Russian Journalist Says Latvia Declared Him Persona Non Grata

Leonid Ragozin, a Russian journalist with a Latvian residency permit, said the Baltic country has declared him persona non grata following a controversy over a series of comments about the war in Ukraine.

The Latvian Foreign Ministry’s decision was made “in order to deny me justice in the Latvian court system,” Ragozin wrote on the social media site X on Wednesday, as such a designation is harder to challenge legally. He claimed the decision was made in revenge for previous stories he’d written.

Latvia’s Foreign Ministry said earlier this month it placed an unidentified Russian citizen on its persona non grata list, but declined to give reasons for the decision. Foreign Minister Baiba Braze said at the time that she was initiating proceedings after receiving information from “competent authorities.”

Ragozin, who has worked for the BBC and contributed to Politico and Bloomberg Businessweek, has lived in Latvia for more than a decade. He angered some for his interviews and comments on social media about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Interior Minister Janis Dombrava said earlier this month that Ragozin has had a long track record of comments that “served Russian interests.”

The Baltic country, a member of the European Union and NATO, has taken a hard line on what it perceives as any signs of support for the full-scale invasion and Moscow propaganda. In 2022, Latvia’s media regulator revoked the operating license for Russia’s most prominent independent TV channel, TV Rain, after an anchor appeared to advocate sending supplies to mobilized Russian troops fighting in Ukraine.