Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine sent tremendous shockwavesinto Latvian society. The war wasperceived as a personal, brutal attack,with the trauma of the Soviet occupationand the mass deportations, which had never really receded from the public discourse, faring up with unprecedented intensity. The consequences and ripple efects created by the war are still unfolding, and this report will map them in several key dimensions concerning the presence of the Russian language in the Latvian education system and the public sphere, as well as regarding the politics of memory and the past. The developments in these and other dimensions concerning the Russophone community and its identity in Latvia are ongoing, and many outcomes are still unknown. The topics examined here also do not ofer an exhaustive list of the relevant developments since February 2022. However, it is clear that the war has opened a major point of transformation for many debates and political issues that have been important in Latvia for decades. This report will address and contextualise the key events in this regard, with a brief outline of the indicative trends.

The rise of illiberal politics in Eastern Europe seems to have confirmed the worst expectations about the democratic stability in the region. Yet, this interpretation can be criticized as reproducing the view of perpetually “immature” Eastern Europe. The article elaborates the criticism in regard to more recent literature in the field and offers an alternative perspective for analyzing democracy in the region, which draws on the radical democratic theory by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Using the case of Latvia, I discuss Laclau’s account of ethnopopulism and critically examine the discursive relationship between “the people” and “the state” that emerges in this view. The article offers an alternative perspective to the dominant paradigm of democratization in Eastern Europe, including its interpretation of populism. It shows the value of applying radical democratic theory to a wider variety of contexts.