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

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