Latvia Backs Away From Rules to Expel Thousands of Russians

Aaron Eglitis
·2 min read
46

(Bloomberg) -- Latvia’s government signaled it would back away from a plan to strip permanent residency from Russian citizens after as many as 10,000 people risked expulsion from the Baltic nation for not meeting a language requirement.

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Interior Minister Maris Kucinskis announced legislative changes that would extend a deadline by two years. He said the measures requiring Russian residents to demonstrate proficiency in Latvian amounted to a “political decision” approved in the heat of campaigning ahead of an October election.

“We are currently correcting mistakes that were made a year ago,” Kucinskis told Latvian TV late Tuesday after a government meeting. The new measures still need to be approved by the parliament in Riga.

The shift casts a light on attempts by Baltic governments to expunge Russian influence in a region long dominated by Soviet rule, where attitudes have hardened since the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

While the tension has played out in toppling Soviet monuments — an 80-meter (262-foot) tall memorial was brought down in central Riga last year — restrictions on visas and Russian language teaching have fallen heavily on the Russian minority, which makes up about a quarter of the population of Latvia and neighboring Estonia.

Learning Latvian

As the original deadline approaches, scores of Russian citizens either failed to pass the language requirement or were unaware of the consequences. The rule, which includes exemptions, applied to Russians who were previously stateless or once held a Latvian passport. Many adopted Russian citizenship because they could collect pensions sooner.

Other measures in the nation of 1.9 million include blocking Russian television and restricting education to Latvian.

A United Nations panel of human rights experts last week said that an Estonian measure to transition the country’s Russian schools to Estonian appeared to be discriminatory to the Russian minority. Some teachers in Russian schools in the Baltic nation have protested the legislation.

“By eliminating minority language instruction in pre-schools and schools, the new law severely restricts minority language education in Estonia, in contravention of international human rights instruments,” the UN experts said on Aug. 17.

Estonia’s Justice Ministry last week introduced measures that would temporarily strip voting rights for local elections from the country’s approximately 84,000 Russian and Belarusian citizens.

While Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas’s party backs the law — saying current rules effectively enable citizens of a hostile nation to influence the country’s politics — her Social Democratic coalition partners have criticized the measure as amounting to disenfranchising a minority.

--With assistance from Ott Tammik.

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