The People’s Republic of China is exploiting the tragedy of the war in Ukraine to its advantage – with the collusion of the naive and greedy West

It was a feistier start to my first visit to Lithuania than I’d expected. I was talking to Žygimantas Pavilionis MP. “Fifty years of experience, and you still don’t listen to us,” he told me. The siege of Mariupol was still at full tilt, and the acquiescence of neighbouring Belarus to Moscow was being keenly felt.

Along with the other two Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania is a former Soviet republic that is now a member of Nato and the European Union. Earlier this month, the Seimas, Lithuania’s parliament, had unanimously approved a ­resolution that recognised the Russian ­invasion of Ukraine as an act of “genocide”, and also labelled Russia a terrorist state.

The Lithuanian parliament building, if you haven’t seen it, is a charmless cube of poured concrete, its Communist vintage revealed by a thick jacket of cold-weathered pebble-dash. Like most of Vilnius, it was draped in Ukrainian flags, lending an aura of optimistic defiance to the capital’s central square. “We’ve been through this before,” the brutalist architecture seemed to scream.