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Fascinating figures out of Lithuania, a country that once had very little foreign presence outside of citizens of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Now, the ground is shifting beneath its demography. 👇 In three years, more than 20,000 Russians and Ukrainians have packed up and left. Ukrainians alone dropped from 94,000 to 74,000; the number of Russians fell by about a thousand as state policy changes. And into the gap? A very different wave. Tajiks four times as many as before. Pakistanis ten times. Bangladeshis fifteen times. Azerbaijanis have tripled. Even the once-almost invisible Filipino community has grown sixfold since 2023. Lithuania’s Defence Minister recently suggested swapping out “dangerous” Russian-speakers for “pro-Western” Filipinos... a cultural exchange programme branded as a national security strategy. It tells its own story. A country once shaped by the its previous links to the Slavic east now recasts itself with workers from Dhaka and Manila, on the basis that this is safer and truer to “EU values.”