Baiba Braze has said that ride-hailing company Bolt later apologized to her, explaining that the driver doesn’t speak Latvian yet
The Foreign Minister of Latvia Baiba Braze has confronted a taxi driver who refused to speak any language other than Russian. The man later turned out to be 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 its use, and has described it as a vestige of Latvia’s decades-long Soviet oppression. This campaign 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 said that the driver in question “is from Ukraine [and] therefore does not know Latvian.” The minister emphasized that “Russian should not be the only language of communication” in Latvia.
The country’s parliament adopted amendments to the Credit Institution Law in September, 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.
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.
