Riga, Latvia (CNN) — What keeps Latvians, particularly their president, awake at night these days? Perhaps it is a simple confluence of circumstances. Suddenly, a war that still appears a potentially existential threat not far from their doorstep is being supplanted in the larger world’s attention by violence 1,200 miles to the south of this Baltic capital.
For if Russian President Vladimir Putin succeeds in subduing, then absorbing Ukraine, the nation of Latvia still shares a tense, 206-mile frontier with Russia and 100 more miles with the Kremlin’s closest ally, Belarus — in contrast with the 36-mile border between Israel and Gaza. If Putin is anxious to rebuild a Soviet-style empire, the threat here could certainly be immediate, but especially proximate.
“We have always realized this challenge of Russia even before the illegal annexation of Crimea back in 2014, even before Russia launched the war against Georgia,” Latvia’s determined president Edgars Rinkēvičs told me in a wide-ranging conversation on the sidelines of the Riga Conference 2023 last week. “One of the reasons why Latvia, along with Lithuania and Estonia did their best to join NATO and the EU [in 2004] was a realization, even back in the 1990s, that Russia was going to change and for the worse, not for the better.”
“These are challenging times, but I would say that we do understand that we need to be prepared for all kinds of surprises.” The Latvian leader says he doesn’t believe Russia would try to attack a NATO or EU member but it’d certainly “push the envelope in all ways possible.”
Still, if there is a single European leader capable of navigating these treacherous shoals, it is Latvia’s newly-minted president — who just turned 50 years old and is three months into his term at the helm of this Baltic nation. For his entire life, he has lived in the shadow of Russia. Born as a citizen of the Soviet Union when Latvia was a Soviet republic, he lived through his nation’s struggle for independence before serving for a dozen years as foreign minister. Now, since July, he has been its president.
Slight of build, but with a commanding, if low-key presence, his piercing blue eyes fix any visitor, conveying at once sympathy and a brilliance in command of every nuance of policy and circumstance. He is equally unique among European leaders — the only openly gay EU head of state.
And now, one threat to his equilibrium and that of his nation is the reality that the world’s attention has been diverted, at least for the moment, to the Middle East. But Rinkēvičs is persuaded this is not the time for western democracies in particular to take their eyes off the ball, as similar as the two conflicts may be in their fundamentals.
“I do believe that both Russia as a state and Hamas as a non-state actor do want to destroy the set of universal values of democracy, human rights, rule of law as we know it. Of course, one is also a nuclear power, trying to restore some kind of empire — looking not back to the Soviet Union, but back to Peter the Great. The difference is that on the one hand, this is a fight between two states —Russia and Ukraine — and then there is the fight between the state of Israel and Hamas, terrorists.”
Indeed, the battle over support for the two conflicts is being waged as fiercely in Europe as it is in a dysfunctional Washington, as Rinkēvičs certainly appreciates.
Speaking the morning after President Joe Biden declared from the Oval Office that America is still “a beacon to the world,” Rinkēvičs is still very much counting on the US, even while there is considerable skepticism building in some European quarters that the US can be relied on — especially after high-level trade talks between the US and EU broke down last weekend.
And clearly Washington recognizes the value of this relationship. Last week, the State Department signed off on Latvia’s purchase of six HIMARS (high mobility artillery rocket systems) and associated equipment — the 300-kilometer-range variety that for a long time the Biden administration had refused to authorize for Ukraine.
At the same time, on Thursday, leaders of all EU governments gathered in Brussels in an effort to chart a unified path between these two conflicts —with Gaza topping Ukraine for the first time since the Russian invasion— at a preliminary session of European foreign ministers. The final agreement was an attempt to balance both sides of the Israel and Gaza conflict, but calling for a humanitarian cease fire and corridor in Gaza to prevent a cataclysm for the civilian population. US officials were not present at the summit…