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On April 24, Russian state-owned media outlet RIA Novosti reported a statement made at a briefing by Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova:

“The ban on Latvian schoolchildren communicating with each other in Russian is the policy of the Nazis, who prohibited people from using their language on ethnic or national grounds, said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova.

Earlier, Riga City Council member Aleksejs Roslikov told RIA Novosti in an interview that schoolchildren in Latvia have been banned from speaking Russian to each other on school premises, even during free time.

‘Nazis. Nazis have always banned people, on ethnic or national grounds, from practicing their culture and history, from using their language, and have restricted all freedoms on national grounds,’ she said during the briefing.

At the same time, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson emphasized that this discriminatory policy is prohibited by the Nuremberg Tribunal and international law.”

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The previous day, the former leader of Latvia’s “For Stability!” party, the above-mentioned Aleksejs Roslikovs, indeed told RIA Novosti about a ban on speaking Russian in Latvian schools, even outside of class time:

“Many radically minded Latvian politicians already say that Russian is a language for the kitchen — meaning: talk among yourselves at home. Naturally, several laws have been adopted. For example, students are no longer allowed, even in their free time, to speak any language other than the state language among themselves on school premises.”

However, in reality, no such law exists in Latvia.

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Aleksejs Roslikovs was the leader of a party that primarily relied on the votes of Russian-speaking voters sympathetic to Putin’s regime. In June 2025, while serving as a member of the Latvian parliament (Saeima), he made an obscene gesture from the parliamentary rostrum and had to be removed from the chamber.

Latvia has opened a case against Roslikovs on charges of inciting national and ethnic hatred. The prosecution argues that he deliberately used fabricated claims, portraying the Latvian authorities as hostile toward Russian speakers and suggesting that repressions were being prepared. A court hearing in Roslikovs’s case was scheduled for early April, but in March he received permission from the court to travel to a conference in Switzerland, after which he did not return to Latvia and instead settled in Belarus.

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