Lithuania’s friends
and brothers

Soviet propaganda poster during the winter
war with Finland, 1939-1940.
From Wikipedia.org.

“Do you know how we Fins look upon the Russians as brothers or friends?” A Finnish friend of mine asked, and soon he revealed the answer: “We consider them our brothers, of course, because friends you can choose yourself.”

Lithuania of today is facing the problem Finland has had to deal with for many decades, and is now learning the art of keeping close ties to the West without irritating Russia too much. But Lithuania has got many more “friendship dimensions” to tackle; to keep up the mood towards the EU and to balance its relations between America and Western Europe.

Many would even say that it is questionable who are the real friends of Lithuania within Lithuania itself, or as a columnist recently wrote on this issue: “All these scandals and infights among politicians are no more than battles of personal interests which have very little if anything to do with interests of the nation.”

But first back to Russia, where a recent poll gives quite interesting information on how ordinary Russians view the relations with other countries. According to the poll, Russia's best friends are Belarus (47 percent), Kazakhstan (33 percent), China (24 percent), Germany (22 percent) and India (15 percent).

Russia's main foes are Latvia (46 percent), Georgia (44 percent), Lithuania (42 percent), the United States (37 percent), Estonia (28 per cent) and Ukraine (27 percent).

Lithuania is, in other words, considered one of Russia‘s top foes.

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