Trump isn’t kissing Putin anymore Vandals erase the famous graffiti art in Lithuania mocking the unholy bromance

In May, outside the Keulė Rūkė restaurant in Vilnius, Lithuania, now-famous graffiti art appeared depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin and US presidential candidate Donald Trump lip-locked in a passionate embrace. The painting was an adaptation of Dmitri Vrubel’s 1990 “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love,” sometimes referred to as the “Fraternal Kiss,” based on a 1979 photograph of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker kissing. On the night of August 12, 2016, someone painted over the center of the Putin-Trump graffiti, leaving behind just the still-recognizable hairdos of the two men.

Dominykas Chechkauskas, the owner of the Keulė Rūkė restaurant, participated in the creation of the original graffiti art. “We do not consider this incident to be simple vandalism,” he wrote today on Facebook. “It is a terrorizing attack [sic] on freedom of speech in Lithuania. The purpose of the attack was to remind us, the people of the free world, that there are still active advocates of authoritarianism in our society.” Chechkauskas has promised to restore the original graffiti, which he says “has already a world-famous symbol of liberty and defiance.”