Latvia's national media regulator has proposed a formal eight-year phase-out of all private commercial radio broadcasting in the Russian language — a measure framed in the language of resource management but carrying unmistakable information-war implications that Moscow will be quick to exploit.
The proposal was submitted to parliamentary committee by the National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP) in mid-February 2026. "Latvia has switched to state-funded education only in the Latvian language, and there are no arguments for valuable state resources to be spent on supporting the information space in the Russian language in the commercial radio environment," NEPLP chairman Ivars Abolins said, according to reporting by United24Media, which cited Latvia's Delfi news portal.
The regulatory reasoning centers on radio frequencies, which are classified as state property in Latvia. By granting commercial broadcasters exclusive use of those frequencies, the state is — in Abolins's framing — providing an indirect subsidy to outlets operating in a language that the country has formally moved away from in its public education system. A parliamentary committee is yet to deliberate on the proposal.
The eight-year timeline is itself instructive. Even a government determined to reduce Russian-language media influence in its public sphere is moving with deliberate gradualism — a signal of the legal and demographic complexity involved. Latvia's Russian-speaking population constitutes roughly 25 to 30 percent of the country's inhabitants, concentrated most heavily in the eastern Latgale region, where Russian has historically functioned as the dominant everyday language in many communities. Any abrupt action against Russian-language media there would carry disproportionate social weight.
Latgale's Russian-speaking communities are precisely the population that the Kremlin's "compatriots abroad" doctrine — articulated in policy form since the early Putin years — identifies as a legitimate constituency for Russian state interest and intervention. The doctrine has served as a recurring justification for Russian pressure on Baltic states, most explosively in the case of Ukraine's Donbas region, where its logic was used to underpin military intervention.
The Kremlin has not yet issued a formal response to the NEPLP proposal, which remains in a preliminary parliamentary stage. But Moscow's response to earlier Latvian media restrictions provides a reliable template. When Latvia moved to raise taxes on Russian-language newspapers and restrict Russian state television rebroadcasting, the Russian Foreign Ministry characterized the measures as ethnic discrimination and an attack on a "compatriot" population — framing the regulatory action as proof of anti-Russian hostility in the Baltic states.
That framing has strategic utility beyond Latvia's borders. Russia's state media apparatus — RT, Sputnik, and their successor platforms operating under different names following Western bans — has consistently amplified Baltic language and media policies as evidence of European anti-Russian prejudice, targeting audiences in Germany, France, and Central Europe where skepticism about Baltic security concerns remains a political factor.
In Latvia, as in much of the former Soviet space, understanding requires reading between the lines. The eight-year timeline may also reflect a calculation about audience migration: Latvian officials and independent media analysts have noted that Russian-language audiences in Latvia, particularly younger cohorts, have been moving toward Latvian-language media of their own accord since 2022, accelerated by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The phase-out, in this reading, is an institutional acknowledgment of a demographic trend already in motion rather than a forced linguistic engineering project.
The proposal has not yet been enacted and faces parliamentary deliberation. Its ultimate form — whether the eight-year timeline holds, whether exceptions are carved out for news or public-interest programming, and what appeals mechanisms Russian-language broadcasters will have — remains to be determined.
What is already determined is how Moscow will use it: as another exhibit in the information war narrative that Baltic NATO members are persecuting their Russian-speaking populations. The Kremlin does not need the policy to become law to exploit it. The proposal alone is sufficient raw material.
