Latvian politician says bad relations with Russia is creating economic catastrophe for country

Paul Antonopoulos
Fort Russ News
Tue, 14 Aug 2018 00:00 UTC

Aleksei Medvedev

Latvia has created a catastrophic situation for itself because of its antagonization of relations with Russia, a candidate of the Latvian political party Soglasie ("Agreement" or "Harmony", in English), Aleksei Medvedev, has claimed in a new video message on Facebook.

"I, as a person who was born and lived all his life in Ventspils, a city where the main source of income is the port, I cannot remain silent about the catastrophic situation that has arisen in the country", Medvedev explained, specifically mentioning the impact of failing cargo trade resultant of deteriorated relations with Russia.

According to the politician, maritime and rail transport brought 700 million euros to the country in 2016, but by the end of 2018 revenue will have declined significantly. In the future, Medvedev warned, the situation will only worsen, bringing economic woes to not only to the city, but the whole country.

Medvedev expressed certainty that this economic disaster is the result of Riga's Russophobic foreign policy.

"The worsening of relations between Latvia and Russia is literally destroying one of the key headings of the state budget. In recent years, Russia has built several new ports in the Baltic Sea region...We have to realize that Europe will receive Russian goods anyway; Russia will sell them and transport them anyway, nobody will lose except Latvia, who is already being excluded from this scheme," he lamented, adding that compromises could still rectify the situation.

The Latvian transit goods sector has been deprived of a considerable volume of cargo partly because of Russia's moves to develop its own infrastructure in the Baltic Sea region as well as increase rail transport capacity in the Saint Petersburg area. Russia's increasing focus on independent develop bypassing Latvia is a response to the NATO occupation of the Baltic states and their EU colonization, which has seen Riga play the role of a lobbyist for more aggressive anti-Russian steps on the part of Brussels and Washington.

Ethnic Russians currently make up more than 25% of the Latvian population, and Russian is spoken in everyday life by nearly 40% of the Baltic country's residents.

The disenfranchisement and persecution of the Russian and Russian-speaking population of Latvia has gained Riga scandalous notoriety in recent years. To this day, the majority of Russians are "non-citizens" under Latvian law, and in 2015, Latvian police saw "nothing illegal in recent calls to set up special 'ghettos for ethnic Russian non-citizens and Russian nationals'" deemed politically suspect of being a "Russian fifth column."

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies. He has an MA in International Relations and is interested in Great Power Rivalry as well as the International Relations and Political Economy of the Middle East and Latin America.

Comment: In related developments, it looks like Latvia's neighbor Lithuania has also drunken the Russophobic poison:

In the Lithuanian city of Kazlu Ruda, the construction of the first NATO-standardized air force training polygon in the Baltic region is nearing completion, the press service of the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense has announced.

The polygon will be located about 60 kilometers from the border with Russia and has the explicit mission of "contributing to the NATO policy of deterring Russia." In it, military aircraft will be able to practice attacks against land targets. In addition, the structure will be used for the training of military pilots.

The construction of the polygon began in 2017 and its end is scheduled for the last quarter of this year. The project is being developed with the help of the US Air Force engineering unit, RED HORSE. Construction funding comes from the European Security Guarantees Initiative (ERI).

In addition, the Lithuanian Ministry of Transport and Communications has established a no-fly zone over the polygon for civil air traffic.

This comes just as NATO has posted on its Twitter page a new propaganda video which put Russia in first place among "threats to transatlantic security."

In recent years, Moscow has repeatedly drawn attention to and warned against NATO's unprecedented military activity near Russia's western borders, such as in the Baltic states. NATO continues to expand its eastward initiatives under the official pretext of "deterring Russian aggression."

Moscow has more than once expressed its concern over the increase of US-NATO forces in Europe. Russian President Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, recently stated that Russia poses no threat to anyone, but will not ignore actions potentially dangerous to its vital interests, as seen in 2008, when Russia militarily intervened to stop the NATO-backed Georgian invasion of Russian-protected South Ossetia.