That small difference is one is being said by the government to justify its actions, and the other is said by someone generations after the act was done, to specifically highlight the racism.
The actual statements produced by the American government would have sounded a lot like your first quote, and the Lithuanian forced deportation could also be summarized as “once a Russian, always a Russian”
The way I read the article was that all Belarussian and Russian applicants for renewals of visas / residency were rejected.
Edit: the US visa rejection rate is around 15%. This really doesn’t seem like news at all… After reading some other sources on this topic, it seems that it would have been only around 8% of applications, So yeah, seems you are correct. I stand corrected. Seems like this is barely worth an article in that case, countries reject visas all the time for arbitrary reasons…