‘It will be us next’: Latvians denounce Russian aggression, help Ukrainian refugees — and some even join the war

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This article was published 14/03/2022 (1018 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

RIGA, LATVIA—Juris Juras missed a weekly meeting of the Latvian parliament’s legal affairs committee, but he had the most poignant of reasons.

The politician was in Ukraine, volunteering his services as a foreign fighter against the Russian army.

He offered no excuses for leaving his constituents and not a word since about his plans, though he is said to have helped residents evacuate from the capital, Kyiv.

Not that anyone here in the Latvian capital, 250 kilometres from the Russian border, has called his decision into question.

The Russian military operation in Ukraine has put the whole of this tiny Baltic nation on alert, from the hardiest of lawmakers down to retiree Maria Keisha, sitting in the sun at the makeshift protest camp that has sprung up in central Riga, across the street from the Russian Embassy.

“If today it’s Ukraine,” she reasoned, “it will be us next.”

It’s not just a turn of phrase, and it’s not just Keisha who feels the threat of being a tiny nation in the shadow of the angry Russian bear.

She has a friend who holds the same harsh opinion of the Russian offensive, one started by President Vladimir Putin under the pretext of rescuing Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas region. Her friend, however, refuses to give voice to her thoughts, not over the telephone and certainly not in messages shared via telephone.

“She is scared that they will investigate who said what and who was for Ukraine,” said Keisha in earshot of a tall, bearded man, standing with a bicycle, who makes no attempt to hide the fact that he’s listening in.

“If Vladimir comes, people will have something to be afraid of,” he said, jumping in to refer to Putin. “Your friend is wise. She doesn’t know who’s going to be here in a year from now.”

As a nation, Latvia is hardly hiding away, despite the uncertain times.

Thousands of Ukrainian refugees have arrived here since the Russian troops entered Ukraine on Feb. 24. There is a certain geographical irony that they have been welcomed for processing at a brutalist Soviet-era congress hall that faces the Russian Embassy (a beautiful, four-storey, pink-and-white Art Nouveau structure).

The Ukrainian Embassy is just down the road — a road recently renamed “Independent Ukraine Street” by Riga’s city council. A morbid, three-floor-high poster showing Putin as a skeleton — an agent of death — was recently unfurled on the wall of Riga’s Museum of Medical History to face the Russian Embassy on another side.

It’s as if the angry residents of tranquil Riga want to show the Russians what it feels like to be surrounded and attacked on several fronts.

Deputy Mayor Linda Ozola says it is a continuation of the campaign Latvia has been waging against its eastern neighbour since 2008, when Russia fought a brief war with Georgia over South Ossetia. Latvian efforts then intensified in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed the southern Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.

“We don’t want to be paternalistic and say, ‘We told you so’— but we told you so,” she said, accusing other European nations of ignoring and downplaying the threat of Russian aggression. “We have this very strong understanding that Ukraine is fighting also for us.”

Nastya Nishchimenko, 22, said she was struck by the warm reception she got upon arriving in Riga after a long journey that began when she left her family home near Kyiv. She left behind her parents, her grandmother and her twin brother, Dmitri, who has been forced into service in defence of Ukraine.

“Hopefully, in a month or so, I can return. I really hope so. The prognosis right now is that it might be over by the end of the summer,” she said. “When Russia runs out of money, when its army is defeated, or when someone kills Putin.”

The murderous hopes of someone so young don’t cause Nastya’s two companions to flinch.

Law students Olga Tunik, 22, and Maria Koniukhova, 21, were studying at the university in Kharkiv when the Russians rolled across the border. Best friends, they set off on a two-week odyssey from one city to the next, visiting relatives, sleeping where they could, eating what was offered, trying to stay alive as they moved westward from eastern Ukraine.

Their final dash took them into Slovakia, at which point they said goodbye to Tunik’s boyfriend, who was then forced into the fight. The women boarded a train to the Czech Republic, travelled on to Poland and volunteers drove them to Latvia, where Tunik’s uncle agreed to take them in.

“It’s been very tough,” Koniukhova said. “We are trying to sleep and eat now. We’re trying to drink water because we haven’t drank normally for three days. It was tough for our bodies. Our kidneys were aching. It was extremely cold, and these are all our clothes.”

Seeing the stream of arriving refugees and hearing their stories on an otherwise peaceable stroll through the heart of an utterly modern European city as winter turns to spring is already having an effect on locals.

There have been reports of a surge in demand for Latvian passports, attributed to worries about the Russian incursion into Ukraine spilling over into the Baltic states. In the week after the Russian attack there were an additional 440 applications to join the Latvian National Guard, which Ozola called “an indication of the mood.”

After the Latvian parliament amended a law last week to allow citizens to go and fight with the Ukrainian army, a number of people left, with Juras, the lawmaker, being the most visible.

“Juris has always been a keen supporter of Ukraine,” Ozola said. “When this war started — knowing him as a personality, he is a fighter, he is a doer. He needs to be on the ground. He couldn’t help but go there.”

There is no shortage of motivation to get involved.

Seeing images of a dead Ukrainian family on the news led Morics Mengelsons, a student, to the protest camp outside the Russian Embassy. There, he has taken it upon himself to act as a sort of caretaker, replacing old signs and placards with new ones, organizing demonstrations and shows of defiance.

On Sunday, he took hold of one end of a 12-metre-long Ukrainian flag sewn by the sister of a protesting acquaintance, Karlis Bankovics, and held it aloft for the Russian diplomats inside their beautiful Riga bunker.

“This war is just a 12-hour drive in that direction. It’s very close,” said Bankovics, who recently took part in a humanitarian convoy that delivered donated goods to Lviv, in western Ukraine.

“Some of the people who went to the same place to deliver goods to Ukraine asked if people (there) wanted to come to Latvia, where we can give food and accommodation. They said, ‘No, no, no. Latvia and the Baltics are next.’”