The post I was replying to, specifically mentioned Latvia. I mostly agree with your characterization of Lithuania. Well, I would add corruption and bureaucracy to the things that still make Lithuania look very familiar to many Russians.
Lithuania - corruption index 32/168 [1] Russia - corruption index 119/168 [2]
Regarding bureaucracy:
You do know that almost everything in Lithuania is done electronically? I can open a company in a couple of days without leaving my house. Same with my taxes.
And if I do need to sign something, I usually sign it with my e-signature and just send over the signed PDF.
I haven't seen much bureaucracy here in years.
Now try that in Russia.
Language-wise (another parent, but I'm too lazy to make a 2nd comment):
I speak both - Russian and Lithuanian... and while there are similarities, like next to no word order, structure, punctuation etc. There are more differences than similarities.
Roots of most words are different. There are more verb forms in Lithuanian [3] which slavic languages lack. Lithuanian still preserves a fully functional future tense, unlike say slavic languages that lost the future tense (like english) and have to use a compound future tense.
Lithuanian itself feels much more archaic.
Linguistically the baltic languages are as close to slavic languages as they are close to german languages[4]
[1]http://www.transparency.org/country#LTU [2]http://www.transparency.org/country#RUS [3]http://www.lituanus.org/1987/87_1_04.htm [4]https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among...
Cool, I was really thinking of former ombudsman/Health Minister ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimant%C4%97_%C5%A0ala%C5%A1ev... ), Transport Minister ( https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/5225-lithuania-former-ministe... ) and President ( https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/4991-lithuania-former-preside... ), which all have seen bribery-related scandals just this year, but corruption index there is better than in Russia, so I guess everything is fine.
As for bureaucracy, no I didn't know that you have functional electronic government, that's really awesome! My comment was based on experiences there in 2006-2009, I guess a lot have changed since then.
> There are more differences than similarities.
I guess, you realize that that's a really pointless statement. Russian speaker can understand meaning of some spoken sentences and some other words are understandable if you read them. Sure, there are differences, - that's why they are considered separate languages! But Russian speaker without prior knowledge wouldn't understand any sentence in German or Norwegian. I hope this makes sense. Also, speakers of one Slavic language do not necessary understand all other Slavic language speakers, so this just isn't what you should expect from linguistically close languages.
By the way, that picture you linked to (in [4]) clearly shows that Polish is relatively closer to Lithuanian (51-70 distance) than Lithuanian is to German (>=71), check out the diagram's legend.