Latvia’s prime minister, Krišjānis Kariņš, has called on EU leaders to stop all tourist visas for Russians, reigniting the debate about further tightening sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Speaking to the Guardian, Kariņš rejected the idea that allowing Russians seeking to evade the draft to enter the EU would be a way to weaken the Kremlin’s armed forces. He said it was understandable that many men would not wish “to go and fight and likely die in Ukraine” and this could trigger a “potential huge immigration wave coming from Russia”, but contended that posed a security risk to Europe. “I think the political dissenters have mostly already left. Then there will be economic opportunists, many, many other reasons and people with unknown loyalties.”
Latvia, along with Poland, its two Baltic neighbours and Finland, has closed to Russian tourists and has been urging the rest of the EU to do the same – so far without success. France and Germany are reluctant to end tourist visas, fearing it would block the exit of Russians who oppose Putin’s regime. The European Commission last month issued guidance calling for tighter security checks when issuing visas to Russians.
Kariņš said it was “important that we always keep the side door open for humanitarian reasons, but these need to be looked at on a case by case basis”. Riga hosts banned independent Russian media outlets such as TV channel Dozhd, Novaya Gazeta Europe and the Meduza website, which was founded in the Latvian capital in 2014 by a Russian journalist sacked for her coverage of Crimea. Many of these outlets are blocked from transmission into Russia. Kariņš said: “We have allowed and welcomed these people to work … so that a free, non-Kremlin-dominated Russian press could still exist and broadcast to inform their compatriots.”
A Latvian-American dual national born in Wilmington, Delaware, Kariņš leads Latvia’s centre-right New Unity party, which came top in parliamentary elections last month, with 19% of the vote. He now hopes to form a coalition with the free-market National Alliance and left-leaning Progressives, parties that are aligned, he said, on an agenda of being “[pro-]Nato/EU, moving towards being climate-neutral, being independent of Russia, fully supporting Ukraine”.
The elections saw the once pro-Kremlin Harmony party fail to clear the 5% threshold to enter the Saeima, Latvia’s parliament, which has 100 MPs. The party, traditionally a home for Latvia’s 475,000 Russian-speaking voters, including Ukrainians and Belarusians, lost support over its strong condemnation of the Russian invasion, while anti-war voters opted for mainstream parties.
Kariņš said he did not see any indication of a social rift between the two linguistic groups. “The opposite seems to be happening. Since the start of the war, the percentage of citizens, residents of Latvia who support Russia has been decreasing.” He said there was “a gradual process of integration into one, more unified society.”
His incumbent New Unity party increased its number of seats to 26 from eight, despite inflation running at 22.4%, second only to Estonia in the 19-country eurozone. Since Latvia gained independence from the Soviet Union 30 years ago “our nation has been through a lot – mildly put,” Kariņš said, listing the blowback from the 1998-99 Russian economic crisis, and deep recession in 2008 after the global economic crash. The government was spending between 2% and 2.6% of its economic output on support for households and businesses to cushion the blow of high energy costs, he said. “Probably primarily, people understand very well that the energy costs are the price, or the cost of the war that we are paying,” he added. “The Ukrainians are paying with their lives.”
He was speaking on the sidelines of the European Political Community, a gathering of leaders from nearly every nation on the continent, excluding Russia and Belarus. The group, which unites countries from Iceland to Turkey, was originally conceived by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, as a club of democratic nations.
Kariņš acknowledged the “internal vivacity of democracy” varies among the group, which ranges from Scandinavian Social Democrats to the autocratic rulers of Azerbaijan and Turkey. He said all countries in Prague, unlike Russia, could be referred to as nation states. “Russia is a country which apparently views itself as an empire. It seems to have as yet no identity as a nation state,” he said.
He added: “What Putin is trying to define are the borders of the Russian empire [which] also includes parts of Ukraine, which is ludicrous, but this is how empires think. Many of us thought or hoped that the thinking of imperialism was something that died with the second world war. And we see unfortunately that is not the case.”
Conflicts in other parts of Europe were very real, he said, adding he did not wish to whitewash the issue of democratic standards. “But that does not mean all of us cannot actively condemn Russia’s aggression, an outright war and what appears to be genocide.”
