Attacks on Lithuanian Partisan Leaders Are Expanding – Kremlin Media Accuses Jonas Žemaitis and Juozas Lukša of Nazism

On 27 January, the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day — the day when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated 81 years ago. As in previous years, Kremlin-aligned media in 2025 intensified coverage of the highly sensitive topics of the Holocaust and antisemitism, exploiting them to justify an aggressively imperialist political agenda. Alongside recurring false claims that the Baltic states voluntarily sought to join the Soviet Union, the past year also saw accusations linking three of Lithuania’s most prominent armed resistance leaders — Jonas Žemaitis-Vytautas, Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, and Juozas Lukša-Daumantas — to Holocaust crimes.

A clear trend has emerged in which Kremlin-aligned media outlets publish an increasing volume of negative content about Lithuania in connection with the Holocaust and antisemitism year after year.

It is difficult to identify a single specific cause behind this phenomenon, but one noticeable factor is that, as the war against Ukraine enters its fourth year, the overall tone of Russian media continues to deteriorate. Lithuania, together with its Baltic neighbours, is increasingly being cast as a scapegoat — publicly attacked in order to divert attention from worsening social problems within Russia itself.

Debunk.org conducted a study examining 223 pieces of antisemitism-related content published by Kremlin-aligned online media in 2025 that mentioned Lithuania. This represents a slight increase compared to 2024, when 208 such publications were recorded.

Year after year, Russian media continues to promote the narrative that all neighbouring states resisting Kremlin influence are ‘Nazi’ countries that deliberately rehabilitate and glorify an alleged Nazi past. In recent years, however, accusations of ‘tolerance toward Nazism’ have increasingly and more aggressively targeted not only Eastern European countries, but also Western Europe and the United States. This can be linked to the West’s active support for Ukraine in its war against Russia — support that was significantly more limited before 2022.

As is well known, the Kremlin justified its aggression against Ukraine by claiming that Russian-speaking populations were being systematically oppressed and that the country was engaged in so-called ‘rehabilitation of Nazism,’ often associated with the figure of Stepan Bandera. In Lithuania’s case, this framework has been adapted: the ‘Nazi’ label is increasingly being applied to Lithuanian freedom fighters.

On 27 May, a document published on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Jonas Žemaitis-Vytautas of allegedly serving during World War II in a supposed Nazi punitive unit referred to as the ‘Lithuanian Local Squad’.

On 23 April, the official website of Russia’s Channel One television network published information citing unverified claims allegedly based on data from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, asserting that Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas supposedly led a ‘gang persecuting Jews’ in 1941.

The same article also claimed that another prominent Lithuanian resistance figure, Juozas Lukša-Daumantas, had allegedly been a member of a pro-Nazi front and that his name was supposedly connected to the killings that took place in Kaunas in June 1941 at the so-called ‘Lietūkis’ garage.

However, the most scandalous allegation targeting Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas appeared on 24 December in the Russian outlet Argumenty i Fakty, which published a claim stating that, ‘according to an unnamed witness, Ramanauskas-Vanagas killed around 50 civilians with a crowbar, then climbed onto a pile of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion.’

Such inflammatory and entirely unsubstantiated claims, published on Christmas Eve, were not accidental. Rather, they represent the culmination of a year-long trend in Kremlin-aligned media, where Holocaust-related themes are weaponised to equate Lithuania’s resistance against Soviet occupation with Nazism and the murder of Jews — an effort aimed at delegitimising the independent democratic state of Lithuania.