Did Lithuanian, Latvian and Polish presidents receive a request to move aside due to lack of space during a group photo session at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP28 in Dubai on December 1, 2023? No, that's not true: The leaders of the Baltic countries and Poland boycotted the group photo session to protest the presence of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
The claim originated in a video (archived here) on TikTok by sotniktiktok on December 4, 2023. The caption (translated from Russian to English by Lead Stories staff) read:
The leaders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland were extra in the group photo at the UN Summit in Dubai. In the 'family picture' at the UN Climate Change Conference, there was no space for the leaders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, so they were asked to step aside and get out of the way. But the Belarusian President got a place in the first row
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Dec 5 07:57:17 2023 UTC)
Lead Stories contacted the Office of the President of the Republic of Lithuania for a comment on the claim. The Office responded in an email received on December 4, 2023, writing:
I can confirm that the President of Lithuania refused to be in the family photo, because Lukashenko was there.
The office directed us to a report by Lithuania Radio and Television that reported:
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and the leaders of Latvia and Poland sat out a joint photo at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP28 in Dubai on Friday because authoritarian Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko posed for it.
In the article, Nauseda, joined by Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics and Polish President Andrzej Duda, described the reason for the boycott, saying:
It would be hypocritical to stand shoulder to shoulder with the leader of a country that has become a staging ground for Russia's aggression against Ukraine
He added:
This is called a family photo. Lukashenko is not part of the family we want to belong to.
