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Russian Foreign Min condemns Lithuanian court ruling on WW II veteran

“It’s quite obvious that the verdict has an explicitly political underpinning”, the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman said

MOSCOW, November 8 (Itar-Tass) – Lithuanian court’s ruling to recognize the 89-year-old Russian citizen Mikhail Tabakayev, a veteran of World War II, “guilty of deportations of civilians from the occupied territories of Lithuania to the remote regions of the USSR”, is shameful and politically motivated, an official spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

“It’s quite obvious that the verdict /taken by the Kaunas county court on the 89 year-old veteran – Itar-Tass/ has an explicitly political underpinning and is based on the concept of ‘Soviet occupation’ promulgated by the Lithuanian officialdom rather than on historical and legal realities,” said Alexander Lukashevich, the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman.

“Sorting out with the past” with the aid of a disgraceful trial over someone who is very advanced in age and severely ill looks especially cynical against the background of the fact that, according to persistent reports by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, not a single Lithuanian collaborationist has ever been brought to account for the crimes committed in the period of the Holocaust, Lukashevich said.

He pledged the Russian government’s resolve to continue giving material and moral assistance to the veterans of law enforcement agencies of the former USSR who are now subject to persecution out of political motives.

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