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When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant<\/a> last year for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a Moscow court launched a surprise counterattack: It ordered the arrest of a 70-year-old retired judge in Lithuania.<\/p>\n The judge, Kornelija Maceviciene, was not connected in any way to the case against Mr. Putin<\/a> in The Hague or to investigations into Russian war crimes in Ukraine.<\/p>\n Her \u201ccrime,\u201d as the Moscow court sees it, was handing down \u201cunjust\u201d guilty verdicts against former Soviet officers, nearly all Russians, for their role in a brutal crackdown against pro-independence protesters who had gathered at a television tower in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, on Jan. 13, 1991.<\/p>\n In a bloody episode that helped seal the demise of Soviet power, 14 protesters \u2014 one of them a young woman crushed by a tank \u2014 were killed and hundreds of others were injured when Soviet forces stormed the tower in an abortive last-ditch attempt to prevent Lithuania from escaping Moscow\u2019s grip.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After examining copious evidence showing who in 1991 gave the orders to use deadly force and who carried them out, Ms. Maceviciene and two fellow judges ruled in 2019 that scores of Russians, along with a few Ukrainians and Belarusians, were guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes and other offenses.<\/p>\n That has put her in the sights of Russian authorities beholden to Mr. Putin\u2019s view that the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about the unjust \u201cdisintegration of historical Russia\u201d \u2014 a preoccupation that lies at the heart of his military assault<\/a> on Ukraine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Setting the historical record straight \u2014 as Mr. Putin sees it \u2014 hinges on reframing the demise of Soviet power as a tragic injustice in which Russians were innocent victims, never perpetrators, of violent crimes in defense of Moscow\u2019s empire.<\/p>\n And doing that requires overturning, or at least discrediting, guilty verdicts handed down by Ms. Maceviciene in Lithuania against the former Soviet military and security officers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Maceviciene\u2019s verdict was \u201cclearly unjust,\u201d according to an August ruling by the Basmanny District Court in Moscow that ordered her immediate arrest. Two fellow judges and the lead Lithuanian prosecutor in the Vilnius television tower case have also been declared criminals and placed on Russia\u2019s wanted list for \u201cpersecuting\u201d Russians.<\/p>\n In an interview in Vilnius, Ms. Maceviciene voiced disbelief and alarm that, more than three decades after the bloodshed at the television tower, Russia was now trying to edit out uncomfortable facts and punish her for adjudicating on the events of 1991.<\/p>\n \u201cI really can\u2019t figure out their logic,\u201d she said. \u201cThe facts of the case are clear.\u201d<\/p>\n Saulius Guzevicius, a former special forces commander and an expert on hybrid threats, said Russia\u2019s pursuit in recent months of judges and prosecutors had sharply escalated a yearslong campaign \u201cto rewrite the history of 1991 and discredit us as fascists.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey are sending us a message: \u2018We never forget those who went against us,\u2019\u201d Mr. Guzevicius said. During the Vilnius showdown in 1991, he was part of a security detail assembled by pro-independence activists to protect the Lithuanian legislature.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Under Mr. Putin, Russia has gone to extraordinary lengths to present itself as a guilt-free victim of Western powers and foreign \u201cfascists,\u201d rewriting history textbooks<\/a> and punishing historians who delve into Moscow\u2019s past crimes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yuri Dmitriev, an amateur historian in northwestern Russia who found a mass grave containing hundreds of people<\/a> killed by Stalin\u2019s secret police, was jailed for 13 years in 2020 on what his family dismissed as trumped-up pedophilia charges. Pro-Kremlin historians claimed, against all evidence, that the bodies include many Soviet soldiers killed by Finnish fascists.<\/p>\n Lithuania, dragooned into the Soviet Union in 1940, was the first Soviet Republic to declare independence from Moscow, setting an example in March 1990 that was later followed by Ukraine and 13 others.<\/p>\n