Lithuania summons Belarus envoy over embassy attack

Lithuania said on Wednesday it would lodge a formal protest after unidentified individuals threw Molotov cocktails at its embassy in neighbouring Belarus in a late-night attack. “Late yesterday (Tuesday) evening two Molotov cocktails were thrown into territory of the embassy. They caught fire, but our police officers put them out,” Lithuania’s envoy Linas Linkevicius told AFP by telephone from Belarus’s capital Minsk. “It was a pure luck that we avoided damage. The consequences could have been much worse,” he added. Linkevicius said he was in the building when the attack took place at around 10:45 pm (1945 GMT). “We did not have any indications that something like this could happen. We are ready to cooperate in the investigation,” he added. The Lithuanian foreign ministry said it would summon Belarus’s envoy to Vilnius and present him with a protest note over an incident later on Wednesday. They would demand that Belarus fulfil its international obligations to ensure the security of diplomatic missions and that it act to find those responsible “... and bring them to justice,” said the ministrystatement. Lithuania would also strengthen security at its diplomatic missions, and was ready to provide experts for the investigation in Belarus, it added. Lithuania and Belarus, whose capitals lie just 190 kilometres (120 miles) apart, have rocky diplomatic relations despite their trade ties. Like Belarus, Lithuania won independence from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991. But the two countries have since taken very different routes. Lithuania is firmly anchored in the West, having joined the European Union and NATO in 2004, but Belarus has turned into one of the world’s most isolated states under the 18-year rule of President Alexander Lukashenko. Emanuelis Zingeris, head of the Lithuanian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said he believed the attack had been “ideologically motivated”. He suggested it was linked to the commemoration of the 1917 Russian revolution, which brought the Bolsheviks to power and paved the way for the creation of the communist Soviet Union. Nov.7 is a public holiday in Belarus to commemorate the revolution. Lithuania played a key role in the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union: in 1990 it was the first republic to declare its secession, after five decades of rule by Moscow.