office, Prime Ministers and individual ministers, to express positions on matters outside of the Presidency's competences. During the campaign for the 2014 Lithuanian presidential election, Grybauskaitė was accused of "autocracy" and collusion with the Homeland Union. However, Grybauskaitė publicly stated that she does not support granting additional powers to the Presidency, instead stating that the existing Presidential powers should be "used more effectively". Grybauskaitė is generally seen as a President friendly to the Homeland Union, and polls most strongly with conservative and liberal voters. Conflict with the Seimas in 2012 After the 2012 Lithuanian parliamentary election, Grybauskaitė declared that she will not accept any proposed cabinet which includes the Labour Party, which earned the second largest number of seats in the Seimas in the election. Labour, a populist political party led by Russian-born businessman and oligarch Viktor Uspaskich, was implicated in the so-called "dark accounting" case in 2006 and was also seen by the President as a pro-Russian party. However, Grybauskaitė was unable to prevent the formation of a coalition between Labour and the Social Democrats, which took office as the Butkevičius Cabinet. Grybauskaitė remained influential during the rest of the term and vetted Labour-proposed minister candidates with various means, including testing ministerial candidates on their knowledge of English. After the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania left the coalition in 2014 and their minister Jarosław Niewierowicz resigned, the position of Minister of Energy officially fell to Labour, but Niewierowicz's replacement, Rokas Masiulis, was widely seen as Grybauskaitė's candidate. Foreign policy Relations with Russia At the beginning of her first term, Grybauskaitė tried to reset relations with Russia and check whether pragmatic relations with Russia were possible. In 2010, Grybauskaitė even met with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. However, after this meeting, relations between Lithuania and Russia began to cool down. On 19 December 2013, Grybauskaitė decided to boycott the Sochi Winter Olympics together with other Western leaders, including German president Joachim Gauck, French president François Hollande, and the US president Barack Obama, due to Russia's human rights violations, attitudes and behaviour with Eastern partners and Lithuania. Relations with Russia markedly deteriorated during Grybauskaitė's second term in office, due in part to her hard line stance against Russian influence in Europe and the Baltics, especially after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War. In May 2014, Grybauskaitė called the dependence on Russian gas an "existential threat" to Lithuania. Following