Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Latvian State Security Service has started seven criminal investigations for supporting Moscow on TikTok or using the platform to spread ethnic hatred. Who are the voices from the Baltics that mirror Kremlin narratives there? And why is Lithuania and Estonia taking it easier?
The pandemic has escalated online harassment, especially aimed at journalists and healthcare workers. Yet in all three Baltic countries police don't consider even publicly shared death threats as real enough, therefore action against perpetrators rarely follows.
Work visits to the U.S. described as “fuckery”, promises to “fix things” in the banking sector, disclosure of confidential information in a sauna and false testimony: a dropped case lifts the veil on how the former governor of the Bank of Latvia operated.
Profit of the payday loans made Aigars Kesenfelds millionaire and gave him a chance to spread wings internationally. The turnover of his businesses now approaches 400 million euros a year. However, the plain sailing has run into difficulties in Kosovo and Armenia due to “abnormal superprofits”, and the companies related to him have lost licences. For this story, the least known Latvian millionaire is forced to leave the shadows and answer unpleasant questions.
At a time when many people have lost their incomes due to Covid - 19 pandemic, the supervisory board of the enterprise responsible for building Rail Baltica had quietly envisaged to raise their salaries by 15 percent or 400 euros as of January next year. They gave up the idea only after journalists from Re:Baltica started to question the decision.
When in March of this year Re:Baltica's Re:Check became official Facebook (FB) fact checkers and labeled the first false information, the main conspiracy theory propagators in Latvia were enraged.