HE CONDEMNS Ukraine's Maidan protests and has been photographed wearing the black-and-orange St George’s ribbon, a symbol of Russian imperial power. But Waldemar Tomaszewski (pictured) is not a rebel commander in the Donbas. He is the leader of the political party of Lithuania’s Polish minority, the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania (AWPL).

Mr Tomaszewski’s support is not broad; on March 1st he came third in Vilnius’s mayoral election, with 17% of the vote. But as a leader of Lithuania’s ethnic Poles, who make up 7% of the country’s population, his international influence rises above his domestic support. Relations between Vilnius and Warsaw have long been strained over issues such as the restitution of property confiscated under the Soviet regime and the refusal to allow the Polish alphabet on official documents. Now Mr Tomaszewski’s pro-Russian leanings are fuelling increased suspicion of Lithuania’s ethnic Poles, at a time when the country is glancing nervously over its shoulder at Moscow.

Mr Tomaszewski, who is a member of the European Parliament, claims that his party aims to “unite all people of good will,” and not just Poles. This has increasingly involved courting Lithuania’s ethnic Russians, the country’s second-largest minority, who make up 6% of the population. For the mayoral election, AWPL formed a coalition with Russian Alliance, a local Russian party. Mr Tomaszewski oppposed Ukraine’s Maidan revolution last year; rulers should not be chosen “by throwing bottles of petrol at policemen,” he says, drawing parallels with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Some of his colleagues go further: last summer Zbigniew Jedziński, one of AWPL’s eight MPs, wrote on Facebook that NATO should “bomb Kiev”.

Mr Tomaszewski certainly does not speak for all of Lithuania’s 200,000 Poles. He is not popular among some young members of the Polish Discussion Club, a Vilnius group founded last year to encourage dialogue among local Poles of all political stripes. Indeed, their discussions were prompted by Mr Tomaszewski's divisive stunts: like the wearing of both a St George's ribbon and a red-and-white Polish one to a May 9th commemoration of the victory over Nazi Germany. “As a Lithuanian citizen, I can make demands, but I also have obligations,” says Aleksander Radczenko, a 39-year-old lawyer and blogger who is one of the club’s founders. Many Polish-Lithuanians worry that Mr Tomaszewki’s provocative actions undermine their claim to full integration in Lithuanian society.

That is the view of Czesław Okińczyc, who was one of three Polish-Lithuanian members of parliament to vote in favour of Lithuanian independence from the Soviet Union in March of 1990; six others abstained. (Mr Okińczyc’s framed ballot hangs on his office wall.) Today he is an adviser to the prime minister and the founder of the country’s only Polish radio station. He is dismayed to see shades of the fault lines of the 1990s emerging today.

Part of the problem is Polish-Lithuanian reliance on Russian media. A poll in January found that while 55% of Lithuanian respondents blamed Russia for the conflict in Ukraine, just 16% of national minority respondents (Russian- and Polish-Lithuanians) did so. According to the same poll, 58% of national minority respondents get their news about Ukraine from Russian television. Mantas Martišius, an expert on information warfare at Vilnius University, says that Lithuanian television and TVP Polonia, Poland’s diaspora channel, are simply more boring than the Russian competition. It is not clear what Lithuania can do to bring the country’s ethnic Poles and Russians into the same information space as the majority.

Perhaps the most inflammatory provocation yet is the appearance of a “Vilnius People’s Republic” page on Facebook calling for an intervention by Polish “little green men”—unidentified soldiers of the sort Russia used to seize Crimea last year. The page prompted an investigation by Lithuanian prosecutors, as well as a response from Grzegorz Schetyna, the Polish foreign minister. Mr Schetyna said that more should be done to ensure the rights of Polish-Lithuanians, but also “their involvement in Lithuanian statehood”. Some Vilnius Poles say they would like to see Warsaw explicitly distance itself from Mr Tomaszewski and his pro-Russian stance. Mr Tomaszewski, meanwhile, continues to court the ethnic Russian vote. Will he wear the St George’s ribbon again on May 9th this year? “We will not stop celebrating the victory over fascism because of separatists fighting in Ukraine,” he says. “That would be a misunderstanding.”