A recent trip to the Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia impressed on me an increasingly prescient political issue requiring ever more European attention: the status of non-citizen Russians in the Baltics. As of 2024, in Estonia 61,000 people have ‘undetermined citizenship’. In Latvia, 175,000 people have noncitizen status, making up 9% of the population. These murky categories exist as a result of a desire to protect independence and cultural heritage after the Baltic states

Northern Europe’s security centre of gravity has moved north and east since 2022: the Baltic Sea, the GIUK gap , the Norwegian Sea, and Arctic approaches now define the front edge of deterrence and reinforcement. In this setting, Ukraine should be analysed less as the object of Northern policy and more as the catalyst that is reshaping it. Two overlapping mini-laterals, NB8  and JEF , offer a pragmatic architecture, one optimised for political alignment and signalling, the ot

How many Ukrainian soldiers have died in the last three years of war? You probably haven’t heard because, newsworthy as the figure should be, western media outlets rarely report it. The latest authoritative calculation  suggests that both sides have lost roughly the same number of men: that is, approximately 200,000 to 220,000 dead. Staggeringly, this is more soldiers than the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa combined lost in the First World War. The sad tr

Living in Daugavpils, the largest Russian-speaking settlement in the EU, it is hard to ignore the sticky political situation. Despite its...