Lithuania's bold move: Troop deployment plans for Ukraine amid Russian threats

Lithuanian Prime Minister claims she has Parliament's permission to deploy training units in Ukraine but awaits a request from Kyiv, disregarding potential Russian threats.

Ingrida Šimonytė disclosed to the "Financial Times" that Lithuania's Parliament had authorised the deployment of Lithuanian troops in Ukraine for training missions, even though Kyiv has yet to make such a request.

She acknowledged her understanding that Russia would view this as a provocation but remarked, "If we just thought about the Russian response, then we could not send anything." "Every second week you hear that somebody will be nuked," she commented.

Šimonytė questioned whether weapons would be utilized, given that radioactive contamination could also impact Russia. - "Most of the time the winds blow from west to east," she noted tersely.

Šimonytė remarked that Russia has escalated its assaults on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, such as power stations, schools, and hospitals, "to provoke a new wave of people who will flee Ukraine due to the lack of basic conditions and services."

To date, over 4.2 million refugees from Ukraine have reached EU nations, with the majority leaving during the winter and spring of 2022 at the onset of the conflict. Šimonytė assured that Lithuania would neither expel Ukrainians of draft age back to Ukraine nor conduct searches for such individuals within its borders.