Lithuania

Lithuania is a unitary semi-presidential republic in the Baltic region of Europe, with Vilnius as its capital and largest city. Mindaugas united the Baltic tribes and formed the Kingdom of Lithuania in 1253, and the territory expanded under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to become the largest country in Europe by the fourteenth century; a 1386 union with Poland eventually created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, which lasted more than two centuries before neighboring powers partitioned it between 1772 and 1795. Lithuania declared independence on 16 February 1918 after the First World War, but was occupied first by Soviet forces in 1940, then by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944, then reoccupied by the Soviet Union, with armed resistance against Soviet rule continuing into the early 1950s. On 11 March 1990 Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to proclaim restored independence, roughly a year before the Soviet Union's own formal dissolution; it covers 65,300 square kilometers with a population of about 2.9 million as of 2025, and has since joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, adopted the euro in 2015, and joined the OECD in 2018.