Lithuanian President Likens Putin to Hitler, Stalin

Lithuania's president compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler and Stalin in comments on the Ukraine standoff that were published by a German news magazine on Monday.

Asked by Focus weekly if it went too far to liken Putin to Stalin, or to Hitler as former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton reportedly did, Dalia Grybauskaite emphatically said it wasn't.

"It is a very objective description of what Putin is doing," the Lithuanian president said. "He is using nationality as a pretext to conquer land with military means.

"That's exactly what Stalin and Hitler did. Such comparisons absolutely apply," she added.

Former U.S. secretary of state Clinton made a similar comparison at a private event in March, according to a local newspaper report.

Describing Moscow's intervention in Crimea following the ousting of the pro-Russian president in Kiev and its insistence that it was simply protecting Russian speakers, Clinton said: "If this sounds familiar, it's what Hitler did back in the 30s."

Russia faces intense Western pressure over the crisis in ex-Soviet Ukraine, where it annexed the strategic Crimea peninsula in March and where pro-Moscow separatists are fighting government forces.

A Baltic nation of three million, Lithuania was the first to break free from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1990 before joining NATO and the EU in 2004.

"Practically every week armed forces exercises take place in Kaliningrad on our border," Grybauskaite said, referring to the Russian exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.

She also accused Russia of waging "information warfare".

"Moscow is manipulating the Russian minorities in the Baltic and making them support Putin's aggression in Ukraine," she added.

Russia launched military manoeuvres on its westernmost edge earlier this month, a day after NATO began war games near the Russian border that Moscow labelled "an act of aggression" amid the East-West tensions.