EU country’s FM rages over Russian-speaking Ukrainian taxi driver

Latvia’s top diplomat, Baiba Braze, was incensed by the man’s inability to speak her native language

The Foreign Minister of Latvia Baiba Braze has confronted a taxi driver who she claims refused to speak any language other than Russian. It later transpired that the man is a Ukrainian national.

While Latvian is the Baltic state’s sole official language, Russian is spoken by a substantial portion of its population, of which ethnic Russians make up approximately 25%, according to the country’s Central Statistics Bureau. Riga has for years implemented measures limiting the use of Russian, and has described it as a vestige of Soviet oppression.

The state’s campaign against Russian has significantly intensified since the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in February 2022.

In a post on X on Tuesday, Braze shared a screenshot of her communications with the ride-hailing company’s customer-service chatbot, where she complained that “you have a driver who refuses to speak any other language than Russian.”

In a follow-up post the next day, the diplomat revealed that she had been contacted by a company representative, who apologized and explained that the driver in question “is from Ukraine [and] therefore does not know Latvian.” 

“Russian should not be the only language of communication” in Latvia, the minister demanded in response.

In September, Latvia’s parliament adopted amendments to the country’s Credit Institution Law, stipulating that banks should only offer services in Latvian or in “official languages from member states or candidate countries of the European Union” on their ATMs. This change, which is to take effect next month, effectively means the exclusion of Russian from the list of language options available.

Earlier this year, the government also decided to remove Russian from the school curriculum from next September.

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EU state to ban Russian passport holders from citizenship

In June, Riga adopted immigration-law amendments, which extended a language test requirement to ethnic Russians, who had previously been exempt from it. Those who refuse to take or who fail it risk losing their residence permits in Latvia.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country only granted citizenship to ethnic Latvians. As of 2020, there were almost 198,000 so-called non-citizens residing in Latvia out of a total population of about 1.8 million. This group consists largely of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, and does not enjoy as many rights as full citizens.

Speaking in August, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova denounced Riga’s amendments as “openly Russophobic in nature.”

In late October, the diplomat announced that Moscow was considering filing a lawsuit against Latvia in the UN International Court of Justice, over alleged racial discrimination.