Lithuania is a small country situated on the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is the southernmost of the three so-called 'Baltic' states and shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland and Kaliningrad (a Russian exclave) to the southwest.
Lithuania is a member of NATO and the European Union. Its population is 3.6m and its capital and largest city is Vilnius - the European Capital of Culture in 2009. During the 14th century, Lithuania was the largest country in Europe: present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia were territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
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