Vievys burial remains studies to finish in December

Anthropological studies of the remains of 81 Soviet soldiers exhumed in Vievys are expected to be completed by December, with initial findings due in November, LRT reported.

Vilnius University specialists are expected to receive the remains in September, Professor Rimantas Jankauskas of the university’s Faculty of Medicine told BNS. The standard anthropological examination will determine the soldiers’ sex, age, illnesses, injuries and height, while samples will be collected for possible further identification.

Genetic testing may also be conducted if needed and if funding is available, Jankauskas said.

The remains were exhumed last week from the centre of Vievys, a city in Elektrėnai Municipality, and are being prepared for transfer to specialists at the Anatomy, Histology and Anthropology Department of Vilnius University’s Faculty of Medicine. After the examination, they will be reburied in Vievys’ Orthodox cemetery.

Jankauskas said no additional recommendations on the reburial are currently planned unless the research reveals “very unexpected facts.”

The Soviet soldiers had been buried near St Anne’s Church in central Vievys. A monument to Soviet soldiers and an eternal flame had previously stood at the location.

In December 2024, Arūnas Bubnys, director of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, said the burial site should be removed in accordance with the requirements of the 1949 Geneva Convention’s Additional Protocol on the protection of victims of international armed conflicts.

At the request of the mayor of Elektrėnai, the so-called Desovietisation Commission assessed the burial and found it violated a legal ban on promoting totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and their ideologies in public objects. The commission said the site reinforced and spread the Soviet Union’s and Russia’s promoted myth of the Great Patriotic War, and that the burials were secondary because the remains had been moved from original burial sites in the surrounding area.

Soviet soldiers’ remains were also exhumed from central Šiauliai this year. Russia’s Foreign Ministry protested both cases, accusing Lithuania of desecrating the remains.

Lithuania has called Moscow’s accusations false and absurd. The country’s Foreign Ministry said Russia was deliberately distorting the situation to justify legal actions it had initiated against Lithuania.

A ban on promoting totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and their ideologies took effect in Lithuania in May 2023. Under the law, totalitarian and authoritarian symbols, including monuments and the names of streets, squares and other public objects, must be removed from public spaces.