“The war did not change Russia. It revealed Russia.” - Rihards Kols Rihards Kols, Latvian Member of the European Parliament, speaking at the #RigaConf2026 plenary session "Preparing for Russia Remade by War". “It is important correction we need to make in this room. The war did not change Russia. It revealed Russia. And this is precisely, and I will reiterate, that for years some of us in this region said this plainly, and we were told that we are exaggerating. There are some who are still saying that the Baltics, our region, we are exaggerating, that we were prisoners of our own history. So the war did not create new Russia. It stripped away the excuses that let people pretend the old one was becoming something else. And that is something being spread across Europe. Already was mentioned the dynamics on day to day. What is the changing on the war efforts, war economy? And obviously we can reiterate the numbers. Obviously the Russia today spends roughly 7 to 8% of GDP and roughly 40% of federal budget expenditure on defense and security. And it is the highest share since the Soviet collapse. And that should be noted. But on top of that, which is more alarming, is that church, state media, education curricula, industry, the courts have all been folded into a single machine whose output is the war effort. And that has to be registered. And really, do not make no mistake. That is not wartime mobilisation in the sense we understand in democracy, when we speak about a temporary redirection of resources toward an external goal. It is the opposite. The war has become the organising principle of the state itself, and the state has organised everything else around sustaining it. So I want to be really blunt, because I think this room can handle it from seeing familiar faces. Russia is not a state that happens to be run by a strong man who came out of the KGB. Russia is a state built and operated by security services, for security services as a permanent condition. putin is not aberration sitting on top of normal state apparatus. He is the product of the apparatus, and so is whoever comes after him. We, we ask often and in this format as well, in previous years, what happens after putin? We are asking the wrong question. The right question is what happens to the system whose entire logic is a threat detection, repression, and control regardless of who occupies the top chair. Individuals do leave voluntarily or through windows or having too much tea. The services, the networks, the operating logic, they remain. And there is a comfortable story in the Western capitals that ordinary Russians are quietly against this war, that repression is holding back at Latin majority that would choose differently if only given a chance. I do not believe that, and frankly the evidence does not support it. If there were a real organised majority demand for change inside Russia, we would see it. Not because Russians are uniquely passive, history proves the opposite when the conditions are right. But because when a majority generally wants a change, it finds a way to make that one visible, costly to ignore, and difficult to suppress indefinitely. So the simple, uncomfortable logic conclusion is this. The absence of visible mass demand for change is itself the evidence. Passive discontent that never translates into political consequence is not resistance, it is accommodation. And there is the line I want people to sit with. You cannot wake up someone who is only pretending to be asleep. A society that quietly benefits from empire, that quietly enjoys the mobilisation of victimhood and grievance the Kremlin sells it, does not need waking. It needs to be confronted with costs it cannot ignore.” 1/2