Latvia, a small country on the Baltic Sea with just over 1.8 million people, has recently passed a spate of laws to reduce Russia’s influence in the former Soviet nation. Lawmakers hope the measures will deepen domestic cohesion against threats from Moscow. But some experts worry the laws could dangerously deepen fault lines between ethnic Latvians and the significant domestic minority of ethnic Russians.
Wariness of Russia has already led to the removal of Soviet-era monuments and proposed renaming of a street that celebrated Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. More significantly, Latvia has separated the Latvian Orthodox Church from the Russian Orthodox Church and banned some Russian TV broadcasts. It is even considering a return to the mandatory military service that had been abolished in 2006, several years after Latvia joined NATO and the European Union.
