A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, MAY 7 , 2022
know that we stand with them,”
Biden told reporters in Washing-
ton before she boarded her flight
to Europe.
On Saturday, the first lady will
visit the U.S. Embassy in Bucha-
rest for a humanitarian briefing
from United Nations agencies,
humanitarian groups and the
Romanian government. She will
then meet Romania’s first lady,
Carmen Iohannis, who, like
Biden, continues to teach Eng-
lish while her husband serves as
the head of state.
The first lady will also visit a
public school in Bucharest host-
ing Ukrainian refugee students
and attend a listening session
with the Romanian minister of
education.
She will travel to Kosice, Slova-
kia, on Sunday to celebrate
Mother’s Day with mothers and
children before visiting the Slo-
vakia-Ukraine border crossing in
Vysne Nemecke. Biden will tour
refugee processing centers and
meet with aid workers and refu-
gees. She will also visit a Greek
Catholic chapel that serves refu-
gees, volunteers and first re-
sponders.
Millions of refugees have fled
Ukraine as Russia’s military has
waged a brutal war that Biden
has declared a genocide. The U.S.
government has not officially
adopted that term, which re-
quires an extensive review proc-
ess, but U.S. officials are assisting
the international community in
ongoing war-crimes investiga-
tions.
The first lady will conclude her
trip Monday at the presidential
palace in Bratislava, where she
will meet Slovakian President
Zuzana Caputova.
Ashley Biden, the president
and first lady’s daughter, was
initially scheduled to join her
mother on the trip, but shedropped out after she was noti-
fied of a close contact with an
individual who tested positive
for the coronavirus. She tested
negative, but she was advised by
a White House physician not to
travel with the first lady, accord-
ing to a White House spokesman.
Ashley Biden attended the
White House correspondents’
dinner last weekend and several
related parties. A number of
White House officials and jour-
nalists have contracted the virus
since those gatherings.
Jill Biden will be joined for the
Romania portion of the trip by
Mark Gitenstein, the ambassa-
dor to the European Union and a
longtime Biden aide and friend.
Gitenstein served as U.S. ambas-
sador to Romania during the
Obama administration.
Biden will travel closer to the
conflict than her husband did
during his trip to Europe in
March, when he visited Rzeszow,
Poland, about 60 miles from the
Ukrainian border. But in recent
weeks, a number of top U.S.
officials have traveled to Kyiv to
meet with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky.
The highest-ranking official to
make the trip was House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who
made a surprise visit to Ukraine
last Saturday. She and a half-doz-
en other lawmakers met with
Zelensky and his top aides for
three hours late Saturday, ex-
pressing American solidarity
with Ukraine and seeking a first-
hand assessment of the condi-
tions as she hoped to steer Presi-
dent Biden’s massive new
Ukraine aid package through
Congress.
“Our commitment is to be
there for you until the fight is
done,” Pelosi told Zelensky. “We
are on a frontier of freedom, and
your fight is a fight for everyone.”war in ukraineprepare the country to live with-
out energy from the continent’s
biggest supplier, Russia.
While Germany was helping
build two undersea pipelines to
dramatically increase its imports
of Russian natural gas, Lithuania
was spending its taxpayer money
with the single-minded goal of
breaking free. The effort paid off
last month, when the nation of
2.8 million was able to halt its
remaining gas purchases from
Russia to protest the invasion of
Ukraine. It broke its reliance on
Russian oil years ago.
Long-simmering hostility
toward Moscow and its historical
subjugation of Eastern Europe is
the propellant that has driven the
continent’s most successful ener-
gy-independence movements.
Fellow Baltic states Estonia and
Latvia, as well as Poland, are
years ahead of other European
Union nations in rejecting Rus-
sian oil and gas.
Some say they tried to warn
Germany over the years as it was
deepening its dependence on
Moscow through the Nord
Stream 1 and 2 pipelines from
Russia.
“Germany was claiming that
this project is fully an economic
one, [that] it has nothing to do
with politics, and they could see
no issue [with] the independence
of Germany and the whole of
Europe,” Anna Moskwa, Poland’s
minister of climate and environ-
ment, said in an interview in
Warsaw. “For us it was an issue,
taking into account the history
we had, the whole of Europe has.”
Poland’s efforts are now put-
ting it in a position to help Ger-
many as it races to kick its Rus-
sian habit. In talks in Warsaw last
month, the countries discussed
ways that Germany could use
Poland’s oil infrastructure to
break its remaining dependence
on Russian supplies.
Lithuania has a bitter history
of Russian occupation, starting
with Catherine the Great’s forces
in 1795. The nation regained its
independence after World War I,
but external domination re-
turned during World War II,
when Germany briefly occupied
the country and enlisted Lithua-
nian collaborators to help slaugh-
ter most of the country’s Jewish
population. Lithuania then fell to
the Soviet Union, which forcibly
incorporated it as a Soviet repub-
lic in 1944.
Thousands of guerrilla fighters
continued resisting Soviet rule in
the postwar years, a movement
eventually crushed through tor-
ture, execution and mass depor-
tations to Siberia. In the base-
ment execution chamber at the
KGB museum, the discarded eye-
glasses and shoes of some of these
partisans are displayed on the
floor next to a wall pockmarked
with bulletholes.
Lithuania felt a different kind
LITHUANIA FROM A
of pressure after it became the
first Soviet republic to declare
independence, in March 1990. By
that time, Moscow had built a
web of pipelines and refineries to
deliver heavily subsidized oil and
gas from Siberia to Eastern Eu-
rope, and it leveraged that net-
work to punish its recalcitrant
republic.
In April 1990, Moscow sharply
cut oil and gas deliveries to Lithu-
ania for more than two months,
causing a spike in gasoline prices
and the shuttering of many facto-
ries.
Lithuania desperately sought
supplies from Norway and oth-
ers, but it didn’t have the money
to pay or the power to steer
foreign tankers around the Soviet
navy. It was an early lesson that if
Lithuania wanted to have sover-
eignty in its decisions, it needed
to buy energy elsewhere, Kreivys
said.
“Russia always, always has
used energy as a tool for geopolit-
ical influence,” Kreivys said.
As a first step after its inde-
pendence, it hired an American
firm to build a new oil import
terminal that was completed in- Buying oil that way was
more expensive but freed Lithua-
nia from relying on Russian pipe-
lines.
The risk of such dependence
was underscored later that same
year, when Lithuania sold a stake
in its Soviet-era refinery to an
American bidder instead of a
Russian rival, prompting Russia
to impose a sporadic oil blockade
on the facility through a pipeline
the Soviets had named Friend-
ship.
Energy pressure worsened af-
ter Vladimir Putin came to power
in 2000, and after Lithuania
joined the European Union and
NATO in 2004. Russia started
charging Lithuania significantly
more for natural gas than it did
other European customers. And
after Lithuania chose a Polish
buyer over a Russian suitor when
its refinery came up for sale
again, it once more found Russia
shutting down shipments of
crude.
That spurred Lithuania to ac-celerate its efforts to break free,
drawing up plans for a new termi-
nal to import liquefied natural
gas (LNG) via Baltic Sea ship-
ments.
When Putin warned against
proceeding with the gas project,
in a rare 2010 meeting with Lithu-
ania’s then-president, Dalia Gry-
bauskaite, he only motivated Vil-
nius to move faster, said Romas
Svedas, who was vice minister of
energy at the time.
Grybauskaite is “a very strongpersonality, and immediately she
said, ‘No, we are going to develop
alternatives,’” Svedas said in an
interview.
“We’ve been forced to build an
extensive LNG terminal even
though our neighbor is the rich-
est country in the world for natu-
ral gas,” he said. “It’s a paradox,
but basically Putin pushed, as he
is pushing the whole world, to
make a choice for democratic
values.”
The LNG plan met resistancein Lithuania’s Parliament, where
some legislators questioned the
wisdom of building such an ex-
pensive project in a small coun-
try. Kreivys and Svedas blamed
Russian disinformation for the
obstruction, which was eventual-
ly overcome.
Local opposition also cropped
up when Lithuania tapped Chev-
ron to explore for shale gas,
which would have eventually re-
quired fracking to extract. Again,
Svedas suspected Russian handi-
work.
A clutch of anti-shale bill-
boards mysteriously appeared on
the main highway out of Vilnius.
When local journalists investigat-
ed, some of the billboard compa-
nies said a private individual had
purchased them, but they
wouldn’t name the person, Sve-
das said. No central or local gov-
ernment officials would claim re-
sponsibility.
“In Lithuania, normally if you
have a position, you make it
public. You go to the street and
say, no for shale, no for war. It’s
okay, we’re a democratic country,”
he said.
Despite the odds, the LNG ter-
minal began operating in 2014
and helped lower gas prices for
Lithuania, officials say. The coun-
try continued buying some gas
via pipelines from Russia, which
lowered its prices to compete
with the LNG supply.
But after Russia invaded
Ukraine, Lithuania was the first
European country to announce
that it would immediately stop
buying Russian gas. Latvia quick-
ly followed, and Estonia said it
would stop by year’s end. “Our
terminal is supplying them as
well,” Kreivys said.
This week, Lithuania and Po-
land opened a new pipeline con-
necting the countries and en-
abling them to share gas — a
timely development after Russia
abruptly cut gas deliveries to
Poland last week.
“Together we say NO to Rus-
sian gas, NO to Russian oil, NO to
financing the war,” Lithuanian
President Gitanas Nauseda
tweeted after the opening cer-
emony Thursday.
Shared electricity is the last
remaining link to Russia that
Lithuania is racing to cut. It still
gets about 10 percent of its elec-
tricity from a network built in
Soviet times and controlled by
Moscow.
The transmission loop con-
nects all three Baltic states with
Belarus and western Russia, cre-
ating an interdependence that no
one country can break without
hurting itself and the others, said
Rokas Masiulis, head of Lithua-
nia’s electricity grid.
Still, Vilnius is scrambling to
build new electricity links to Po-
land and the E.U. with the aim of
leaving the Soviet-era network.
“By the end of 2025, we’ll be
ready to desynchronize from Rus-
sia,” Masiulis said.Oppression fueled Lithuanian energy independence
PETRAS MALUKAS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
A fuel pipeline between Lithuania and Poland began operating this week, a t imely development after Russia abruptly cut gas deliveries to
Poland last week. Lithuania has spent years working to break free of Russian oil and gas.JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
President Donald Trump in 2018 hosted, from left, Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis, Estonian
President Kersti Kaljulaid and Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite. A fter Russia invaded
Ukraine in February, Lithuania announced it would immediately stop buying Russian gas. Latvia
quickly followed, and Estonia said it would stop by year’s end.global humanitarian response.
The invasion marks the moment
of highest U.S.-Russia tension
since the end of the Cold War.
One of America’s top goals has
been to reassure its fellow NATO
members that it would protect
them should the war spill outside
Ukraine’s borders, and to empha-
size to Moscow that it would
respond directly to an assault on
a NATO member, in contrast to
the indirect aid it is providing
Ukraine. Article 5 of the NATO
treaty compels members to come
to one another’s aid if attacked.
President Biden visited Poland
in March in his own effort to
provide reassurance to countries
on NATO’s eastern flank. During
that visit, he ad-libbed a line at
the end of a speech suggesting
that he wanted Russian Presi-
dent Vladimir Putin to be re-
moved from office, saying, “For
God’s sake, this man cannot re-
main in power.” The White House
quickly clarified that Biden was
not advocating a policy of regime
change.Secretary of State Antony
Blinken and Defense Secretary
Lloyd Austin have visited
Ukraine itself, and several heads
of state — including the leaders
of the Czech Republic, Poland
and Slovenia — have visited Kyiv
during the conflict. But so far,
President Biden has not visited
Ukraine, as aides privately cite
the security challenges that
would pose.
The United States has sent
billions of dollars in military
assistance and humanitarian aid
to the beleaguered country, and
the president last week asked
Congress for an additional $
billion to support Ukraine
against Russia, which has
launched the largest land war in
Europe since World War II.
This is Jill Biden’s second solo
overseas trip since the start of
the administration. Last sum-
mer, she led the U.S. delegation
to the Tokyo Olympics for the
Opening Ceremonies. “It’s so im-
portant to the president and to
me that the Ukrainian peopleSUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
First lady Jill Biden meets U.S. troops at the Mihail Kogalniceanu
Air Base in Romania, her first stop on a four-day trip.BY TYLER PAGERmihail kogalniceanu air
base, romania — First lady Jill
Biden arrived here Friday for the
first stop on a four-day trip to
Eastern Europe, serving as an
unusually personal emissary
from the White House as the
United States seeks to reiterate
its support for NATO allies, espe-
cially those nearest Russia’s war
zone in Ukraine.
The trip marks Jill Biden’s
highest-profile diplomatic en-
gagement since her husband be-
came president, visiting a region
that remains on edge from Rus-
sia’s invasion and fearful it could
be next. During her trip, the first
lady planned to meet with Slova-
kia’s president, Romanian and
Slovak educators, and refugees
who have fled Ukraine since
Russia invaded more than two
months ago.
Biden began her visit Friday
with a stop at the Mihail Kogal-
niceanu Air Base, where she
greeted U.S. and NATO military
officials and helped Army com-
manders serve macaroni and
cheese and potatoes to American
troops stationed here.
One U.S. service member in-
troduced himself to the first lady
as hailing from Pennsylvania,
where Jill Biden was raised, add-
ing that he attended the Univer-
sity of Delaware. “I’m a Blue Hen,
too!” she said, referring to the
mascot of the university from
which she received her PhD. “So
is my husband.”
The air base, a Romanian in-
stallation that hosts U.S. and
NATO troops, has nearly tripled
in size, to about 2,700 personnel,
since Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, and the first lady ar-
rived with supplies in hand. Her
team had received word that the
base was running low on ketch-
up, so they brought about five
gallons of it on their plane, and
Biden herself entered the dining
area holding two bottles of ketch-
up.
After cutting a cake decorated
with an American flag, which
had been made to commemorate
the first lady’s visit, Biden joined
Staff Sgt. Sharon Rogers to rec-
ord a video of the two of them
reading “Night Catch,” a chil-
dren’s book, to Rogers’s young
son, Nathan. Biden had facilitat-
ed the reading through Joining
Forces, her initiative to support
military families, and United
Through Reading, which con-
nects military families with de-
ployed service members through
video recordings and virtual
book readings.
Previous first ladies have also
made overseas visits to support
U.S. troops stationed abroad, but
Biden’s trip to the edge of a hot
war zone comes at a particularly
high-stakes moment in U.S. for-
eign policy, with the Biden ad-
ministration playing a central
role in the military conflict andJill Biden kicks off visit
to Eastern Europe
First lady seeks to
underscore U.S. support
for NATO allies