Last week I received a notification about my expulsion from Latvia, my only home where I lived for the last twelve years and the land of my ethnic Latvian ancestors. It referred to an earlier decision by the foreign ministry to declare me persona non grata which has never been officially announced.
Tweeting on the occasion, Latvia’s new populist Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs falsely claimed that I was justifying the Russian aggression in Ukraine. But he did by subtweeting my statement on the expulsion which contained the following line: “I condemn the Russian aggression and support Ukraine’s sovereignty over occupied territories”. This line alone could earn me a prison sentence if I were in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
This highlights the absurdity of what I see as my political persecution in Latvia. It doesn’t matter for my persecutors what my real views are and where I stand on Ukraine. They are levying this sadistic punishment on me, I believe, primarily as a long-brewing revenge for an investigation into the links of the current interior minister’s far-right party with Kyiv-based Russian neo-Nazis who propagated white terrorism of Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik variety.
They also appear to have been using me as a soft target in their own political machinations during the election period at the time when xenophobia and paranoid witch-hunt for “Kremlin’s agents”, often imaginary ones as in my case, is one of the best-selling products on the Baltic political market.
No charges, no right to appeal
The notification letter regarding my deportation contained no reference to any statements or actions that could have prompted this decision. But it explicitly states that the decision didn’t warrant hearing out my explanations about any of my perceived transgressions. If I were given a chance to explain myself, I’d learn what I am being punished for. That’s what the Latvian authorities are clearly trying to avoid, perhaps because it would immediately expose the flimsiness and lawlessness of the charges.
Apart from being denied any knowledge about the causes of this punishment, I am also being explicitly denied justice, Designed for diplomats enjoying immunity from prosecution, not for ordinary people, persona non grata status cannot be appealed in court.
In the run-up to these events, senior Latvian MEP Rihards Kols gave a simple and honest explanation as to why this tool should be applied to me. Arguing on X (Twitter) with Foreign Minister Baiba Braže (who insisted that my expulsion should be handled by the interior ministry), he said:
“You know perfectly well why the interior ministry path doesn't work: the [security] services don't establish a direct threat, the revocation would be appealed, the state would lose in court. That's exactly why the legislator has provided for the option to include a person on the undesirable list by the foreign ministry – a political, non-appealable decision.”
Kols is no random person in the story. He is a foreign policy bigwig at the Nacionālā Apvienība (National Alliance) party, which has been campaigning for my deportation for seven years.
A sojourn with Russian Nazis
The story begins in 2019 when I co-authored an investigation exposing a link between Nacionālā Apvienība and Russian neo-Nazis who found a new home in Kyiv after Maidan revolution. They saw post-Maidan Ukraine as a more “racially pure” alternative to Putin’s Russia and described Putin as a heir of “Judeo-Bolshevik regime” that populated Russia with millions of migrants from predominantly Muslim Central Asian states.
In March that year, their online platform Wotanjugend, still flourishing in Ukraine, circulated the 80-page Russian translation of the manifesto published by white terrorist Brenton Tarrant before he killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. They also distributed manifestos of other white terrorists. They continue, up until now, to glorify the members of BORN - a Russian neo-Nazi gang, with links in Putin’s administration and security services, which murdered antifa activists and migrants, as well as famous Russian lawyer Stanislav Markelov and his Ukrainian friend, journalist Anastasia Baburova.
I met with these Russians in Kyiv, including with one directly linked to BORN, and wrote a story about them in 2016. My Latvian investigation emerged as a by-product three years later. As I kept following Wotanjugend people on social networks, I noticed that a group of Nacionālā Apvienība members engaged with them in Kyiv.
The Latvian nationalists attended a festival of NSBM (national-socialist black metal) organised in Kyiv by Russian neo-Nazi Aleksey Lyovkin, currently a key RVC figure, and Azov movement ideologist Olena Semeniaka. The festival was accompanied with a conference called Pact of Steel, after the Hitler-Mussolini pact. One of the Latvians, Agris Purviņš, presented a lecture at the conference.
The story, published by the Latvian investigative outlet Re:Baltika and co-authored by its editor, Sanita Jemberga, resulted in Nacionālā Apvienība’s secretary-general Raivis Zeltīts leaving the post and the party. He went on to create a party called Austošā Saule (Rising Sun), the name likely inspired by Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn with whom he liaised. Despite numerous complaints by the far right, the Latvian media watchdog found that our article adhered to the best journalistic standards.
As soon as the story was published, I became exposed to an incessant campaign of smear and intimidation by the Latvian far right whose support in society is very limited but who - due to their aggressive toxicity - have a disproportionately outsized influence on the country’s policies. An MP for Nacionālā Apvienība, Jānis Iesalnieks, posted what I interpreted as a death threat on Twitter - a picture of a grave accompanied with a comment that Re:Baltika has chosen to walk along the fir-tree path (referring to the tradition of pathing routes of funeral processions with fir tree branches).
In the next few years, I participated in the investigation into the assassination of journalist Pavel Sheremet, conducted by the Ukrainian media outlet Zaborona, drawing the ire of Ukrainian secret services whose agents were charged as suspects by Ukrainian police detectives. I also became the target of Western war industry lobbyists through my frantic and idealistic attempts to prevent an all-out conflict by chronicling and contextualising the events of 2019-22 that led to Putin’s brutal invasion. I deem the latter a criminal and unforgivable act, in case you wonder.
In 2021, the Ukrainian infowar collective Informnapalm posted a smear piece about me in eleven European languages (the idea is to deplatform and defund me across Europe). The Latvian version was published on the website of Zēltits’ new party. Apart from ridiculous insinuations about my political position and biography, its original version contained the doxxed home address of my elderly mother in Moscow. This version was circulated to million-strong audiences by prominent infowar personalities and senior officials, such as former Estonian president Toomas Henryk Ilves.
At that point, I got swamped by an avalanche of death and anal rape threats posted by government-connected pro-Ukrainian and far right infowar groups. It was daily, unspeakable and sadistic horror.
In April 2022, the then Latvian defence minister Artis Pabriks published an official letter falsely accusing me of being an agent of Kremlin’s influence and demanding my deportation from Latvia after my rather innocent interview with the Latvian public broadcaster LSM. This happened in the context of the election campaign in Latvia. Pabriks led, along with Ilves’s wife, the candidate list of a party which lost miserably and was knocked out of the parliament. There were no consequences for me at the time.
Electoral machinations
The events of 2026 also unfolded in the election context. In the last week before the election, held in October, I became a subject of the campaign. This happened on the initiative of two ministers from the parties which fared badly in opinion polls and at least one of then was on the verge of being knocked out - the far right Nacionālā Apvienība and the centrist Jaunā Vienotība (New Unity).
Interior Minister Jānis Dombrava (NA) and Foreign Minister Baiba Braže (JV) took to arguing on X on the subject of which of them should be responsible for deporting me from Latvia. For a few crucial days before the vote, they kept pointing fingers at each other because they were visibly afraid of taking political responsibility for what clearly smacked of Putin-style political persecution.
That exchange produced the only instance when a Latvian official listed my perceived misdemeanours which he thought were sufficient to kick me out of my home. Dombrava claimed that I “blamed the West for Russia's aggressive actions”; “spoke about the ineffectiveness of sanctions, labelling them as ones that provoke Russia”; “sought to justify Russia's aggressive foreign policy”, “discredited Ukraine, its political leadership, and its armed forces”.
Apart from criticising the ineffectiveness of Western sanctions (obvious to all of my sources in Russia), each of these accusations is a piece of slanderous falsehood. But more importantly, what Dombrava is listing are thought crimes that might be punishable in an Orwellian totalitarian society, not in a democratic state confined by the rule of law. The bit about discrediting the Ukrainian armed forces is particularly amusing, given how it mirrors the draconian Russian laws on discrediting the Russian army which threaten me with a lengthy prison sentence if I ever return to Russia - for nearly all of my publications in recent years.
The politicians involved in the spat pointed out that “competent bodies”, a Soviet-era expression standing for secret services, didn’t see any grounds for declaring me a threat to Latvia’s national security. It is worth noting that I was screened by the Latvian security service, VDD, every year for nine years in a row until I received the status of EU permanent resident in 2024 and there has never been an attempt by VDD to caution me or warn me about any articles or statements.
At that point, Braže refused to succumb to the pressure from NA members. But when the votes were counted, it turned out that both parties had managed to enter the parliament, having suffered considerable losses. Braže’s Jaunā Vienotība came last, receiving 19% fewer votes than in the previous election. But having turned into parliamentary dwarves, the two parties emerged as potential kingmakers in the new coalition, led by the winner - Apvienotais saraksts, the party of the populist Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs.
My sources suggest that coalition-shaping manoeuvres may have prompted Braže to make a drastic decision and announce on X on October 7 that her ministry had begun the procedure of declaring an unnamed Russian citizen persona non grata. She said the decision was prompted by “new information from competent bodies”. Simultaneously, Latvian officials began anonymously informing Latvian and international journalists that the person in question was me.
Six days later, I received an official notification from the department of migration (PMLP) stating that I was being expelled on the grounds of the foreign minister’s decision to declare me persona non grata.
Character assassination
Because the Latvian government has made every effort to conceal from me the official reasons for the expulsion, I am left wondering what may have prompted Braže’s change of tack and this inhumane, sadistic punishment levied on a person who had already fled a cruel tyrannical regime in his country of citizenship. Or what new information the “competent bodies” may have obtained.
The only clues I am getting is from the industrial smear campaign, which accompanied the story at the time when the ministers took to discussing my deportation in public.
The campaign was led by the far right Polish channel Visegrad24 which has been accused multiple times of spreading fake news, including by yours truly. Infowar personalities, like Michael Weiss and Oz Katerji, also joined in, distorting my statements and spreading outright disinfo. Katerji claimed that I travelled back to Russia after March 2022. That’s a blatant lie.
The main accusations focused on my interview with Canadian journalist Aaron Mate. Two elements of the interview have been cherrypicked to build a case against me. To put things in perspective before I address these elements, AI-powered analysis of the interview reveals 17 instances in which I make statements that fall under the Russian draconian laws on discrediting the armed forces, five of them with “high risk” of imprisonment, should I ever step on the Russian soil again. But my persecutors couldn’t care less about that.
The first episode pertains to a statement in which I tried to explain the Kremlin’s line of thinking in the conflict. I said that Putin’s regime sees Russia as the underdog that’s always compelled to strike first. This is what I believe the Kremlin thinks, not what Leonid Ragozin thinks. However this line was mendaciously used by Infowar personalities to accuse me of justifying Russia aggression.
Here is the direct quote: “The way it works is, I guess the main thing to start with is that Russia, or at least the Kremlin and Putin's regime, they don't believe they're fighting with Ukraine. They're fighting with the West. So by definition, they consider themselves as underdogs in this battle.”
The key word here is “they” and I carry on: “But because they always consider themselves as the underdogs and as the side that is being under constant pressure from the West, encroaching on its former sphere of influence, on its strategic interests, it compels them to respond… with brutal force.” (The quote is shortened for clarity).
What I got wrong
The second bit, I admit, is more problematic and I regret that I explained myself awkwardly, failing to express my genuine position on a sensitive issue. Russia, I said, “as a general rule” and “with many exceptions” tries to avoid killing civilians.
Direct quote: “Whether it's because the Russian regime is more brutal by definition, or whether it's because Russia has a greater capacity, there was obviously more brutality on the Russian side. But as you said, as a general rule, they went for military and industrial targets and they tried to avoid killing civilians or they tried to avoid striking civilian targets. There were many exceptions from this.”
On “civilian targets”, it’s just a slip of tongue which contradicts what I said just a few minutes earlier as I was justifying Ukrainian drone attacks against Russian airports (as “Kremlin agents” routinely do, you know): “But then, of course, Russia attacks loads of civilian targets. So Ukraine has the right to do so, obviously”.
The problem is with what I said about civilians. What I tried to convey there was that we are not yet at the stage of escalation in which Russia has begun conducting mass and deliberate destruction of high-rise apartment blocks in cities in which the vast majority of Ukrainians live, in Kyiv, Odesa and other main population centres away from the frontline. But I did mention in the interview that apartment blocks do often get hit - either directly by the Russians or as a result of the work of Ukrainian air defences (and god forbid I should blame the Ukrainians for defending themselves).
Then I point out what most observers of this conflict know well - that the ratio of civilian to military casualties in this conflict is disproportionately low compared to pretty much any other conflict in recent history: “The number of civilian casualties compared with the number of military casualties was quite low for all sorts of reasons, but one of the reasons is that I don't think there is a deliberate policy by Russia to target civilians, which may change. And there is also a way in which the Russians do target civilians, turn their lives into a nightmare by destroying critical energy and heat and water supply infrastructure. In that sense, even though they don't kill many civilians, they make their lives quite terrible." Of course my haters only used the first sentence in this chunk of the interview and forgot the second.
But I deeply regret these insensitive words because I failed to mention the systematic killing of civilians by Russian drone operators in frontline cities like Kherson, as well as mass and deliberate destruction of high-rise buildings during the storming operations in Donbas. It am sorry for hurting the feelings of those affected by these brutal actions by the Russian military, directly or indirectly.
Of course I mentioned and condemned these attacks on many previous occasions as my tweets and article can attest. “Horrible video and self-evident war crime by Russian drone operators”, I wrote on August 4 over President Volodymyr Zelensky’s tweet about a human safari incident in Kherson.
So I wonder how would you answer this question: Is evicting me from the only real home that I ever had in my life for this slip is an adequate punishment for what was clearly was a non-deliberate mistake?
If Latvia’s security service ever allowed me to express myself on the issue, I would have happily done so. But the fact that I was explicitly refused to provide one and that no real accusations have been brought against me, makes me think that my mistake in Aaron Mate’s interview has nothing to do with the real reasons for my political persecution.
The true reason perhaps is my investigation into Latvia’s main far-right party as well as my criticism of the way the way the West has been handling this conflict and its motives within it, which I stand by.
More than anything, I am hated for instances where I point to the erosion of democracy and rule of law in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe, falsely justified by the necessities of war. I get maximum bashing when I call it what I think it is: Putinisation.
Too harsh? Well, my persecution in Latvia appears to prove me right.
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