Vilnius station confronts Moscow-Kaliningrad train with images from war

Russian passengers traveling between Kaliningrad exclave, mainland Russia and Vilnius railway station in Lithuania, March 25, 2022, will see a poster featuring a photograph taken by Maxim Dondyuk, a Ukrainian photographer, of a damaged building. 

Dear passengers of train No. 29, Moscow-Kaliningrad. Today, Putin is murdering civilians in Ukraine. Do you agree with this? An announcer repeats the message in Russian at Vilnius station, while the service ends there.

On Friday morning, two dozen large photographs from the conflict in Ukraine with the same message were displayed on either side the platform that was reserved for Russian transit trains.

As they travel between Russia's Kaliningrad exclave and Moscow, St Petersburg and Lithuania via Belarus, the trains, which can carry up to six passengers per day, stop in Vilnius.

A two-decade old agreement between Lithuania and Russia and the European Union provides transit-only visas to Lithuanian citizens. The Lithuanian locomotive drives the Lithuanian locomotive during the part of the journey within Lithuania.

"We know that the Russians are protected from what's happening in Ukraine. "Here in Vilnius railway station we have the possibility to show at most a little bit of what is going on," Mantas Dubaskas, spokesperson for state-owned Lithuanian railways said.

He said, "It's all we can do." "Maybe, we can change some minds of very few passengers."

These photos were taken by Ukrainian photographers and show people in pain, the injured, the victims of grief, the destruction of buildings and bridges and refugees fleeing the country with their small children.

Moscow describes its actions in Ukraine as a "special military operations" to disarm its neighbor. According to the Kremlin, Russian forces have not attacked civilians.

Russia's parliament passed this month a law that could see you sentenced to up to 15 years imprisonment for spreading false news about the military.

Russian officials claim that false information was spread by Russia's enemies, such as the United States of America and its Western European allies, in an effort to cause discord among the Russian people.

No one was seen in the train's windows on Friday morning. Since the COVID-19 lockdown of early 2020, no tickets were sold to the stations for Russian trains so nobody disembarked or joined the service. It is not known how many people were aboard the train.

Russian aircraft flying between Kaliningrad, Russia and Russia fly above the international waters of Baltic Sea. This is despite Lithuania and other EU countries having banned them from their airspace as a result of Russia's attack against Ukraine.