EU Commissioner of Health and Food Safety Vytenis Andriukaitis | John Thys/AFP via Getty Images EU commissioner: Jeremy Hunt is a pure nationalist with no clue about history Vytenis Andriukaitis challenges Tory leadership hopeful to debate him on EU and Soviet history.

Vytenis Andriukaitis is angry — at British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

The European health commissioner challenged the Tory leadership hopeful to a debate about a statement Hunt made last year comparing the European Union and the Soviet Union.

"I am ready to debate with all guys around me: Salvini, Hunt, Trump," he told POLITICO Friday. Hunt, he added, is a "pure conservative, nationalist and without post-colonial thinking."

At the Conservative Party conference in October last year, Hunt infuriated many in Brussels by likening the EU's tactics in the Brexit negotiations to those used by the USSR.

"When Jeremy Hunt tells that story ... of course, he is young, he has no clue, no understanding about what? About history," said Andriukaitis.

Andriukaitis, a former Lithuanian health minister, was born in a Soviet gulag after his parents were deported to Siberia on Joseph Stalin's orders. He was twice arrested for involvement in the anti-Soviet underground movement and was instrumental in establishing an independent Lithuania in 1990.

"I tell to Jeremy Hunt ... if you know something about Soviet totalitarianism please ask me, I can explain to you all the issues and it is ... because of my life," he said. "I never saw trees, I never saw forest because it was tundra. I had no understanding of day and night because I was born there [in a gulag] and then stayed there."

Last year, he penned a deeply personal open letter in which he stated: "Likening the EU to the USSR is wrong and offensive."