> They were literally fighting together with the Germans against the USSR. Learn your history before making audacious claims.
Perhaps you should learn a thing or two yourself before making such remarks.
In the first two years of the WWII, Germany and the USSR were allied. They divided Europe among themselves with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact[1] on the eve of the invasion of Poland, and then invaded Poland from both sides, and held a joint parade when both forces met in the middle of Poland. Other invasions (Finland, France, Denmark, etc) soon followed.
The same secret agreement with Hitler left Latvia to the USSR. After the fall of Poland, USSR started issuing a series of ultimatums against Latvia, which culminated with the Soviet invasion and occupation of Latvia. Independent Latvia ceased to exist in June 1940[3], and the independence was not restored until 1991. Latvia as a state was not fighting together or against anyone because it simply didn't exist 1940-1991. Latvia was under Soviet military occupation 1940-1941, then under German 1941-1944, and then again under Soviet occupation 1944-1991.
One of the excuses for the initial Soviet invasion in 1940 was that Latvia was too sympathetic of the plight of Polish people and too unfriendly with the Soviet ally, Germany. :)
The Soviet-German alliance is best illustrated by the frequency of the word "facism" in the leading Soviet newspaper Pravda: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/13chr5f/mentions_of... In August 1939, they sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In June 1941, the war between them breaks out. During the two years from mid-1939 to mid-1941, they coordinated their attacks and destroyed the independence of not only Latvia, but many other European countries too, until there was no-one else left between Berlin and Moscow.
To this day, this is big source of tensions between Russia and its European neighbors, because Russia refuses to acknowledge its role in the first two years of the war. Present-day accusations of "nazism" coming from Putin's totalitarian dictatorship against modern European democracies are just pathethic attempts to distract from its own aggression, and serve as further examples of hostility instead of the path of reconciliation that Germany took.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_military...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_occupation_of_Latvia_in...
> BTW 2021 is 7 years after the western backed coup (maidan). Hostilities had been going on for a while.
There was no coup in Ukraine, it's just another long debunked Russian talking point that lacks any substance. I've explained it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42986476
The closest thing Ukraine ever had to a foreign coup is constant Russian meddling with Ukraine's internal affairs. The best example of this is the 2004 poisioning of Ukrainian president. The before and after pictures, taken only a few months apart, tell the story of what a friendly neighbor Russia has been for the longest time: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-43611547