Latvia

Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is a country in the Baltic region of northern Europe, one of the three Baltic states alongside Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south, bordering Russia to the east and Belarus to the southeast with a maritime border toward Sweden, covering 64,573 square kilometers with a population of 1.83 million and Riga as its capital and largest city. Latvians, the titular nation at 65.5 percent of the population, are Balts speaking Latvian, while ethnic Russians form the largest minority. After centuries of Teutonic, Swedish, Polish-Lithuanian and Russian rule, the independent Republic of Latvia was established on 18 November 1918 after breaking away from the Russian Empire, though the country grew increasingly autocratic after a 1934 coup installed the dictatorship of Karlis Ulmanis. Latvia's independence was interrupted at the outset of the Second World War by forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union, occupation by Nazi Germany in 1941 and re-occupation by the Soviets in 1944, which formed the Latvian SSR for the next 45 years; the peaceful Singing Revolution starting in 1987 ended with the restoration of full independence on 21 August 1991. Latvia has since been a democratic unitary parliamentary republic, a developed country with a high-income economy ranked 39th on the Human Development Index, and a member of the European Union, the Eurozone, NATO and the United Nations.