“The Russian language is everywhere again”: exiles sow unease in Lithuania

An influx of exiled Russian activists and refugees from Ukraine and Belarus is stoking fears in a country that has fought to preserve its language and culture under Soviet occupation.

A pile of flowers covered a small memorial in the center of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius after the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei A .Navalny last month. “Putin is a murderer,” read a sign in Russian.

The impromptu tribute at the memorial, an unassuming pyramid commemorating the victims of Soviet repression , highlighted Vilnius' growing status as the center of Russian political opposition. Hundreds of dissidents who fled Russia after the invasion of Ukraine have found a sympathetic ally in their fight against President Vladimir V. Putin: the Lithuanian government, which has long viewed the Russian leader's foreign interventions as a threat existential.

In Vilnius, exiled Russian journalists have set up studios to broadcast information on YouTube to millions of compatriots back home. Russian activists have rented offices to document the Kremlin's human rights abuses, and Russian musicians in exile have recorded new albums for audiences at home.

The arrival of Russian dissidents in Vilnius added to a larger wave of Russian-speaking refugees and migrants from Belarus and Ukraine over the past four years. Fleeing war or repression, these migrants together reshaped the economy and cultural makeup of this slow-paced medieval city of 600,000, reinforcing Lithuania's image as an unlikely bastion of democracy. p>

But the tribute to Mr Navalny also highlighted the difficult relations between Vilnius' growing Russian-speaking diaspora and their Lithuanian hosts. Some in Lithuania worry that the economic and diplomatic benefits of this migration come at the cost of creeping Russification in a small country that had struggled to preserve its language and culture during Soviet occupation.

The memorial where Mr. Navalny's mourners laid the flowers, for example, was dedicated to Lithuanian victims of the Soviet secret police, a sort of substitute for the leader's death of the opposition on orders, they believe, from Mr. Putin, a former KGB officer.

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