Lithuanian politician (born )
Linas Antanas Linkevičius (born 6 January ) is a Lithuanian diplomat who has formerly served in the cabinet as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of National Defence. He is currently Lithuania's Ambassador to Sweden.
He was born into an engineer and teacher family. His childhood and school years were spent in Kaunas. In , he graduated from the Kaunas 7th Secondary School with a gold medal. From , he studied at the Faculty of Automation of Kaunas Polytechnic Institute, graduating with an electrical engineering degree. During the rest of the 80s, he served as secretary of the local Lithuanian Komsomol district in Panemunė.
Linkevičius served as minister of National Defence from to and from to He was the Lithuanian Permanent Representative to NATO from until
In December Linkevičius was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs.[1]
Throughout his term as foreign minister, Linkevičius has corroborated Lithuania's status within many international and multilateral entities and organizations, including the United Nations, NATO and the European Union. He managed to establish strong personal ties with prominent international leaders like Laurent Fabius, Angela Merkel and Shimon Peres, whom he invited to be an advisor to the project of the Jewish Memorial Center in Vilnius, on the site of the Great Synagogue of Vilna.
He is known to be a partisan of international collaboration in fields like science, sport and the arts, in order to strengthen the image of Lithuania and to enhance its global standpoint.
In , Linkevičius visited Saudi Arabia and met with the King Salman of Saudi Arabia. He said back then "I think that after this visit our relations will become much more systematic."[2]
Linkevičius expressed deep concern over the escalation of hostilities in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh and called on Armenia and Azerbaijan to immediately halt fighting and progress towards a peaceful resolution.[3]
On 9 March , after Poland's referral to the European Court of Justice, leaders of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia expressed their support for Poland over the Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union.[4] On 13 September , Linkevičius has re-confirmed Lithuania's stand: "We will oppose the sanctions against Poland. This dialogue is very complicated but we believe that the result will be positive."[5]
On 19 December , President Gitanas Nausėda signed a decree on his appointment as ambassador to Sweden. He took up his duties on January [6]
Linkevičius has been a constant opponent within the European Union and NATO of compromises with Russia over Ukraine. When measures to re-engage Russia were discussed in Brussels, in January , he strongly objected. "I do not think we should think how to re-engage; Russia should think how to re-engage . . . I see no reason why we should invent something," he was quoted.[7]
"We can't trust a single word of the Russian leadership. [Russia's] statements are worthless," he was quoted as saying in a public speech in March , scolding some of his European Union colleagues for being detached from "reality" in seeking to soften or unroll some of the sanctions against Russia. [8]
In a newspaper column, in June , Linkevičius warned Lithuania's NATO partners against regression to a mid-Cold War-like détente with Russia, as the one experienced in the late s and throughout the s. Russia, he wrote, no longer poses "a serious alternative to Western liberal democracy", and its adversarial relations with the rest of Europe are "just a Kremlin construct, invented by modern Russia to cover failures of reform."[9]
Referring to Lithuania as a "frontline state" with Russia, he urged in that column that "NATO’s capabilities should be based on sober threat analyses, not illusions. Anything that the Kremlin perceives as weakness will encourage it to press ahead."
In addition to Lithuanian, he knows English, Russian and Polish. He is married with two daughters.