“The Lithuanians Have Our Back”: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s Office and the United Transitional Cabinet in the Face of Fragmented Western Support Aliaksei Kazharski and Ekaterina Pierson-Lyzhina Contents 1 Introduction: A Cabinet in Exile or a New Type of Non-state Actor? ...................... 2 2 Vetting, Vouching, and Vowing: The Partnership Between Tsikhanouskaya and the Lithuanian Authorities ............................................................... 6 3 Becoming the “Best Known Belarusian” in Exile ........................................... 8 4 Why No “Eastern Front”: Explaining the Geopolitical Orientation ......................... 9 5 The Cabinet Versus Lithuania’ s Restrictive Measures Bill: Taking a Firm Stance Politely ........................................................................................ 10 6 Conclusion .................................................................................... 11 References ........................................................................................ 13 Abstract The chapter discusses the relationship between the Lithuanian authorities and the Office of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarusian opposition leader recognized as the national leader of Belarus by the West and exiled to Vilnius. The analysis focuses on the period of 2020–2023. It argues that Tsikhanouskaya’ s Office and the United Transitional Cabinet, created in 2022, benefitted from fragmented Western funding and political support that made them more autonomous vis-à-vis the host state. To support its claims about the nature of the partnership between the Office and Lithuania, the chapter examines firstly the Office’ s long-standing reluctance to make a geopolitical choice in favor of the EU and, secondly, its protests against the attempts by the Lithuanian president Gitanas Nauséda to “harmonize” the sanctions against Belarusian and Russian citizens. The study relies on interviews with members of Tsikhanouskaya’ s Office/Cabinet and A. Kazharski (*) Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic e-mail: aliaksei.kazharski@fsv.cuni.cz E. Pierson-Lyzhina Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: ekaterina.lyzhina@ulb.be © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Marton et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Non-State Actors in East-West Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05750-2_45-1 1