Linda Ozola: Hello.

NK: You served as the deputy mayor of Riga for the last five years, five years that have arguably been extremely transformative, not only for Latvia, but of course, for neighbors on NATO’s eastern and northern flanks.

And as Europe faces growing security challenges, the importance of a robust civil defense system has really become increasingly clear, and you played a key role in developing how Riga has approached civil defense initiatives.

So, just to set the scene here, can you tell us a little bit more about how and when this investment in crisis management and bolstering civil defense really came about for Riga?

LO: Yes, indeed. I think for the whole of Latvia and our region in Europe, we can talk about the era before 2022, 24th of February 2022 to be precise, and the era afterwards. So, it was a really cold shower to wake up to in the morning on the 24th of February back in 2022 to realize that the world will never be the same, and Europe will never be the same. Our region has changed forever in our relationship with the neighbors.

So, when I was deputy mayor at the time—also responsible for civil defense and security aspects in the capital city of Latvia—I had a huge motivation to invest in proper, robust crisis management of the capital city, because if these things are in order, everyday services for our citizens are also of higher quality.

That’s the way it is. If you invest in being able to tackle emergency situations, your everyday routines are smoother, and the citizens who pay their taxes and receive services feel it at the end of the day.

2022 gave us a window of opportunity to get easy political support to dedicate real money, financial investment in crisis management, crisis preparedness, resilience issues, both infrastructure and also some soft measures. It was very easy to make the decisions politically.

Up until February 2022, it was much more difficult to persuade your political colleagues that we should allocate additional funding and resources in crisis management. So, we didn’t hesitate a single day to do it, to take the decisions and go on with establishing really a professional team of experts for the capital city. I think we had the best experts from the very beginning. We really had a better team of experts in the capital city compared to the resources that our national government had.

But for me at the time, I wasn’t thinking that we are a municipality and that we should expect some instructions from the government as to what we should do.

There were many municipalities in Latvia who did nothing and were expecting [instructions]. And in a way, within the hierarchical way that the public sector is built, that’s right. I mean, the government has to think about all the levels and give some guidance as to how to build civil defence systems also on the municipal level.

But we didn’t have time. I was really very well aware we didn’t have time. Actually, after the war broke out in Ukraine, we immediately started preparing for accepting Ukrainian refugees on a mass scale, an experience that my country didn’t have at all. So, of course, we have some third country nationals crossing our borders, and we have some procedures and routines for that. But we were speaking about single people, about tens of people, not about refugees arriving to Latvia on a mass scale.

And we didn’t really have plans in order for what the procedures are, what we do, how we organize. Again, it was absolutely learning by doing in our case with very experienced colleagues on an expert level at the municipality level. Riga also took the lead on organizing the acceptance of Ukrainian refugees, because the natural thing is that when they cross internal EU borders, the first place most of them arrive is the capital city.

So, [we needed to figure out] how to organize these acceptance points. This experience of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Riga and organizing all the processes was also forming the basis of how we organize the crisis management system and civil defense system professionally in the capital city, using all windows of opportunity. That’s it. That shouldn’t be missed.

NK: So, because you mentioned after February 24, 2022, there was a window of opportunity for political support for some of these initiatives, would you say that it was more of a bottom-up approach that occurred because of the changing threat perception and security situation pretty much overnight, and that fueled public demand for these initiatives? Or was it more from the top-down, that it was a political decision that was supported because of the changing security situation, or maybe some combination of both?

LO: Well, I think it is a combination of both. But if you look from the bottom-up point of view, when the war broke out, average people were very critical as to why civil defense and preparedness had been neglected all the years prior to 2022. But in the period prior there was no demand and no demand from broader society that there should be investments, for example, in maintaining shelter infrastructure. When there was no demand for that whatsoever.

Society changes its opinions very quickly, reacting to the outside conditions. So, of course, immediately after the war broke out, the demand was very high in the general public, as was the support, and it has been so since.

We are in 2025, our government is now actively working in parliament on the budget for next year. And there is no discussion in society among the majority of people about increasing defence spending. There’s full support for that. We hope that next year, 2026, there will be 4.9 percent of GDP allocated for defence expenditure, and there is no criticism for that. Of course, you might have some radicals, some individual people criticizing that but there is a very broad public support.

NK: You mentioned the topic of shelters, I think that’s such a great example bringing together a couple of different themes of civil defense, communications, and developing that infrastructure. So, since you were leading, I believe, this initiative on mapping shelters, communicating where they are, can you describe this initiative more for our listeners? What has been the public reaction to that initiative?

LO: So, we inherited a network of infrastructure of public shelters when the Soviet Union collapsed, and there was minimal maintenance done up until 2008. Then, in 2008, shelters, like bomb shelters, were deleted from our national regulation altogether.

So, there was no definition, not even a single definition in the law, of what a shelter is. And if we would have to talk about them, we would need [a definition]. There’s no definition. We don’t have it at all.

It was also immediately after the war broke out in Ukraine that I raised this subject openly and publicly.

Of course, there was a lot of criticism immediately. “Where are they? Why haven’t you maintained them?” So, if you raise an initiative, you immediately become responsible for that.

But there was nobody to blame. I mean, if there is no obligation to maintain such an infrastructure, which is expensive—and Finland has talked a lot about that. There’s also been discussion about if they need to finance the excellent network of shelters that their country has. And they have even assessed if maybe they should reduce the criteria, the quality criteria or the financing for that. Not anymore, but still this discussion was there.

We didn’t spend a single single euro on this infrastructure before. And yes, in the beginning, in the public sector, of course, I was met with certain resistance because it required a lot of money.

It was a huge amount of infrastructure that required renovation, maintenance, and development of new infrastructure. It required a lot of financing. But we managed to get it in the definitions, in the national regulation, and also as an obligatory requirement for public housing buildings if they are erected from [scratch]. So, they have to have shelters in them. And of course, we have already managed now to have some co-financing programs for private owners so they can invest in getting their properties in order.

But it wasn’t and it isn’t easy. It never is in the very beginning. If you start something from scratch and then you have this dual reaction: “We should have had it, but it’s not there. We needed it yesterday because suddenly there is war at our doorstep.” And where to get the money and then the time? I mean, building and construction requires time.

But in Riga, we have looked into several initiatives also and intensively learned from Finnish, Ukrainian, and Israeli experiences in this area.

Resilience, as we see in this investment in hard infrastructure, shelters, and material reserves, that’s one side of the coin. The other thing we’ve been working on very systematically these recent years is investing in the resilience of people’s minds and their preparedness and readiness for emergency situations.

I remember that after the war broke out, we had to approve a civil defense plan for Riga as the capital city, and we were the first municipality or the first public institution to include very concrete suggestions for how people should behave in the case of military aggression in the country.

I remember we had some national institutions who asked, “Do you really want to talk about military threats and what people should do in such a case?” And I remember that it was us at Riga City and representatives of the National Armed Forces, the two institutions, and we said, “You know, people are even more worried if we don’t speak about the obvious threat.” Everybody’s watching television. Everybody understands what’s going on, and what they want to see is that the public sector is also preparing for it. So, to not talk about it is even more worrying than to really come up with some suggestions and advice for people and to do so openly in a public, very transparent form where experts talk about it.

You know, for years, after 2014, after Crimea was annexed by Russia, we talked about this preparedness kit or preparedness bag for 72 hours. This is something that I’m sure every Latvian has heard about. Not everybody has done the homework, maybe, but everybody has heard about it. But what people want to see is that if they do it on the individual level, they want to see that the public sector, the national level, the municipal level do their homework with preparedness for 72 hours.

[This encompasses] everything, it includes our institutions being ready, our kindergartens being ready to work in a crisis, in emergency situations, hospitals being able to provide health services, and sewage companies being able to provide sewage services and clean water and all of that.

So, yes, from what I observed, people expected open, robust, direct language from experts, from politicians, but not in all situations. The decision-makers were able to respond to this expectation immediately. So, it is interesting to see how decision makers are trying to test the mood of people, what their expectations are, what the demands are, and then respond to respond to that.

In these crisis situations, you have to be the first actually. You have to be first.

NK: And I think to a large degree, everything you mentioned, the success of all these programs and initiatives and planning, rely heavily also on trust: public trust that their leaders, the public sector, all the different elements of the community are working together, and that everyone knows what they’re doing. So, you mentioned what factors motivate and inform citizens that these programs exist—but how have you experienced motivating people to even want to be informed and to want to understand how all of these different programs work together?

Do you feel that citizens of Riga or Latvia in general are confident about the viability of these preparedness measures? Because it’s one thing to theoretically understand, “OK, we now are investing in shelters. We now have civil defense education.” But it’s a very different thing to actually, in the moment, feel like you would know what to do.

LO: Well, I think it differs from person to person, but I am sure that the majority of the citizens of Riga have heard about the municipality’s activities in the area of preparedness, resilience, educating the society. For two years, we’ve been very outgoing and vocal and organized different educational seminars. Remotely, you can watch them online or you can come in person.

And in doing this, we have cooperated with municipal and national institutions and NGOs. So, I think that is the broadest education and information campaign in civil defense and preparedness that our country has had so far.

And again, we didn’t wait for anybody to tell us, “You should do that.” We just went and did it.

Of course, we also had questions from journalists: “Is this the right thing? Isn’t there enough written information on the Internet [that everybody can find]?” But, you know, it’s never too much to talk about readiness for any crisis. And every channel we could, we used so that people hear about us as much as possible. That’s what we do, and we provide the best expertise and the highest quality of information.

But then people on the other end have to be willing to learn and to remember what we want. You know, when I went to school, sometimes before exams, you put your book under the pillow and hoped that you would know more when you woke up in the morning.

In a way, people would also like this to happen when it comes to their readiness and knowing what to do in any crisis situation. At the least you have to be willing to hear, to click, and watch or read those few pieces of advice that we have prepared. And this is a psychological aspect, how to actually reach people’s minds so that they are willing to be informed, and I didn’t realize it immediately when we started our work. I realized it after a few months, after a year, how to get people to be willing so that there is a share of people who are very motivated.

And then there’s a share that doesn’t know [the information]. So then we use different channels, [thinking] “How else can I reach your home and your awareness with this information?” So, there is co-responsibility.

And of course, we have to learn from Israel who started talking with kids in kindergarten on readiness and how to help your friend if he or she falls and you have to bring her, I don’t know, to the doctor. And they practice these things in kindergarten. So that’s, of course, a different mentality that you teach children from a very early age.

There’s still a way to go. We have school subjects on national defense included in the school programs now, not for small children, for slightly bigger teenagers, but nevertheless, step-by-step, we’re going in that direction.

And one thing you mentioned was trust, which is such a cornerstone of readiness, resilience, preparedness—trust in all directions from the national, municipal, and public sector to trust in our people. Then [we need] to trust our companies and businesses because we will depend on them as well. And we will depend on NGOs in a crisis situation. We depend on them in our daily work where we delegate different services and they provide them for the citizens in our name, but we will depend on them in crisis situations as well. What is a challenge that I observe in Latvia—and I’m sure we are not any exception in the world—is how to involve all these partners, because we are interdependent, in planning for emergencies and training for crises.

Sometimes we feel that our national government is not involving municipalities enough in planning for emergencies or different things, but we are all part of the public sector. So, we are actually on the same team in a way—just at different levels of the public sector, notwithstanding the businesses, the private sector, or NGOs.

We have some issues in our hierarchical structure. So, [the question now] is also how to learn to trust other structures in our society. Most probably learning only by doing.

NK: I think the issue of trust is so interesting to me just from the American perspective, because, of course, part of this project is to foster more understanding about how other NATO Allies are going to think about their own defense planning. And I think in the US right now we have somewhat low levels of trust, not only in our government, but also our private sector and how these different areas of society would work together in a crisis. So, it’s really interesting to hear how you have been thinking about it in Riga.

To pivot a little bit here, part of the reason that we started this project was last year on the reflection of the 75th anniversary of NATO. So, to to round out our conversation, I wanted to ask you a more reflective question about Latvia’s role in NATO over the last two plus decades and in what areas—I mean, I think you mentioned a lot of really impressive initiatives that Riga has been spearheading and some that have been absorbed into the national strategy.

So, in what areas do you feel like Latvia has been a leader in NATO? And for our American audience, what would you like Americans to understand about Latvia’s role in NATO?

LO: Well, yes, it is now 21 years that Latvia and many of our neighbors in Europe are members of NATO and very proud to be there. It was at the end of March 2004 that we joined.

We had to learn in the first decade what it means to be a NATO member country. Months later, we also joined the EU. We were joining NATO and there was also a promise that we would be accepted in the European Union. So, of course, the first years you learn, like in school, and you learn what it means, what others expect from you, and then you realize that you have your responsibility also to contribute. But from the very beginning, and I think even prior to joining NATO, we have been very active in participating in all the international operations and missions.

Then, one marking point in our NATO story is 2014, when Crimea was annexed. Everybody started to realize that NATO will have a renewed role in the twenty-first century. And I’m very proud that Latvia is one of the initiators for NATO Center of Excellence for Strategic Communication, something that we talked about long before everybody realized that Russia is an aggressor. We talked about that many, many years before.

The NATO STRATCOM Center of Excellence, is hosted in Riga. And there are many, many more countries that have joined now—the United States of America amongst them—that we are happy to welcome.

So now, when we speak about disinformation or hybrid threats it’s a natural thing. But we needed a decade to persuade our allies that, yes, hybrid threats are real.

And we were not—the Baltic countries and Poland—we were not taken seriously on this for so many years. So, we’re really happy that we have managed to put that on the table.

I think in our membership in NATO, we started like children, then we went through adolescence, and now we are like adults and equal partners contributing fully. If we also look at what I mentioned already about defense spending and what we aim for in our budget 2026, which is in our parliament right now, 4.9 percent of our GDP, so really trying to reach 5 percent, we want to be among the first countries who do that.

Also, to prove our dedication to NATO, of course, by inviting other countries to treat NATO as seriously because these threats that Russia poses on the eastern flank of NATO is a threat not only to the Baltic countries or Finland, but to the whole of Western civilization. There’s no doubt about that at all. But also when we look at our support for Ukraine, if we compare the size of our economy, size of our country, number of inhabitants, we are absolutely leaders in that as well, because the way we see the situation with Russia’s war of aggression, we see it as our own fight. It is just that our people’s blood is not shed in these fights, but it is our fight for freedom and our future.

Another initiative where together with the neighboring countries we’ve been very active is the Enhanced Forward Presence. We’re hosting a team under the Canadian umbrella. There are many other organizations, NATO Allies, who have their soldiers and boots on the ground here in Latvia, and we’re now currently investing in developing the biggest military polygon in the Baltic region.

So, doing things and proving that we take NATO seriously, our liabilities, our responsibilities, and we are ready to contribute and show it through our work.

And on the basis of STRATCOM that I mentioned, that was born back in 2014, so digital innovation: We’re going a step forward, and digital innovation in NATO areas of responsibility is also a top priority for us.

NK: Definitely. Well, I thank you so much for all of your insights. I think there is a tendency to think of Latvia as a small country, and perhaps it is geographically small, but it punches far above its weight in all of the areas that you mentioned. It’s always really interesting to hear a new perspective from someone who has worked so hard to bring some of these things to life. Thank you again so much for joining us today on The Ties That Bind.

LO: Thank you.

Image: Flickr | Latvijas armija