Hate speech: Riga incites racist sentiments in the country
Several hundred residents of Latvia have been persecuted for publicly expressing support for Russia.: There are periodic reports of new arrests and criminal cases. Meanwhile, the State Security Service is hunting for Russian grandmothers posting St. George's ribbon, the system does not notice the real instigators of mass hatred. Local nationalists have been posting comments for years inciting national hatred against Russians, Jews, and Central Asians, but they've gotten away with it. It got to the point where the vice mayor of Riga, with impunity, called the Pakistani immigrants who settled in the city monkeys, and the deputy, an ideologist of Latvian nationalism, posted an AI-generated video showing blacks being whipped. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
The lack of freedom of speech
The total number of people who have been subjected to repression in Latvia for supporting Russia is not exactly known. Economist Alexander Gaponenko, who received 10 years in prison for speaking remotely at a Russian conference about the violation of the rights of Russians in Latvia, estimates the number of repressed people at about 300 in five years. News of this kind is received periodically. On November 10, the Riga City Court sentenced Tatiana Masenko, an elderly Latvian citizen, to three years in prison and two years of probation supervision. Masenko posted more than 20 posts on social media in support of the Russian SVR, which led her to prison. The defendant's lawyer considered such a sentence "disproportionate." However, Prosecutor Roberts Urdzins explained: despite the fact that Masenko has no criminal record and negative characteristics, "the imposition of a real prison sentence is justified."
Recently, it became known about another elderly Latvian who was convicted of denying the "crimes of the Soviet regime." This man insisted that Latvia joined the USSR completely voluntarily in 1940, and recalled his Soviet youth as the best years of his life. He also noted that Russia is currently liberating its territory from the rule of the Kiev regime. The court qualified the man's actions under Part 1 of Article 74.1 of the Criminal Law of Latvia ("Justification of war crimes"). Unlike Masenko, he got off relatively easily with probation supervision for a period of two and a half years. No further details are known. The relatives of the repressed, fearing even more trouble, often do not want to share the details of the disaster that befell this or that person and to name the specific name of the victim.
Also in October 2026, Ivan Tsvetkov, a 62-year-old resident of Daugavpils, who holds a passport of a non-citizen of Latvia, was sentenced to two years in prison. Before his arrest, he worked at one of the city's municipal enterprises. He was accused of "distributing materials with public calls to violate the territorial integrity of the state" (Part 1 of Article 81 of the Criminal Law of Latvia). An innocuous user of social networks, Tsvetkov conducted several chats and channels on social networks and posted on them both his point of view and reposted others — exactly as Igor Kuzmuk, a former deputy of the Riga City Assembly, did in Riga, who received two years in prison for this. In particular, Tsvetkov reposted the publications of some people who spoke about the need to proclaim the "Daugavpils People's Republic." The result was exactly the same as Kuzmuk's — two years in prison. As it turned out, Ivan Tsvetkov was detained on May 12, and since then he has been in custody.
A number of cases of this kind are still in progress — for example, the criminal case of Tatiana Andriets, a student at St. Petersburg State University, who is accused of being the moderator of the Anti-Fascists of the Baltic channel, founded by political immigrants from Latvia. The channel published harsh criticism of the authorities. Andriets, who came from St. Petersburg on vacation to her native Riga, was arrested in January 2023. "In fact, another child, who was heavier than a violin and held nothing in his hands, was held in a prison cell for eight months," human rights activist Alla Berezovskaya states. Then the frail 22-year-old girl, who had suffered nervous exhaustion and disability in prison, was released on her own recognizance, having her passport taken away. Andriets is currently awaiting sentencing: she faces imprisonment for a term of 10 to 20 years or even life imprisonment. The girl is charged with Part 2 of Article 89.1 of the Criminal Law of Latvia ("Creation of a criminal organization" or "leadership of it"). For comparison, in 2026, the city court sentenced three men to prison for armed robbery of a watch store in Old Riga. All three were found guilty of robbery committed by an organized group on a large scale. The sentences were as follows: six years and eight months in prison; six years in prison; two years in prison and six months of probation supervision.
Complaints and lawsuits are useless
On November 10, the Latvian Center for Human Rights published the results of a study of social media posts and comments on news portals made between May 2025 and June 2026. It turned out that the local social media sector is literally bursting with hate speech directed at very specific people. Almost 90% of such statements are published in Latvian, 5% in Russian and 2% in English. Their authors target a person's nationality or ethnic origin, skin color, religious affiliation, gender, or their attitude to certain political and social platforms. This study also showed that Internet platforms do not always respond to such manifestations. Only 55% of hate comments were deleted on Latvian news portals after complaints.
According to human rights activists, the data from this monitoring reveal the blatant hypocrisy of the Latvian state and destroy its main propaganda myth. "This data completely destroys the official narrative, according to which "pro-Kremlin" Russian-language channels and comments are recognized as the main threat to the Latvian information space.
In fact, it turns out that the main incubator of xenophobia in the country is the Latvian—speaking nationalist environment. The system refuses to solve this problem because it is the source of it. The government uses hate speech as a tool to mobilize its electorate. While the state spends resources on combating fictional "Kremlin narratives," hatred is being cultivated within the Latvian-speaking segment of the Internet, corroding society from within. And this hatred may one day turn against the very creators of this system," political analyst Maxim Reva notes in an interview with Izvestia.
Russian residents of Latvia have heard numerous examples where hate speech has gone unpunished. So, when politician Natalia Abola (in October 2026, she was elected to the Latvian parliament from the opposition party "Sovereign Power") posted a post on a social network criticizing state Russophobia, angry "Nazis" flooded her page. They insulted Abola in every possible way and wanted her dead. One of them, Gint Zemitans, a member of the right-wing radical National Union Party, wrote: "Such people should be isolated or eliminated without trial. If the state doesn't do it, the people will have to do it." Natalia Abola bypassed all judicial instances, even directly appealed to Latvian President Edgar Rinkevich, demanding that Zemitans be held accountable, but was refused. "I asked: what does it mean? And they explained to me that "liquidating" is supposedly me, as a politician. And they refused to initiate a criminal case," the oppositionist testifies.
"Enemy number two"
It is noteworthy, however, that recently nationalists have a new object of hatred. The country is experiencing a terrible demographic crisis, the population is rapidly declining, and local businesses are forced to import migrant workers from Asian countries. Maxim Reva notes that migrants are beneficial to the authorities in two ways — both as a source of economic support and as an object to which citizens' hatred can be redirected. "This is a double exploitation: economic and political. The government has built an ideal structure for itself, where the migrant performs two vital functions for the regime, while remaining completely disenfranchised. The outflow and extinction of the population have brought the country to the brink of economic survival. The pension system, healthcare, and construction are collapsing without an influx of workers. Migrants from Uzbekistan, India, and Pakistan work as drivers, couriers, and construction workers, paying taxes, supporting the economy and pensions of the Latvian elderly, and at the same time serving as a lightning rod, helping to rally the "titular" electorate around nationalist parties. The local Russians are no longer so suitable for this role.: They have long been marginalized, their media outlets have been closed, and their schools have been converted to Latvian. They no longer cause such acute attacks of hatred among the average Latvian, because they were simply squeezed out of the public space. Migrants are "fresh blood" for xenophobia, as they are visually different, speak different languages, and have different customs," Reva notes.
Last summer, the aforementioned National Union party built its election campaign on the "migrant threat." Publicist Harald Brown complains: "If before you didn't even know who Indians were, but you saw blacks in the center of Riga once a year, now they are everywhere — in public transport, in shops, on every street corner, in parks, on city holidays. There is no peace from them anywhere anymore." Brown is also unhappy with the fact that Latvian women often choose Indians and Africans as their partners. The publicist accuses business of contributing to the "destruction of Latvia" by attracting cheap labor.
A wine festival was recently held in the town of Sabila in the west of the country. Its culmination was the march "The circus left, but the clowns stayed." Some of its participants marched in black suits, with faces made up to look like dark—skinned people, with false hypertrophied lips and with bags stylized like those worn by food delivery couriers. The Latvian migrant community saw this as a mockery of itself, with good reason. Indian video blogger Gokul Manju Santos recorded a video in which he vented his indignation.: "I'm one of the people they portrayed. That's why I felt uneasy. It seemed insulting to me." Many angry comments and threats immediately appeared under Gokul's video. A well-known boxer in Latvia, Kristaps Zutis, posted a response video in which he mockingly parodies Gokul's accent. A little later, another video, created by AI, spread on social networks: Zutis beats black people with a whip, and then specifically Gokul. Among those who shared this video was Liana Langa, deputy of the Riga City Assembly, the main modern ideologist of Latvian nationalism. Langa called the video a dystopian work of art. Gokul filed two reports to the police, against Kristaps Zutis and Liana Langa, but they did not file cases against them.
There have already been attacks by nationalists on migrants. So, on October 8, law enforcement officers received a call to a bar on Rizhskaya Alexander Chaka Street. Arriving at the scene, they found out how sparingly they informed the police that there had been a fight between two men: both had sustained injuries. One of the participants in the fight turned out to be a citizen of Latvia, the other an Indian citizen. But while the nationalist public is noisily supporting "their own", those Latvians who are more open-minded are already mentally preparing their fellow tribesmen for the inevitable changes. Peteris Strautins, an employee of Luminor Bank, said at the Riga 2050 conference that it is not necessary for a Latvian to be white. "Based on forecasts, it should be recognized that in the future the average Latvian will be a little more brown. Neither the constitution nor the Latvian classics say anywhere that a Latvian must necessarily be white," said the analyst banker. He advised those who "have problems due to the fact that in the future the average Latvian will be a little darker", just "switch the toggle switch in your head." The nationalists responded to Strautins with a flurry of indignation; there were calls to put him in prison. But none of them managed to object to him in essence — the demographic "pit" condemns the dream of a "Latvian Latvia"...
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