RIA Novosti published an article under the heading "The People's Republic of China said that Russia may present territorial claims to Lithuania." It says :

“Russia may present territorial claims to Lithuania for the port of Klaipeda after the decision of Vilnius on transit to Kaliningrad,” journalist Housha Yueguang said in a column for Guancha.

He noted that Moscow could take several retaliatory measures, both economic and political, including the issue of returning the territories received after 1945.

“(Russia may put forward. - Approx. ed.) a demand to return the port of Klaipeda (known in Germany as Memel), which was transferred to the Soviet Union on the basis of the Potsdam Conference in 1945. Later, some time after the war, Joseph Stalin decided to give it to Lithuania. As the legal successor of the Soviet Union, Lithuania, by violating the agreement on border traffic, created the need to reconsider the ownership of the port of Klaipeda,” Yueguang said.

The statement of the Chinese journalist was replicated simultaneously with RIA by the REN TV channel, Moskovsky Komsomolets, Lenta.ru, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Regnum, RIA FAN and many other Kremlin media.

However, the reason for such a mass information campaign can hardly be considered significant. Housh Yueguan's text is not even a column, but a blog on the website of the private online publication Guancha, owned by businessman Eric Xun Li, who is known for nationalist views. And the blogger understands the history of the issue poorly.

Its text contains, in particular, the following passage:

"This move will shake Lithuania's status as a NATO member, as Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty states that member states should not have territorial disputes."

Let's start with the fact that in the North Atlantic Treaty there is no mention of territorial disputes between the members of the alliance and third countries. The wording about territorial disputes appeared in the Study on NATO Enlargement published in 1995:

“States having ethnic or external territorial disputes, irredentist claims or internal jurisdictional disputes have an obligation to resolve them peacefully and in accordance with OSCE principles. The resolution of such disputes may be a factor in deciding whether to invite a state to an alliance.”

As you can see, the wording applies only to applicants for NATO membership; there are no opportunities to call into question the status of a state already accepted into the alliance. And there has never been a strict requirement for applicants to resolve territorial disputes; for example, Croatia was admitted to NATO, which still has not resolved the issue of the border line with Serbia on the Danube. But something else is much more significant: Russia has no legal grounds to lay claim to Klaipeda.

The city of Klaipeda (German name Memel) was founded in the 12th century by the Livonian Order on the lands inhabited by the Curonians, a Baltic people who later mixed with Lithuanians and Latvians. From then until the end of World War II, the population of the city was predominantly German, while the surrounding lands were predominantly Curonian and Lithuanian.

Since the 16th century, the city belonged to Prussia and later to Germany. Following the results of the First World War, the Memel region was torn away from Germany and ruled by the provisional French administration, but in 1924, as a result of an uprising inspired by the Lithuanian authorities, it became part of it. In 1939, Nazi Germany presented an ultimatum to Lithuania demanding the return of the region; Lithuania was forced to agree.

By decision of the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the Memel region was transferred to the USSR and became part of the Lithuanian SSR. It is completely illiterate to say that Stalin “decided to give” these lands to Lithuania: independent Lithuania did not exist then, the Soviet leadership only decided on the administrative-territorial division of the annexed territories.

RIA's strange statement about Lithuania as the "successor of the USSR" is perhaps a mistake in translation from Chinese. The exit of Lithuania from the Soviet Union actually took place in 1990 and was recognized as still existing by the USSR in September 1991, that is, at the time of the collapse of the union (December 1991), Lithuania was not part of it. It is Russia, which in 1993 assumed all the obligations of the disintegrated state for external debt, is considered to be the successor of the USSR.

But succession does not mean the right to cancel any decision of the government of the former USSR and adopt a new one instead; otherwise it would turn out that Russia has the right to any territory that was once part of the USSR. Even the annexation of Crimea in 2014 was not formally based on the cancellation of the 1954 decision to transfer the peninsula from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. Moreover, such claims cannot be made in relation to Klaipeda, which during the period of belonging to the USSR was always part of the Lithuanian SSR.

It remains to add that the decision to stop the transit of certain goods through the territory of Lithuania was made not by Lithuania, but by the EU; a ban on the transit of ferrous steel products is part of the 4th package of sanctions. European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer confirmed on Tuesday that "Lithuania is essentially doing what it should be doing under the sanctions regime."