Serving a nine-year sentence for espionage for official Minsk, Lithuanian lawyer Mantas Danelius decided that the state was obligated to exchange him for its citizens. After being refused, he valued his moral suffering at a significant sum and went to court against the head of the country.
Павялічыць
Mantas Danelius. Photo from his Facebook
As reported by the Lithuanian national publication LRT, the Regional Administrative Court will begin hearing an unprecedented complaint next week. Mantas Danelius, an inmate of Pravieniškes-2 prison, demands 100,000 euros in compensation for moral damages from the Chancellery of Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda. The reason for such indignation was the answers from the presidential apparatus regarding the initiation of an exchange with Belarus, which the convicted spy found unsatisfactory.
Danelius’s desire to leave the Lithuanian prison as soon as possible is completely understandable. Back in May of last year, 2025 (Translator’s note: likely a typo in the original, referring to 2024 or earlier), he appealed to Gitanas Nausėda with a demand to immediately initiate his exchange for Lithuanian citizens held in Belarusian penal colonies. He argued his position by stating that the country’s Criminal Code provides for the president’s role in such procedures.
However, the bureaucratic machine of a democratic state operates according to strict procedures, not at the will of a convicted person. The Presidential Chancellery explained that the spy’s complaint would not be recognized because his letters did not even indicate that he was specifically requesting a pardon, which is the basic legal step for any exchange.
Danelius himself complains to journalists that the prison administration refuses to negotiate with foreign embassies due to lack of authority, and his own lawyer fears contacting diplomats because of possible persecution by the Lithuanian State Security Department.
Danelius was an ordinary informant who, from January 2022 to February 2023, served the interests of Belarusian propagandist Ksenia Lebedeva, who is closely associated with special services.
Exploiting the trust of the Belarusian diaspora in Vilnius, he infiltrated opposition organizations, collected information about their funding, projects, and personal data of activists, thereby posing a direct threat to people who had fled terror. His most cynical operation was a meeting with a former volunteer of the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment: Danelius convinced the fighter that he was acting in the interests of the US embassy, secretly recorded the conversation, and sent it to Minsk. In May 2025 (Translator’s note: likely a typo in the original, referring to 2024 or earlier), the Lithuanian Court of Appeal put an end to his case, upholding the sentence of nine years in prison.