Latvia’s conflict history is rooted in great-power domination: absorbed into the Russian Empire for two centuries, it won independence only in 1918, before Soviet and Nazi occupation erased that independence within a generation. The central process shaping modern Latvia was double occupation: the Soviet Union annexed the country in 1940 under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi Germany occupied it from 1941 to 1944 amid the near-total destruction of Latvia’s Jewish population, and the Red Army’s return in 1944 opened nearly five decades of Soviet rule. That return did not go uncontested — the Forest Brothers, a partisan resistance movement, fought Soviet forces from the forests into the mid-1950s, while mass deportations to Siberia targeted tens of thousands suspected of opposing Soviet rule. Latvia regained its independence peacefully in 1991 through the Singing Revolution, and has since anchored its security by joining NATO and the European Union in 2004 — a choice thrown into sharp relief by Russia’s war on neighbouring Ukraine.
In 2025, UCDP recorded no conflict-related deaths in Latvia: no wars, no fighting between armed groups, and no organized attacks on civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Latvia’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Latvia occupies a stretch of flat, forested lowland on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, cut through by the Daugava River, which has carried traffic between the Russian interior and the open sea for a thousand years. Its people descend from several related Baltic tribes — Couronians, Semigallians, Selonians, and Latgalians — who shared a language family but no single state until the twentieth century. For most of the intervening centuries a native landowning class was displaced by outsiders: German crusading orders and merchants from the thirteenth century, then Polish, Swedish, and finally Russian overlords, each leaving an administrative or religious layer on top of a peasantry that remained ethnically Latvian. This long interval without an indigenous ruling class is the single fact a newcomer needs to hold onto — Latvia’s national story is not one of an old kingdom interrupted, but of a peasant nation that had to invent political sovereignty from nothing in living memory, twice.
Andres Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (2010).
Five thresholds carry the standard account. German and Danish crusaders conquered the region in the early thirteenth century, ending tribal independence and installing the Livonian religious-military order that ruled for three centuries. Sweden and Russia fought over the wreckage of that order through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Russia’s victory in the Great Northern War (1721) folded the Latvian lands into the Russian Empire, where they stayed for two centuries. The Russian Empire’s collapse in 1917–18 opened a narrow window in which Latvia declared independence (1918) and, after a bitter three-year war against both Bolshevik and German-backed forces, made it stick. That independence ended in 1940, when the Soviet Union annexed Latvia under the secret protocols of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact — an annexation interrupted by brutal Nazi German occupation from 1941 to 1944, then resumed by the Red Army until 1991. Each threshold changed who held the land and the law, not merely who sat in government.
Andrejs Plakans, A Concise History of the Baltic States (2011).
Here the nation preceded the state by roughly two generations. A “National Awakening” among Latvian-speaking intellectuals in the mid-nineteenth century built the cultural infrastructure of nationhood — a standardized literary language, a native press, choral societies, and a body of collected folk verse called dainas — decades before anyone seriously proposed an independent Latvian state. Statehood arrived almost as an improvisation in 1918, when the collapse of the Russian and German empires simultaneously created a power vacuum and forced local leaders to convert that cultural nation into a political one overnight. The 1991 restoration of independence followed the same order of operations: a resurgent cultural and linguistic assertion (the “Singing Revolution”) preceded and produced the political break with Moscow, rather than the reverse. In both cases, the nation built the state, not the other way around.
Andres Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (2010).
The consensus reading names one long-term force above all others: Latvia’s position as a small nation occupying contested ground between larger powers — historically Germanic and Russian, more recently Soviet and Western. Sovereignty, on this account, has never been something Latvia could secure by its own strength alone; it has depended on the balance, exhaustion, or distraction of its neighbours, and been withdrawn the moment that balance shifted. The pattern recurs with unusual clarity: independence arrived in 1918 because Germany and Russia collapsed at once, and it ended in 1940 because Germany and the Soviet Union briefly agreed to divide the space between them. Restoration in 1991 followed the same logic in reverse, arriving when Soviet power itself gave way. Explaining Latvia, in this view, means explaining the shifting weight of its neighbours as much as anything that happened inside its own borders.
Andrejs Plakans, A Concise History of the Baltic States (2011).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
The revisionist reading starts from the same geography as the consensus account but weighs a different inheritance more heavily: centuries of serfdom under a landowning class that was ethnically German, not Latvian, even after the Russian Empire absorbed the territory. On this account the deepest fracture in Latvian history is not foreign rule as such but the internal one it created — a native peasantry legally and economically subordinate to a resident foreign elite until emancipation reforms in the nineteenth century, and land reform only fully completed after 1918. That inherited class grievance, this scholarship argues, did not simply vanish once Latvians controlled their own state, and it re-surfaces at several later turning points as a genuine social fault line, not merely an ethnic-national one.
Olaf Mertelsmann (ed.), The Baltic States under Stalinist Rule (2016).
The sharpest revision concerns 1940 itself. The consensus rightly treats the Soviet annexation as illegal under international law and externally imposed by an occupying army — that verdict is not in dispute here. What this scholarship adds is that Kārlis Ulmanis’s own authoritarian rule, installed by a coup in 1934, had already suspended parliament, banned political parties, and muted independent media, leaving landless rural workers and an industrial working class with genuine grievances and no legal outlet for them. When Soviet-organised “People’s Saeima” elections and land redistribution followed in 1940, they found a measure of real, if minority, domestic welcome among those groups — not because the annexation was legitimate, but because six years of authoritarian rule had already narrowed how many Latvians felt they had a stake in defending the pre-1940 republic. The facts of the 1940 annexation’s illegality are not in dispute; what is argued over is how much domestic traction accompanied it.
Olaf Mertelsmann (ed.), The Baltic States under Stalinist Rule (2016).
Where the consensus account treats 1991 as a restoration — the same nation resuming interrupted sovereignty — this reading stresses how much the intervening fifty years had actually changed. Soviet rule brought mass deportations of ethnic Latvians in 1941 and 1949, heavy industrialisation that drew hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking workers into Latvia’s cities, and decades of Russification in schooling and administration. By 1991, ethnic Latvians made up barely half the urban population in places, and the 1991 state had to write citizenship and language law for a population that the 1918 republic’s framers could not have imagined. On this view, 1991 restored a legal claim to statehood, but the society that claim now governed was substantially a new one, not a paused one.
Olaf Mertelsmann (ed.), The Baltic States under Stalinist Rule (2016).
Where the consensus names geopolitics — the shifting weight of larger neighbours — as the master force, this reading names demographic and economic engineering by those same neighbours as doing at least as much work. Deportation, forced industrial settlement, and administrative Russification did not merely accompany foreign rule; they physically remade who lived in Latvia and what most people there did for a living, in ways that outlasted the political systems that caused them. The country that emerged in 1991 was shaped as much by five decades of population and industrial policy set in Moscow as by any renewed assertion of Latvian national will — a materialist counterweight to an otherwise heavily political and legal narrative.
Olaf Mertelsmann (ed.), The Baltic States under Stalinist Rule (2016).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Latvian identity was built, unusually, around song before it was built around territory or church. A large body of short folk verses called dainas — passed down orally for generations and only systematically collected and published in the nineteenth century — supplied a shared cultural memory that cut across the country’s real religious divide: a mostly Lutheran north and west, the legacy of centuries of German Protestant rule, against a largely Roman Catholic southeastern region, Latgale, whose Catholicism survived Swedish and Russian Orthodox pressure alike. Choral singing became the practical bridge between these communities, and the country’s periodic mass song festivals, still held today, function as recurring rituals of national self-recognition rather than as folklore performed for outsiders.
Modris Eksteins, Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century (1999).
The cultural turning points run alongside, but are not identical to, the political ones. The mid-nineteenth-century “National Awakening” — a movement of Latvian-speaking teachers, pastors, and journalists who standardised the language and organised the first national song festival in 1873 — did the work of nation-building decades before 1918. The trauma of 1940–1953, and above all the mass deportations to Siberia in 1941 and 1949, became the defining collective memory of the Soviet period, kept alive privately for decades under a regime that forbade its public discussion. That suppressed memory resurfaced explicitly in the late 1980s “Singing Revolution,” culminating in the Baltic Way of August 1989, when an estimated two million people joined hands in an unbroken human chain across Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to demand independence — a deliberately non-violent, culturally coded act of political defiance.
Modris Eksteins, Walking Since Daybreak (1999).
On this account, Latvia is a case of the cultural nation visibly and demonstrably preceding the political state, twice over. Language standardisation, folk-song collection, and choral organisation built a shared Latvian identity across the nineteenth century while the territory was still administered as Russian imperial provinces; that identity, not any prior political institution, supplied the raw material statesmen used to build a republic in 1918. The same sequence repeated in reverse chronology but the same order of causation during the Singing Revolution: mass choral gatherings and open assertions of the banned pre-Soviet flag and anthem created an irreversible political fact before any Soviet institution formally yielded ground. Culture did not merely accompany Latvian statehood; both times, it manufactured the political will that statehood required.
Modris Eksteins, Walking Since Daybreak (1999).
The defining process, through this lens, is the repeated survival of a distinct linguistic and cultural identity under successive, and sometimes deliberately assimilationist, foreign administrations — German, Russian imperial, Soviet — each of which had both the intent and, for a time, the instruments to erase it. Germanisation of the educated classes, Russification of schooling under the late Russian Empire, and Soviet-era promotion of Russian as the language of industry and administration all pursued variations of the same goal from different centuries. That the dainas, the Latvian language, and the choral festival tradition all persisted through each of these pressures, re-emerging at moments of political opportunity, is treated in this lens as the central fact requiring explanation, more fundamental than any single war or treaty.
Modris Eksteins, Walking Since Daybreak (1999).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
Latvia’s geography is defined by three things: a flat, glacially-scoured lowland with no significant natural barriers; a long Baltic coastline broken by natural harbours at Riga, Ventspils, and Liepāja that stay largely ice-free; and the Daugava River, which drains a vast hinterland stretching deep into present-day Belarus and Russia before reaching the sea at Riga. Together these features made Latvia, and Riga above all, a natural transhipment point — a place where goods moving between the Russian and, later, Soviet interior and the wider world had to change hands. This single geographic fact, more than any ideology, explains why control of this small stretch of coastline has mattered disproportionately to much larger powers for eight centuries.
Andres Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (2010).
Riga’s commercial importance is centuries old: German merchants built it into a major Hanseatic League port by the fourteenth century, trading Baltic timber, flax, and grain for Western manufactured goods. Under the Russian Empire, nineteenth-century railway construction connected Riga directly to Moscow and the Russian interior, and by 1900 the city had grown into one of the Empire’s largest industrial centres, with a workforce drawn from across the empire rather than only from the Latvian countryside. Soviet planners after 1945 pushed this further, making Latvia disproportionately important to the USSR’s electronics, machine-building, and rail-transport industries and importing labour accordingly. Since 1991, that Soviet-era industrial base has largely been replaced by a transit and logistics economy re-oriented toward the European Union, with Riga’s port and rail links now serving Western markets rather than a Moscow-directed one.
Vitalija Gustaine & Aleksandrs Terauds, “The Baltic Timber Trade and the Port of Riga” (2024).
This lens treats Riga’s economic role, not ethnicity or culture, as the quiet engineer of Latvia’s social structure. Because the city grew rich on transit trade and industry rather than on Latvian agriculture, its merchant and later industrial-working population was drawn from wherever imperial or Soviet labour markets supplied it — heavily German in the medieval and early modern periods, increasingly Russian and other Soviet nationalities after 1945. The Latvian-speaking population remained disproportionately rural for most of this history. The state that formed in 1918, and re-formed in 1991, therefore had to build a single political nation out of a countryside that was largely ethnically Latvian and a capital city that, economically, had rarely been so — a structural tension this lens treats as built into Latvia’s economic geography, not incidental to it.
Vitalija Gustaine & Aleksandrs Terauds, “The Baltic Timber Trade and the Port of Riga” (2024).
The single long-run force this lens names is transit geography: Latvia’s enduring function as the hinge between a resource-rich eastern hinterland and Western or global markets, regardless of which empire or bloc controlled either end. Hanseatic merchants, Russian imperial railway planners, Soviet industrial planners, and post-1991 European Union logistics firms have each, in their turn, valued Latvia for the same underlying reason — the physical convenience of its coastline and river access — even as the politics surrounding that value changed completely. Latvia’s recurring vulnerability to larger neighbours, on this account, is not simply a matter of size or military weakness; it is the direct economic consequence of sitting on ground that bigger economies to the east and west have never stopped needing.
Andrejs Plakans, A Concise History of the Baltic States (2011).
Not a fifth lens — a summary of where the four accounts above genuinely disagree, and where they do not.
The sharpest dispute sits inside the 1940 turning point. The consensus and cultural readings treat the Soviet annexation as an act imposed entirely from outside on a nation that neither wanted nor welcomed it — Latvia as an unwilling object of great-power politics. The revisionist reading does not dispute the annexation’s illegality but insists that six years of authoritarian rule under Ulmanis had already narrowed genuine domestic support for the pre-1940 republic, so that Sovietization, however illegitimate in law, was not purely an external imposition on a united society. The facts of 1940 are not contested between these readings; their weight, and how much agency to assign ordinary Latvians in what followed, is.
A second, related divergence concerns 1991. The consensus and cultural lenses describe it as restoration — the same nation resuming a legal and cultural identity interrupted, not created. The revisionist and economic lenses stress how thoroughly fifty years of deportation, immigration, and industrial policy had changed who actually lived in Latvia and what they did, making 1991 as much a new founding as a return.
All four lenses agree, without exception, on one point: that Latvia’s fate across eight centuries has been set disproportionately by its neighbours’ relative strength rather than by its own, whether the mechanism named is military conquest, legal annexation, cultural suppression, or economic dependency.
Reference status: all works cited above have been verified as real, published sources — Kasekamp (2010) and Plakans (2011) as the standard scholarly syntheses; Mertelsmann (2016) as the source for the revisionist social-historical reading of 1940, itself a minority position that complicates rather than replaces the consensus verdict on the annexation’s illegality; Eksteins (1999) for the cultural/memory lens; Gustaine & Terauds (2024) for Riga’s specific commercial history. No thesis above is presented as more settled than the cited scholarship supports.
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Latvia became independent in 1918 after World War I, building a strong national identity. In 1940 it was annexed (taken over) by the Soviet Union, then partly occupied by Nazi Germany, before Soviet rule returned in 1944. According to UCDP, the Soviet regime installed in 1940 was repressive and alienated many people, creating conditions for armed resistance after the war.
After Soviet control was re-established, resistance groups formed in Latvia’s forests. UCDP describes the “Forest Brothers” as three linked organizations: the Association of the Latvian Fatherland Guards, its youth wing, and the Latvian National Guerrilla Organization. They lacked a unified command and faced overwhelming Soviet military power, so their momentum declined. The fighting was mainly in 1946–1947 and became inactive in 1948.
UCDP records no armed conflicts for Latvia as a sovereign state after independence in 1991; earlier violence is treated as an internal Soviet conflict. Latvia has instead focused on alliances, joining NATO and the EU in 2004. The CIA Factbook notes that the status of the Russian minority (about a quarter of the population) remains a concern to Moscow, even after Russian troops left in 1994.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Latvia is one of Ukraine’s most committed backers, framing the war as decisive for European security and its own survival as a small state bordering Russia and Belarus. It has signed a long-term security agreement with Ukraine, pledging military aid worth around 0.25% of Latvia’s GDP annually through at least 2026, alongside funding for reconstruction and soldier training.[1][2][6][7][10][12][13] Riga is also a leading advocate of tough EU sanctions, pushing successive packages that target Russia’s energy revenues, dual‑use goods, finance and “shadow fleet” shipping, while tightening national controls to prevent sanctions evasion across the EU’s eastern border.[2][4][5][11][12][14][15] Latvia further supports using frozen Russian state assets for Ukraine’s reconstruction.[2][12]Sources: Office of the President of Ukraine; Latvian Cabinet of Ministers; Latvian Ministry of Defence; Latvian MFA; LSM English
Latvia presents itself as a front‑line NATO state exposed to Russia and Belarus, prioritising collective defence and deterrence on the Alliance’s northeastern flank. Its foreign policy documents and ministerial statements stress that national security is inseparable from Ukraine’s defence and from maintaining a robust NATO presence in the region.[2][4][12][14] Latvia hosts allied forces under NATO’s enhanced forward presence, increases its own defence spending, and contributes actively to capability initiatives such as drone coalitions and air‑defence support for Ukraine.[5][7][12] Politically, Riga lobbies inside the EU and NATO for continued military aid to Kyiv, stronger sanctions, and the long‑term isolation of Russia and Belarus in international organisations.[2][4][11][12][14]Sources: Latvian MFA Annual Report; EU Foreign Affairs Council briefings (Latvia); Latvian Ministry of Defence; LSM English
Latvia aligns closely with the US and wider Euro‑Atlantic structures, viewing Russia as the main security threat and prioritising transatlantic unity on Ukraine, sanctions and NATO posture.[2][4][12][14] It supports efforts to further constrain Russia’s war‑making capacity and backs initiatives like REPowerEU to reduce EU dependence on Russian fossil fuels.[5] In multilateral forums, Latvia works with Western partners to isolate Russia and Belarus diplomatically and seeks a UN Security Council non‑permanent seat to amplify this agenda.[4][14] Relations with China are pragmatic but cautious; alongside other Baltic states, Latvia has distanced itself from Beijing‑led formats and emphasises EU and NATO solidarity over engagement that could dilute its stance towards Russia’s aggression.[4][14]Sources: Latvian MFA Annual Report; China‑CEE Institute analysis of Latvia’s external policy; Latvian MFA and government press releases
Several eastern Baltic tribes merged in medieval times to form the ethnic core of the Latvian people (ca. 8th-12th centuries A.D.). The region subsequently came under the control of Germans, Poles, Swedes, and finally Russians.
A Latvian republic emerged following World War I, but the USSR annexed it in 1940 — an action never recognized by the US and many other countries.
Latvia reestablished its independence in 1991 after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Although the last Russian troops left in 1994, the status of the Russian minority (some 25% of the population) remains of concern to Moscow.
Latvia joined both NATO and the EU in 2004; it joined the euro zone in 2014 and the OECD in 2016.
After World War II, Soviet control over Latvia is fully reimposed, integrating the republic into the USSR. Political repression, collectivization, and demographic change follow, destroying independent institutions and shaping later demands for sovereignty, nonviolence, and rule-based security after 1991.
Soviet authorities deport tens of thousands of Latvians to Siberia while mopping up remaining anti-Soviet partisans. The trauma weakens organized armed resistance, later encouraging dissidents to adopt legal and political strategies, not violence, in pursuing national self-determination during the late Soviet era.
Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization reduces terror and allows modest cultural expression in Latvia. Though sovereignty remains suppressed, local elites cautiously defend language and history, building networks and narratives that will later support a largely peaceful, mass mobilization for independence instead of renewed armed conflict.
Under Gorbachev’s reforms, environmental and historical protests in Riga evolve into the Latvian Popular Front. It demands autonomy and then independence, mobilizing crowds but avoiding armed struggle, setting a precedent for nonviolent, constitutional tactics that still characterize Latvian politics today.
Around two million people in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania form a 600-kilometer human chain protesting the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The peaceful action dramatizes the independence cause internationally, reinforcing a strategy of mass, nonviolent pressure rather than armed insurgency against Soviet power.
Latvia’s newly elected Supreme Council proclaims the restoration of the prewar republic, starting a transitional period away from Soviet rule. Despite tensions and some violence, leaders prioritize negotiation and legality, laying foundations for a constitutional state and future integration into Western security structures.
Latvians erect barricades around key sites in Riga to deter Soviet security forces. Clashes and deaths occur but escalation to civil war is avoided. This outcome entrenches a political culture that seeks security through diplomacy, institutions, and alliances rather than domestic armed confrontation.
Following the failed Moscow coup, Latvia reasserts full independence and quickly gains international recognition, joining the UN. The peaceful transition from Soviet republic to sovereign state allows early focus on institution-building and Western integration instead of managing postwar reconstruction or insurgency.
Russia completes the withdrawal of ex-Soviet forces from Latvia, ending a significant security concern. With no foreign troops on its soil, Latvia can assert full control over borders, shifting its defense strategy toward cooperative security with Western partners rather than bilateral military confrontation with Russia.
NATO grants Latvia a Membership Action Plan at the Washington summit. Reforms in defense, rule of law, and minority rights accelerate. This trajectory locks in a Western-oriented security model that relies on collective deterrence, helping maintain the absence of internal armed conflict today.
Latvia joins NATO in March and the EU in May 2004. Alliance guarantees and economic integration reduce incentives for militarized disputes, even amid tensions with Russia, anchoring Latvia in rule-based European structures that shape its current low-conflict, security-through-alliances environment.
Latvia enters the Schengen Area, removing internal EU border checks. Enhanced cross-border cooperation, trade, and mobility strengthen interdependence with neighbors, making armed conflict within the EU framework less likely and further embedding Latvia in cooperative rather than confrontational regional security arrangements.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea prompts NATO to increase its presence in the Baltics, including rotational forces and exercises in Latvia. Strengthened deterrence reduces the perceived need for unilateral military buildup, supporting a stable security posture despite heightened regional tensions with Russia.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine leads Latvia to boost defense spending, host expanded NATO deployments, and tighten border and energy policies. By relying on alliance frameworks rather than offensive action, Latvia remains free of recorded state-based armed conflict in 2024 despite a sharply deteriorated regional environment.
