A Vilnius court has sentenced a Lithuanian woman to one and a half years of restricted freedom for publicly denying Soviet crimes, in a case centring on a Facebook post about one of the most notorious atrocities of the Soviet crackdown on Lithuanian independence.
Erika Svenčionienė was convicted over a post she published in July 2024 to mark the anniversary of the Medininkai massacre – an event in which Soviet special forces killed seven Lithuanian border guards and left an eighth with severe brain damage, in the early hours of July 31, 1991.
The killings took place at a border checkpoint near the town of Medininkai, close to the Belarusian border, at a time when Lithuania had declared independence from the Soviet Union but Soviet forces were still present on Lithuanian territory. The massacre is regarded in Lithuania as one of the gravest crimes of the Soviet occupation period.
The Vilnius Regional Court on Wednesday amended an earlier ruling by a lower court, which in February had convicted Svenčionienė but imposed only a 3,750-euro fine – a penalty the prosecution considered too lenient. The appellate court agreed, sentencing her instead to 18 months of restricted freedom, though it stopped short of the intensive supervision sought by the prosecution.
