The Protracted war after the First World War: the case of interwar Lithuania

• Daugpilio universitetas: leidinio tekstas

ENThe Armistice of Compiègne, signed on 11 November 1918, marked the end of the First World War in Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, however, the war was prolonged (Safronovas and Jokubauskas 2018), but it was a different fight already, both in its nature, its scale and its scope. The nations liberated from the rule of the Romanovs, Habsburgs, and Hohenzollerns monarchies in 1917-1918 declared newly sovereign national states (sometimes referring to the erstwhile political entities). The declarations of independence, however, were a mere political move that had to be defended by military force. The nations of the Eastern Baltic region that declared their independence, including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, likewise other Central European nations, succeeded in consolidating their sovereignty, while a number of new states (such as Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasian countries) situated further to the east had failed. The border newly delineated after the First World War and the wars of independence persists, to a certain degree, to this day when looking at a political map of the states and their unions. These differences constitute one of the reasons (supporting the relevance of the research) for analysing the wars of independence that took place in Eastern Europe in the wake of World War I. In Lithuania, as in the case of the other two Baltic states, the wars for sovereignty had to be waged in the aftermath of both world wars (the First and the Second World War), with a special emphasis placed in the political and public discourse of the 21st century on the 1944-1953 guerrilla warfare, using phrases such as "all alone" or "war after war" to describe it. Key words: Lithuanian armed forces, low-intensity conflict, military history, frozen conflict, war after war, Lithuanian War of Independence. [Extract, p. 93]