This is the script for my video posted on August 19, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
Estonia and Latvia are home to hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking non-citizens, and since the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has worked hard to turn them into leverage. But why are all of these people in the Baltic States to begin with, and what impact do they actually have on Europe's security?
Before the Soviet takeover in 1940, ethnic Russians were about 8% of Estonia and Latvia and under 3% of Lithuania. Some had been there for centuries, like the Old Believers who fled religious persecution in the 17th century. Others arrived as imperial officials, soldiers, and factory workers and simply never left.
But Soviet annexation under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany saw around 60k native Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians deported east in June 1941 alone. Men were mostly separated out and sent to Gulag labor camps, where most of them died. Women, children, and the elderly went to forced settlements in Siberia and Kazakhstan.
The Germans occupied the Baltics until the war ended, and when the Soviets came back the deportations resumed on a much larger scale. From 1945 to 1953, the total ran well past 200k people.
Meanwhile the Soviets industrialized the region with labor from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. This went beyond backfilling the deported and the dead. Entire industries were built in the Baltics and staffed from outside. Latvia's Russian population grew by roughly 737k from1935 to 1989.
Lithuania came out of this differently because it urbanized its own rural population for industrial work, hosted fewer Soviet strategic industries, and had a higher birth rate. It stayed around 80% Lithuanian, while Latvians fell to 52% and Estonians to 62% in their own countries.
Today ethnic Russians are about a quarter of Latvia, a fifth of Estonia, and 5% of Lithuania. But counterintuitively, most of them are citizens. As of early 2026, Latvia has around 170k non-citizens, roughly 9% of the country, and Estonia has 58k, or about 4.3% of its total population.
Estonia and Latvia hold today that their time in the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1991 was an illegal occupation, and that the modern states are a restored continuation of what they were before WWII. The legal consequence of this is that when they regained independence, they restored citizenship to those who had been citizens before 1940 and their descendants, not to all residents. Soviet-era settlers and their descendants had to naturalize.
Both countries created a special legal status for the people left over. Estonia issues a grey alien's passport to persons of undetermined citizenship. Latvia created the non-citizen, a category with its own passport and rights, and two thirds of these are ethnic Russians, many of whom have lived there since the Soviet era or were born there.
Lithuania went a different direction. In 1989 it opened a two-year window where any permanent legal resident could just opt into citizenship without even taking a language test. Lithuanians so heavily outnumbered everyone else that inclusive citizenship was unproblematic politically, and that is why Lithuania has never had the mass statelessness seen in Estonia and Latvia.
Non-citizens in Latvia can't vote in any election, be it local, national, or European. In Estonia they could historically vote in local elections, but that's now ending. In both countries they're shut out of the civil service, the judiciary, the police and military, and elected office, as well as some restricted professions. They can access pensions and social benefits, but they aren't EU citizens, so they can't work freely in other EU states without a permit.
Interestingly though, Latvian non-citizens have been able to travel to Russia without a visa since 2008, an arrangement created by Russia specifically to make the status more attractive. But that's a minor factor behind why naturalization hasn’t been that widespread. The real reason is that the remaining non-citizen population is very old. The state language exam is a real barrier for people late in life, and many object to it on principle. Some are simply content with a status that already gives them nearly everything citizenship would.
But laws are actively evolving. I mentioned that local voting rights are being taken from third-country nationals in Estonia. In 2022, Latvia made it so that people who had renounced their citizenship or non-citizen status in favor of Russian citizenship would need to obtain EU long-term resident status, pass a language exam, and pass a security screening to stay in the country. Most have complied, and Lithuania is also tightening rules for Russians and Belarusians.
Language is the biggest sticking point. Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian are the only state languages in the Baltics, with small carve-outs like Livonian and Latgalian. Russian was the first language of about 37% of Latvia's residents in 2011, but voters rejected making it an official language. Latvia and Estonia now teach only in their state language, and Lithuania is working on this too.
In March 2022, right after the invasion, 90% of ethnic Latvians backed Ukraine. Among Russian speakers it was just 22%, and while about half backed neither side, some of that comes from people censoring themselves in fear of reprisal.
For decades now, Russia has courted people around the world with ancestral or so-called spiritual links to Russia. They've handed out Russian passports to these compatriots to manufacture citizens who need protecting, and then intervened to protect them. That's exactly how it ran in Georgia, with mass passportization in Abkhazia and South Ossetia through the 2000s leading into the 2008 war.
But this hasn’t worked in the Baltics, because Baltic Russians don’t want to lose their EU access, there is no armed separatist movement, and younger ethnic Russians are increasingly fluent in the local language, civically engaged, and pro-Western.
What Russia can do is exploit a grievance that's already there. In 2007 Estonia moved a Soviet war memorial out of central Tallinn to a military cemetery. To most Estonians it was a symbol of Soviet occupation, but to many Russian speakers it memorialized the defeat of Germany, and the legacy of their grandfathers. Moving it set off riots that injured over 150 people and led to more than a thousand arrests.
At the same time, cyberattacks hit Estonian government, media, and banking networks. Estonia suspected Russia was responsible but could never prove state direction. What it could see was a Duma delegation demanding the government resign, Russian youth groups besieging its embassy in Moscow, and economic pressure to match.
Nonetheless, pro-Russian sentiment, even among ethnic Russians in the Baltics, has declined substantially since 2022. Political parties representing Russian-speaking voters are losing their seats. Even the Orthodox Church is breaking from Russian leadership.
The fact of the matter is, the Baltics are heavily defended under NATO Article 5, and while Russia has tried to capitalize on the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population, there simply is very little incentive for those people to support Russia’s goals. The real threat comes from targeted sabotage directed by Russia, not from a disloyal minority waiting for a signal to act.
Keep reading
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- Why couldn’t Ukraine keep its nuclear weapons?
- Why does Wales still speak Welsh when Ireland stopped speaking Irish?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.