The minister of foreign affairs of Lithuania sits down with Andrew Mueller to discuss the importance of military preparedness, diplomatic efforts and being able to explain and justify your arguments to the electorate. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
One has to be mindful about the country's size and about the objective power that the country can project.
But for speaking out, it takes just one person, and it can come from the smallest of tribes.
It takes extraordinary times to make a global figure of a cabinet minister from a country of fewer than 3 million people.
We do live, and not in the good way, in extraordinary times.
And one office holder who has risen to the occasion is Gabrielius Lansbergus.
Since 2020, the foreign minister of Lithuania, Landsbergis has been among the most forthright of the voices urging a robust European response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
And certainly no citizen of the Baltic states suffers any illusions about the reality of Russian revanchism.
I'm Andrew Muller and I spoke to Gabrielius Landsbergus on the big interview at Lithuania's embassy here in London.
Gabrielius Landsbergus, welcome to the big interview.
Thank you.
Pleasure to be here.
I want to go back a couple of years and a bit to the event which did bring Lithuania's foreign minister perhaps greater global prominence than they might have anticipated, which was Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine on February 22, 2022.
Can you recall where you were and what you thought when first heard the news that this was actually happening?
I was on my way to Kyiv that week.
We had a foreign affairs council in Brussels and this is where we've agreed with Baltic ministers that we are going to travel to Kyiv.
You know, just added sign of solidarity.
And my colleagues from Latvia and Estonia, they traveled directly from Brussels or Paris, wherever to Kiev.
And I stopped at home to change a shirt or something like that.
And I was on my way to the airport when I got news from protocol or whatever that the plane's not gonna take off.
So I still went to the airport.