Vladimir Putin has long peddled a narrative of World War II that whitewashes Soviet complicity in the outset of hostilities in Europe. To justify Russian aggression today, he wholly ignores Moscow’s role in enabling Nazi Germany’s march toward war in 1939.

This long predates his invasion of Ukraine. One notable instance of this: At an international summit in 2019, he blamed Poland for bringing about the start of WWII. Obviously, that’s an inversion of what took place: the formation of an alliance between the Soviet Union and Germany to invade and partition Eastern Europe.

Today, on the 84th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis called attention to the deal. Making a point to mark the anniversary sounds unremarkable, but Putin’s efforts to rewrite history make it a matter of survival for Lithuania and other states on the front line of Russian aggression.

Landsbergis reminds us of what should be obvious: The pact led to an epoch-making act of aggression that plunged Europe into brutal conflict and a brutal decades-long Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.

“There was no ‘peace’, there was only misery and murder,” the Lithuanian official wrote in a post to Twitter, referring to the framing of the pact as a peace deal. “Now you know why Ukraine keeps fighting.”