Is This Where World War Three Ends?
Living in Daugavpils, the largest Russian-speaking settlement in the EU, it is hard to ignore the sticky political situation. Despite its middling population of 80,000, the southeastern Latvian town has received no shortage of coverage in Western media. In 2016, six years before Russia invaded Ukraine, the BBC made a documentary entitled 'World War Three: Inside the War Room', in which diplomatic figures come together to help mitigate the consequences of a hypothetical Third World War breaking out. It all starts, oddly enough, in Daugavpils, after its population revolts in support of Russia.
I found myself in Daugavpils as a student of Russian, unable to go to Russia for my year abroad but still needing to gain that much-needed immersion for my language skills. Despite its location, 90% of the town speaks Russian at home, a Soviet legacy.
In addition to the BBC documentary, I read several articles about the town before arriving to gauge the political mood. One particularly memorable article in The Spectator opined ‘Is this where world war three starts?’.
It is certainly hard to imagine a war in a town where the dominant demographic is 70-something-year-old finicky babushkas whose biggest concern is the weather or the spring onions they're growing on their kitchen windowsill. Nevertheless, worries about the population's loyalty to the Latvian government and the West come up time and time again.
In 2023, the Latvian government required that every Russian citizen residing in Latvia take a Latvian language test to be allowed to remain in the country over fears about their allegiance. According to LSM, one of Latvia's most prominent media channels, over half of all takers of this test were between the ages of 66 and 74. Perhaps we are yet to learn of the revolutionary tendencies of pensioners, but I don't think it would be completely naive to assume these people are not planning to start a revolution any time soon.
The article in The Spectator similarly suggests that residents of Daugavpils have some kind of loyalty to Putin and his policies. It references a poll which found 27% of ethnic Russians in Latvia are supporters of Ukraine but goes on to suggest that 'most of the rest are with Putin.' In reality, the poll the article references also found that only 16% of ethnic Russians in Latvia supported Putin and his policies. The majority of Latvian Russians ‘like Russia but don’t like Putin’s policies’.
During my time there, people have generally shown very little regard or admiration for Putin. There were, of course, people who watched Russian state TV, an unavoidable consequence of the lack of Russian-speaking media available in Latvia, or weren't particularly vocal about their support for Ukraine. Still, it certainly was not the case that people in the town have some inherent allegiance to Putin, as many appear to assume.
Many people I met and spoke with felt quite angry with the town’s coverage in the West, regarding it as wholly unrepresentative. When I told my language school teacher I wanted to become a journalist, she told me my first article must be about Daugavpils, as she felt let down by how the media portrays the town.
Yet everyone seems hell-bent on painting Daugavpils as a town plagued by division. On the 9th of May last year, my last month studying there, Russia celebrated Victory Day to mark the Soviets defeating Nazi Germany. Today, in Russia, this day is used to showcase Russia's military strength and prowess, with a large parade being organised in Moscow each year. In Latvia, the government seems to fear an uprising of Russian populations. Usually, in Daugavpils, you would perhaps see around one police officer a week, but on this day, there were suddenly hundreds of them. All day the town was crawling with police, roads were blocked, and people were being asked for identification. However, to no native of Daugavpils’ surprise, nothing untoward came to pass. The only difference I noticed from a typical day was pensioners going to lay flowers at the town’s war memorial.
Equating political loyalties with linguistic identity is not only futile, as it was on Victory Day, but is dangerously reductive. A divided Latvia is precisely what Putin wants. It gives Russian propagandists the perfect opportunity to cry 'Russophobia' and to claim there's a ' language genocide' happening against Russian-speaking populations in the Baltics, as they already have done. As Ukrainian defeat or compromise looks increasingly likely, an emboldened Russia may emerge. Putin used the protection of Russian-speakers as justification for his invasion of Ukraine, what is there to stop him from doing the same in Latvia?
Daugavpils is a far more peaceful town than most, yet many do still fear war creeping ever closer to their doorstep. But everyone knows any aggression in the town will be the result of Putin and Russia’s imperial hangover, not the people of Daugavpils.
Image: Beatrice Learmouth
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