Pro-Kremlin Campaign Ahead of Latvia’s Parliamentary Election

One Ecosystem, Multiple Channels

The election-related campaign is distributed across a multilingual ecosystem rather than concentrated in a single outlet or language. Sputnik, Baltnews, Pravda (Portal Kombat), InfoDefense, and Baltic-focused FIMI channels such as Shadows of the Baltics, Latvian Hillock, Baltic Bridge, Sprats in Exile, and Baltic Antifascists repeatedly amplified overlapping narratives about Latvia’s October 3 parliamentary election.

The overlap was not limited to similar messaging: direct reposts, duplicated stories, and recurring content producers connected nominally separate channels into an observable amplification network.

On September 13, the Latvia-based pro-Kremlin activist Aleksandrs Gaponenko, (1) sentenced to ten years in prison for inciting national and ethnic hatred and assisting a foreign state in activities directed against Latvia, portrayed his prosecution as part of a broader campaign against Russian speakers.

He claimed that the number of political prisoners in what he called “BALTGULAG” had “long exceeded three hundred.” (2)

The text moved through multiple parts of the ecosystem: Latvian Hillock reposted it from Prison Bulletin, (3) while Baltic Bridge, (4) Shadows of the Baltics, (5) Baltic Antifascists, (6) and Pravda LV (7) circulated the same material.

Gaponenko also produced explicitly election-related content. On September 2, InfoDefense Latvia republished his announcement that he would campaign for candidates from the Sovereign Power / Alliance of Young Latvians (Suverēnā vara / Apvienība Jaunlatvieši) electoral alliance, (8) linking a recurring content producer, the broader amplification network, and pre-election messaging.

Aleksejs Stefanovs is a second hub. A long-time Sputnik contributor and pro-Kremlin propagandist, (9) Stefanovs produced content on the Latvian election that subsequently appeared across several channels in the monitored ecosystem.

Latvian Hillock republished his interview with former European Parliament candidate Olga Chernyavskaya about the October election. (10) Baltic Bridge amplified his coverage of Reinis Uzulnieks, then welfare minister and the Zemgale lead candidate of the Union of Greens and Farmers (Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība), a conservative governing party, after police caught Uzulnieks driving with a blood alcohol level of 3.09‰ on September 12. (11) Uzulnieks was subsequently removed from his ministerial post and expelled from his party but remained on the ballot. (12)

Stefanovs used the scandal to reinforce perceptions of double standards among Latvia’s political elite, feeding broader distrust of state institutions ahead of the election.

Stefanovs also amplified an attack on Latvian public media by Jūlija Stepaņenko, the Sovereign Power / Alliance of Young Latvians prime ministerial candidate, quoting her claim that Latvian Radio had effectively asked whether

“Russians in Latvia have too many rights.” (13)

The network also operates across languages. On September 7, InfoDefense’s Latvian- and Estonian-language branches published localized versions of the same election-related story attacking Rising Sun for Latvia candidates Raivis Zeltīts and Sandis Riekstiņš. (14, 15)

The near-identical posts used Riekstiņš’s service in the Ukrainian Armed Forces to portray the candidates as a threat to Russians in Latvia.

Elsewhere, localized posts did not form self-contained language spaces. On September 15, the Lithuanian-language Pravda LT promoted a story claiming that Latvia’s rising defense spending diverted resources from healthcare and education and that the “Russian threat” was being used to justify militarization, explicitly presenting the October 3 election as an opportunity to change this policy. (16) The Lithuanian-language post then directed readers to the full Russian-language article on Baltnews.

The same election narratives can therefore be traced across outlets with different languages, formats, and ostensible audiences. Narrative convergence alone cannot explain their distribution: identifiable content producers feed multiple channels, individual stories move through direct repost chains, and the same election material is localized across language branches.

The result is a system in which a Latvia-specific narrative can be produced in one part of the ecosystem, reproduced across nominally separate FIMI channels, and adapted for multiple Baltic information spaces.

Grievances Escalate Into Existential Threats

A recurring pre-election narrative portrays Latvia’s Russian-speaking population as a constituency without effective political representation. On September 12, Shadows of the Baltics used the refusal of Ainārs Šlesers, leader of the populist Latvia First (Latvija pirmajā vietā) party, to consider a post-election coalition with Sovereign Power to argue that even politicians courting Russian-speaking voters would ultimately accommodate Latvia’s “nationalist elite,” concluding that

“once again, Russian voters will lose.” (17)

The same argument was extended beyond party politics to state institutions. In a September 13 post subsequently amplified by Latvian Hillock, (18) Shadows of the Baltics questioned the independence of Latvia’s public broadcaster LSM, arguing that dependence on state funding reduced claims of editorial independence to little more than

“fairy tales.” (19)

On September 11, Shadows of the Baltics used an exchange during Stepaņenko’s appearance on Latvian Radio to claim that the Latvian state had “persistently and systematically sown interethnic hostility over the past 35 years.” (20) The post argued that Russian speakers faced “increasing and increasingly sophisticated discrimination” and then went further:

“The question now is not what will happen to Latvia, but what will happen first: the transition from the ethnocide of Russians to their outright genocide, or war.” It warned that Latvia was moving toward “a repetition of Ukraine’s fate.”

Economic grievances were incorporated into the same threat narrative. On September 15, Shadows of the Baltics linked an expected 20–30% increase in Riga’s heating tariffs to Latvia’s rejection of Russian gas, observing:

“The tariff increase comes in December, after the election. Convenient: you don’t talk about bad news before elections. Afterwards, you can.” (21)

The channel also claimed that continued access to Russian pipeline gas could have kept Riga’s heating tariff at €30–40/MWh rather than above €80/MWh.

On September 16, Pravda LV amplified an article in the Russian state-controlled newspaper Argumenty i Fakty that predicted “mass bankruptcies because of anti-Russian sanctions” and attributed Latvia’s economic problems to its break with Russian and Belarusian markets. (22)

The strongest versions of the narrative escalated these political, cultural, and economic grievances into warnings of direct physical danger. On September 7, InfoDefense Latvia portrayed Rising Sun for Latvia candidates Raivis Zeltīts and Sandis Riekstiņš as “Nazis,” using Riekstiņš’s service in the Ukrainian Armed Forces to claim that

“his hands are covered up to the elbows in the blood of Russian people.” (23)

It then projected the external war directly onto Latvia’s domestic election, warning that what such candidates would do if elected was “obvious without comment.” The same war-centered framing also appeared in the campaign messaging of For Stability! politician Aleksejs Rosļikovs, who is currently based in Belarus and was previously warned by Latvia’s State Security Service (VDD) over statements he made to Russian and Belarusian propaganda outlets.

On September 15, Rosļikovs told his audience that the expansion of the Russia–Ukraine war beyond Ukraine was “already a settled matter” and described Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as territories to which the conflict could spread. (24) He explicitly connected that prospect to the election:

“If we do not try to change the government in the October 3 election, we will have to decide how to hide our children and our families from war and forced mobilization into the army.”

Across the corpus, the themes of political exclusion, institutional hostility, and economic grievance converge in a broader and more threatening narrative of persecution, mobilization, and inevitable war.

Together, they portray Latvia’s political course as a growing danger to the Russian-speaking population, framing political change that would benefit the Kremlin as necessary for that population’s physical safety.

Competing for the Russian-Speaking Vote

In the clearest case, the campaign moved from amplifying grievances to directly promoting a specific electoral choice. On September 2, InfoDefense Latvia republished Aleksandrs Gaponenko’s endorsement of candidates from the Sovereign Power / Alliance of Young Latvians electoral alliance. (25) Gaponenko portrayed the alliance as an alternative to Latvia’s “Russophobic and militaristic” governing parties and highlighted its appeal to both Russian and Latvian voters. He explicitly linked the endorsement to his own audience, writing:

“I will campaign for them among prisoners and among everyone who reads me.”

After reproducing Gaponenko’s argument that the inclusion of representatives of the pro-Russian Latvian Russian Union (Latvijas Krievu savienība) on Stepaņenko’s lists had “virtually eliminate[d] competition for Russian voters,” InfoDefense turned to For Stability!, a party competing for the same Russian-speaking electorate. (26) It described For Stability! as a force that

“deliberately grabs the bigger share for itself, taking away part of the Russian vote so that it does not go to Sovereign Power and respectable politicians,” and alleged that Latvian security services “nurture and cherish” the party for this purpose.

InfoDefense thus went beyond amplifying Gaponenko’s endorsement: in its own editorial voice, it promoted Sovereign Power as the preferred choice for Russian-speaking voters.

This electoral advocacy completes the progression observed across the corpus. Narratives of political exclusion, discrimination, and economic decline first portrayed Russian-speaking voters as increasingly threatened by Latvia’s existing political course; narratives of persecution, war, and mobilization then raised the stakes of that threat.

InfoDefense ultimately translated these grievances into a specific electoral choice, promoting Sovereign Power while delegitimizing a rival competing for the same voters.