QUICK TAKE: RIA Novosti threatens Lithuania with missiles, pulls the text, denies nothing

Two lines at noon

The editors’ note

RIA Novosti never wrote that it was false.

On September 25, at noon Moscow time, the page of a column on the Russian state agency’s site displays an editors’ note. The text by outside contributor Alexander Nosovich has been removed, it explains, because it “does not correspond to the editorial board’s views, editorial policy, or Russian state policy,” in Meduza’s translation.

Two lines. No apology. No name of anyone responsible. Not a word about what the text announced.

That silence is the story.

A morning in Vilnius

That morning, in Vilnius, people read the news like anywhere else. The phone set down by the cup. The thumb scrolling. The coffee going cold.

Between two headlines, a neighbouring country’s state agency proposes settling the Lithuania question with missiles.

Then the page changes.

The text is gone. The sentence has already been read.

A withdrawal without a denial leaves the threat hanging.

Four hours online

8 a.m., 10:33, noon

The page’s timestamp says 8 a.m. The update says noon.

In between, an archived copy captured at 10:33 a.m., Moscow time, still shows the column online, in full.

Nasha Niva reports that the page first returned an error, before the agency posted its explanation. Radio Svoboda speaks of a removal about three hours after publication.

Four hours at most. Long enough to be read. Long enough to be copied. Long enough to be archived, translated and discussed in Kyiv, in Riga, in the independent Belarusian press.

A text that lived four hours on a state agency’s site isn’t a draft. It’s a publication.

The headline first

The headline ran two sentences. In Meduza’s translation: “Russia Is In for Another SVO. It Will Be Very Short.”

SVO is the Russian abbreviation for the Kremlin’s “special military operation.” In other words, the invasion of Ukraine, which is still going on.

The term wasn’t picked at random. It promises the same thing, only faster.

Four hours is enough for a text to become an archive.

What the column said

Missiles, not soldiers

The column responds to the Lithuanian parliament’s vote on nuclear weapons.

Its core fits in a few lines. Since Moscow’s adversaries, according to the author, were the first to take the question onto nuclear ground, Russia could do without sending troops on the ground.

“Just missiles with the appropriate warhead.”

A decision, he writes, “not just quick, but lightning-fast.” And he adds: “Don’t underestimate the importance of a few seconds.”

Seconds. Remember the unit.

A country he calls suicidal

In it, Lithuania becomes “a suicidal country,” and “a small but proud kamikaze” at Russia’s door, in Meduza’s translation.

He writes that France and Britain no longer hide their plan to place nuclear warheads near Russia’s borders. That is his claim, not an established fact.

He writes that Ukraine, despite everything invested in it, wasn’t enough to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, and that the West is therefore looking for a new instrument, run, in his words, by a greedy and narrow-minded elite.

He writes that geography will make everything faster than in Ukraine, Nasha Niva reports.

It’s the 2022 script, copied out with another country’s name.

Yet in the same text he acknowledges that President Gitanas Nausėda says he plans no nuclear weapons in Lithuania in the short term.

No soldiers. Missiles. And seconds.

Withdrawing isn’t denying

What the note leaves out

Let’s reread the noon note.

It doesn’t say the text is false.

It doesn’t say Russia has no intentions toward Lithuania.

It doesn’t say those missiles will never be launched.

It doesn’t say who decided to publish.

It doesn’t say sorry.

It says the text doesn’t match a policy. A policy, by definition, can change.

And the day it does…

Off-policy, not untrue

I’ll put this early, so readers know where I’m reading from.

I stand with Vilnius. Against the RIA Novosti newsroom, which published a missile threat at 8 a.m. on September 25 and pulled it without denying it. Because its noon note places the text outside state policy, never outside the truth.

Nor has the newsroom explained why it published in the first place.

The text has vanished. The threat is archived.

Off-policy has never meant untrue.

September 11, the crosshairs

What the Kremlin had already said

We have to go back two weeks.

On September 11, on Channel One, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov talks about Lithuania, Meduza reports. If nuclear weapons aimed at Russia are placed there, he says, that country’s territory will also be in the sights of Russian nuclear weapons.

He speaks of a very serious turn in escalation and tensions.

This isn’t a freelancer. It’s the Kremlin’s official voice.

Between aiming and firing

On September 11, the Kremlin takes aim. On the 25th, the column fires.

Peskov sets a condition: nuclear weapons actually installed. Nosovich waits for none. He is responding to a vote.

State policy, as RIA defends it at noon, fits in the space between two verbs.

Aiming is the official line. Striking fast is off the line.

The distance between the two isn’t measured in kilometres. It’s measured in seconds.

On the 11th, they aim. On the 25th, they fire. At noon, they retract.

A well-placed contributor

Council, newsroom, Kaliningrad

RIA presents him as an outside author. A freelancer.

Alexander Nosovich is a member of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and editor-in-chief of RuBaltic.Ru, a pro-Russian site based in Kaliningrad, according to Meduza and Ukrainska Pravda.

Kaliningrad. The Russian enclave that borders Lithuania.

He writes about the Baltic states from that balcony.

What the investigations say

According to a Dossier Center investigation published in 2020, cited by Ukrainska Pravda, he is reportedly tied to influence networks of the Russian presidential administration and foreign intelligence.

Novaya Gazeta Europe recalls that an LRT investigation described him receiving instructions for RuBaltic from Kremlin-linked officials.

Meduza writes, cautiously, that he is reportedly connected to Russian state influence networks. Radio Svoboda relies on the same investigations, by the Dossier Center and LRT.

These are investigations. Not judgments. I report them as such.

A freelancer, then. Not an unknown.

An outside author isn’t an unknown author.

The September 22 vote

99 votes in favour

On September 22, the Seimas approved, after consideration, the bill repealing Article 137 of the Lithuanian Constitution. 99 votes for, 13 against, 5 abstentions, out of 117 voting, according to the parliament’s official record.

The Social Democrats voted for it. So did the Homeland Union. So did the Liberals. The opposition came, for the most part, from a single group.

That article currently bans weapons of mass destruction and foreign military bases on Lithuanian territory, LRT recalls. Some opponents even asked why the whole article was being scrapped, bases included.

This isn’t installing weapons. It’s lifting a ban.

The column doesn’t make the distinction.

October 6, January 12

Nothing is settled. Two final votes will be needed, on October 6 and on January 12, 2027, with at least 94 votes out of 141 each time, and at least three months in between.

One member summed it up for colleagues, according to LRT: Lithuania is the only country in the region that still keeps this restriction. Latvia doesn’t have it. Neither does Estonia. Neither does Poland. Finland has just dropped it.

And yet it is Lithuania that a Russian state agency chose to target, the one neighbour that still had the ban.

The Seimas lifts a ban. The column lifts a taboo.

A freelancer, a disavowal

Vilnius started it, supposedly

Here is the objection, in its best form.

An outside contributor wrote a text. The state agency pulled it within hours. It stated, in black and white, that the text didn’t match Russian state policy. Crying threat means giving a disowned text the audience that was just taken from it.

And it was Vilnius, Moscow would add, that put nuclear weapons on the table on September 22.

The column says as much: Russia’s adversaries supposedly raised the question first.

No weapons, two votes to go

The vote places no weapon anywhere. It lifts a ban that Lithuania’s neighbours don’t have, and it still has to pass twice more.

The column itself quotes the Lithuanian president: no nuclear weapons planned in the short term.

In other words, the author knew no Lithuanian missile was in sight. He proposed Russian missiles anyway.

As for the disavowal, it has a precedent. We’ll get there. It reassures nobody.

Disowning a text doesn’t erase what it announced.

A withdrawal that still counts

The withdrawal is real

Now, what cuts against my side.

The withdrawal is real. Someone at RIA judged that the text went too far, and wrote so by invoking the state policy of the Russian Federation. That is the heaviest formula a state agency can use.

That’s not nothing.

It isn’t total silence either.

The opponents had warned

Another uncomfortable fact: in the Seimas, opponents of the bill had warned that propaganda would exploit it, LRT reports. Three days later, it had.

Of the 13 votes against, 9 came from a single group, Nemuno aušra, according to the parliament’s record.

They were right about the timing. They were wrong about the cause. A vote doesn’t write a threat. A newsroom publishes it.

A third fact, the costliest for my side: in June, Lithuanian authorities confirmed talks on deploying nuclear weapons, Meduza reports. The Financial Times mentioned American bombers capable of carrying warheads.

That’s true. The vote isn’t purely theoretical. And it doesn’t change this: allied aircraft on allied soil are deterrence. A “very short” SVO against a country is aggression.

The disavowal is real. So is the text.

One minute, in 2022

February 26, 8:01

Novaya Gazeta Europe recalls a precedent.

On February 26, 2022, at 8 a.m., RIA published a piece by Pyotr Akopov on the advance of Russia and of a new world. It spoke of victory over Ukraine and of its question being solved.

The text vanished at 8:01 a.m.

One minute. Sixty seconds.

The text had been ready for a victory. It went out too early.

The withdrawal, then the war

The withdrawal stopped nothing. The invasion launched two days earlier went on.

It is still going on, four years and seven months later.

In 2022, a withdrawn text announced the end of a war already under way. In 2026, a withdrawn text announces another, a “very short” one.

I’m not writing that Moscow is preparing a strike on Vilnius. I have no proof of that. I’m writing that the act of withdrawing proves nothing, and that it has been used before.

Sixty seconds in 2022. The war was never withdrawn.

Vilnius keeps its calendar

A long-planned exercise

On that same September 25, Lithuania launches Vyčio skliautas 2026, its largest annual mobilization exercise, running until October 3.

It isn’t a response to the column. The exercise comes back every year, and it was on the calendar long before.

About 3,000 civil servants, municipal officials, companies and organizations take part, plus about a thousand volunteers, according to LRT. Nine non-governmental organizations, a record for the exercise.

The scenario includes power and communications outages, receiving allied forces, and keeping essential services running.

The goal, according to LRT: a civilian mobilization reserve of 100,000 people. People with jobs, families, schedules, learning what to do if the siren doesn’t stop.

State reserves, for the first time

For the first time, state reserves will be mobilized. Food will be delivered to designated points and to hospitals.

On September 29 and October 3, sirens and the LT72 alert app will be tested.

A siren rising over a schoolyard is a sound you don’t forget. Even when you know it’s a drill.

Vilnius isn’t answering RIA. Vilnius is counting its reserves.

A country that drills isn’t suicidal. It’s getting ready.

Kaliningrad’s geography

The corridor Warsaw is watching

Nosovich invokes geography. It would make everything faster than in Ukraine.

Geography happens to be on the Lithuanian exercise’s program. About 20 Polish officials are observing it, according to LRT. They are working on evacuation, on border-control logistics, on infrastructure in the Suwałki corridor.

That corridor separates Kaliningrad from Belarus. On one side, the enclave the author writes from. On the other, Moscow’s ally.

Two readings of one map

A parallel exercise is taking place in the Lazdijai district, LRT reports.

Same map. Two readings.

The column sees a target reached in a few seconds. Vilnius and Warsaw see evacuation routes to keep open.

One stays online for four hours. The other trains for nine days.

A map doesn’t say who threatens. The text does.

Who published, who withdrew

No reaction in Vilnius

I don’t know who at RIA approved publication.

I don’t know who ordered the removal.

Who read this text before 8 a.m.?

I can’t tell whether the column was a trial balloon or a desk error.

Nor can I tell whether the text was pulled because of its words, or because of its readers.

In the pages I read on September 25, I found no official Lithuanian reaction to the text. No reaction from the Kremlin either.

Yet the Kremlin had spoken two weeks earlier. On substance. Not on form.

Published, withdrawn, never denied

I’ll admit it: this kind of text wears me out more than it frightens me. And that is exactly what worries me.

What remains is simple. A state agency published. It withdrew. It didn’t deny.

And yet the affair will be filed among end-of-week slip-ups, between two headlines about something else.

Reader fatigue is the withdrawal’s best ally.

Seconds and months

Nosovich’s unit of time

Nosovich counts in seconds. The time a missile takes.

Vilnius counts in months. October 6. January 12. At least three months between two votes, because its own procedure requires it.

And yet it’s the slow democracy that gets accused of rushing things.

A parliament’s pace

On September 22, the vote took place at 11:02 a.m., on a Tuesday, in plenary session. Every group has its tally there. Every member has a name there.

A parliament that votes three times, months apart, in full view, isn’t improvising.

A column written to live four hours is.

The Seimas’s slowness is an admission of seriousness. RIA’s speed is an admission of something else.

Seconds threaten. Months decide.

The denial that never came

What it would have taken

One sentence would have done it. Russia does not threaten Lithuania with missiles.

It wasn’t written.

Instead, two lines at noon, unsigned, with no apology. And an archive that keeps everything else, the missiles, the warhead, the seconds.

The text has disappeared from the site. It hasn’t disappeared from the world.

Withdrawn threats

How many withdrawn threats will we keep agreeing to read as denials?

On October 6, the Seimas will vote, at the scheduled hour, under its own name.

The archive is still online.

The text is withdrawn. The threat is not denied.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• RIA Novosti — editors’ note on the column’s removal, September 25, 2026
• RIA Novosti — Alexander Nosovich’s column, archived copy, September 25, 2026
• Seimas of Lithuania — vote result on Article 137, September 22, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• Meduza — the column RIA published and then removed, September 25, 2026
• LRT — the Seimas backs lifting the nuclear ban, September 22, 2026
• LRT — launch of the Vyčio skliautas 2026 exercise, September 25, 2026