Latvian region has distinct identity and allure for Russia

[MBS]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/world/europe/latvian-region-has-distinct-identity-and-allure-for-russia.html?_r=0

Interesting article (this is the kind of in-depth, beyond-the-headlines article where the NYT earns its creds, and my continuing subscription).
But. . uh-oh Don't try it, Putie.

For background, "Latgalian" is seen as a dialect of Latvian. While Russians live in the area, the "Latgalians" themselves are not Russian.

. . On a continent of fractured loyalties, a kaleidoscope of separatist passions extending from Scotland to eastern Ukraine, Piters Locs, the 70-year-old champion of an obscure and, at least officially, nonexistent language, has a particularly esoteric cause.“We are a separate people,” he said, showing visitors around the private museum he built to celebrate the language and literature of Latgale, a sparsely populated and impoverished region of lakes, forests and abandoned Soviet-era factories along Latvia’s eastern border with Russia.While Mr. Locs insists that he has no desire to see the area break away from already tiny Latvia, such passion for Latgale’s language and its distinct identity helps explain why Russian nationalists see this region — about a quarter of the country — as fertile ground for their machinations to divide and weaken NATO’s easternmost fringe.


But complaints that the region’s culture, heavily influenced by Russia, is under threat have been taken up with gusto by pro-Russian groups, fueling suspicion that they work as a front for Moscow.
In a recent article urging Russia to undertake a “preventive occupation” of this and two other Baltic nations, all of them NATO members, Rostislav Ishchenko, a political analyst close to influential nationalist figures in Moscow, asserted that Latgale’s separate identity could help open the way for a “revision” of Baltic borders. A map accompanying the article showed Latgale as a separate entity taking up the entire length of what is now Latvia’s border with Russia.

Such a scenario would mean a Baltic replay of events last year in Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists and so-called green men — Russian soldiers in uniforms stripped of insignia — seized Crimea and then territory along Ukraine’s border with Russia. Much the same strategy has been promoted in a recent series of mysterious online appeals calling for the establishment of a “Latgalian People’s Republic,” a Latvian version of the Donetsk People’s Republic supported by Russia in Ukraine.Latvia’s Security Police, the domestic intelligence agency, have struggled to trace the source of the appeals but believe they originated in Russia.

“They seem to be some kind of provocation to test how we would react,” said a security agency official, who asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the issue. He said there were no signs of separatist fervor in Latgale itself and described the Latgalian People’s Republic as an “artificial creation by outsiders.” Eastern Ukraine also displayed no separatist fervor until Russian-backed gunmen in March 2014 seized government buildings in Donetsk, silenced local supporters of Ukraine’s central government and, aided by Russian state television, mobilized a previously passive population to the separatist cause.