Word: vilnius
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...discoveries pertaining to Napoleon's life are stoking further interest. Scientists are currently analyzing nearly 2,000 skeletons recently unearthed near Vilnius, Lithuania - the remains of some of the 440,000 Imperial soldiers who perished while fleeing Russia following Napoleon's catastrophic 1812 campaign. And French Culture Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon is considering a request to allow genetic testing on the remains in Napoleon's Parisian tomb. The exam would end decades of speculation that the British returned the corpse of Bonaparte's valet rather than the man himself to France in 1840. French scientists have already cleared the British...
...Before returning home, the president will make two quick stops in Vilnius Lithuania and then Bucharest, Romania. Visiting three cities in roughly 30 hours is hard travel for a president who likes his personal comforts. But quick stops have the benefit of leaving little time for the ceremonial duties of statecraft. His Prague agenda included sitting through 45 minutes of ballet by the National Dutch Theater, a cultural duty that didn't exactly thrill the president. "He'd rather dance with Gerhard Schroeder," quips one administration aide...
...Baltic radar network known as BaltNet. U.S. General Joseph W. Ralston, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, calls the system "one of the best I've ever seen. We'd love to have it at NORAD in Alaska." With its central monitoring station in Karmelava, Lithuania, 100 km west of Vilnius, BaltNet can track any aircraft in Baltic airspace. The $100 million system - funded by the U.S. and Norway - enables the mixed Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian crews to monitor planes flying over Russia's nearby, heavily militarized, enclave of Kaliningrad. "The Russians probably don't like that," shrugs Second Lieut. Rimantas...
...mood in the Gorbachev camp after Vilnius was bleak. Some wanted to leave him. Others stayed on, trying, as one put it, "to glue back together whatever we can" of perestroika. Life took on a faintly unreal quality. Between then and August, I saw a lot of one man who was, in the official hierarchy, among the top four or five leaders of the Soviet Union. (In fact his powers were more modest, though his access to information was extremely wide). We would sit in his massive office at the Kremlin, often for a couple of hours at a time...
...news radio that the Putin administration has been doing its best to gut this past year, reported during the coup that some of the units moving into Moscow were in a very aggressive mood. As I heard this I was reminded of conversations a few months earlier, after the Vilnius killings. Then hospitable Airborne commanders based in Lithuania had remarked quietly over lunch that they could have "finished the job" - captured the Lithuanian parliament - in less than an hour. And the Lithuanians had been far better prepared than Yeltsin's supporters...