Lithuania’s grave-tending mission to Siberia discontinued
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Mission Siberia / Mission Siberia
The 15-year-old Mission Siberia initiative of organising annual expeditions to tend graves of Lithuanian deportees and political prisoners in Siberia has announced it would end its activities.
"Amid the continuous complicated epidemiological situation worldwide and fading prospects of improvement in the Lithuanian-Russia bilateral relations, the Mission Siberia project has made a painful but unavoidable decision,” Vygaudas Ušackas, one of the project's initiators, said in a statement.
More than 170 Lithuanian burial sites in Siberia and other former Soviet republics have been visited during 18 expeditions organised since the launch of the Mission Siberia project in 2006, involving over 200 people amid a total of 14,000 young people who had signed up.