An employee of the Vilnius Mayor’s Office is being prosecuted for offensive comments about Russia
An employee of the Mayor’s Office of Vilnius who is responsible for public safety has been prosecuted for publicly insulting Russians. As reported by Delfi news agency, the Prosecutor’s Office filed charges against Darius Kiela and has already transferred the case to the Vilnius local court.
Kiela is accused of commenting negatively on articles about the military conflict in Ukraine and Russian military exercises in the Kaliningrad region. In February 2017, Kiela wrote that Russia is an enemy of Lithuania and the entire world, the country of poverty, hunger and losers, and that it will be destroyed. In other commentaries he called Russians “katsaps” and Russia a "miserable fascist State led by oligarch Führer Putin."
In one commentary, he is happy that "katsaps who killed thousands of people were killed in the East of Ukraine and that is why the fields of Ukraine are now full of katsaps’ bodies. They have not been removed and they are decomposing on the battlefield but there is some use for them. The bodies of the soldiers of degenerate Russia fertilize Ukrainian land.”
He also wrote that "there can be no other use of katsap," that is why Russia that annexed the Crimea is a “degenerate supplier of corpses for Ukraine and the main client is a criminal, Führer Putin." According to the Prosecutor, Kiela not only mocks Russians on ethnic grounds but also humiliates them.
Kiela does not admit his guilt. He stated in court that in 2014, he himself wrote about 30 complaints to the Prosecutor’s Office regarding the commentaries in which Russian Jews were mocked.
"I’m not set against any people or their representatives. I am a civilian and that is why I filed complaints to the General Prosecutor’s Office and I think these are my public and civilian activities, and now I’m being prosecuted for this,” Kiela said in Court.
He stated that he wrote in the commentaries not about Russian people but Russia as a State and about the aggressive policy of its government.
If the Court proves Kiela’s guilt, he will face a fine and restriction of freedom, arrest or imprisonment for up to two years.