Mamikins won't vote in Saeima election, citing fear for his life at Latvia's embassy

Andrejs Mamikins, a former journalist and European Parliament member who relocated to Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine and now frequently appears on Kremlin propaganda broadcasts, has announced he will not vote in the upcoming Saeima election. He also urged his supporters to abstain, calling all the electoral lists unworthy.

Mamikins explained that Latvian citizens in Russia can only cast a ballot at the Latvian embassy building in Moscow, but he fears for both his safety and his life if he goes there. He said the most likely outcome would be arrest and transport to Riga's Central Prison, while in the worst case he believes he could be physically eliminated, citing the case of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Mamikins mistakenly claimed this happened in Iran, when Khashoggi was actually killed in 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Earlier conditional offer to return

Earlier this month, Mamikins had said he was willing to return to Latvia and serve his sentence, but only if parliament passed a law granting automatic citizenship to all non-citizens without exams, restored demolished Soviet-era monuments, and granted Russian the status of a second state language. At that time he made no mention of fearing physical harm.

Criminal case and inflammatory remarks

Mamikins was elected to the European Parliament in 2014 on the "Harmony" party list and later ran unsuccessfully in both a Saeima election and a European Parliament election. In 2023 Latvia's State Security Service opened a criminal case against him over alleged justification of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, and in 2024 a European arrest warrant was issued against him. He regularly appears on Russian propaganda programs, where he has called for strikes on the Baltic states and said their residents are not worth pitying.