said what,” Simonyte says with a laugh. “In the Soviet system, in any shop or in any restaurant you used to have a ‘sanitary hour’ where it was not functional. This was a politically suspect clientele, so all the tables were bugged, and every second one might be occupied by an eagle-eared KGB agent or informer.īut there was a workaround. In the Soviet period, it was a favoured haunt for Vilnius’ arty, bohemian set. The choice of restaurant, one of Simonyte’s favourites, has echoes of the past: minimal décor, wood panelling, and art deco tables with curved edges. She talks of the legacy of living without liberty, which can still be felt three decades later, and has a warning: Putin isn’t finished yet. Over a surprisingly unhurried lunch, I find the answer lies in the country’s own deep understanding of the trials of totalitarianism, which the schoolgirl Simonyte experienced first-hand. If anyone can explain Lithuania’s remarkable role, it’s the prime minister – who, fortunately, is a fluent English speaker. This week, Lithuania’s populace even crowdfunded €5 million ($7.5 million) to buy a Bayraktar combat drone from Turkey for the Ukrainian military.Īt a time when many lament that the liberal West has seemed a little feckless and listless, how and why has Lithuania become a risk-taking, insistent torchbearer for the West’s foundational mission of democratic values and a rules-based world order? Meanwhile, Lithuania and its fellow Baltic ex-Soviet states Latvia and Estonia have been relentlessly and vocally lobbying for the toughest possible response to the imperialist reflexes of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. And Simonyte and her government aren’t backing down, even as Beijing turns the diplomatic and economic screws. The Baltic country of just 2.8 million people has picked a head-turning David-and-Goliath fight with China over the issue of Taiwan. There’s something about this scene, and about Simonyte herself, that feels quintessentially Lithuanian: down to earth, unostentatious, unassuming.īut if that’s the national character, Lithuania has been playing against type of late. Ingrid Simonyte was a rebellious teenager in conformist times. There has been almost no visible sign that I’m having lunch with the country’s prime minister, Ingrida Simonyte. A young woman who has been waiting in the restaurant lobby for 20 minutes greets her, gestures at my corner table, then disappears.Īs the woman walks towards me and introduces herself, none of the other lunchers cast even a discreet second glance. A burly man in a suit has jumped out of the car just before her, and now points her towards the door. Outside a fashionable restaurant on the main boulevard of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, a casually dressed woman in her late 40s gets out of a nondescript black car.
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