Andrei Lankov, a prominent Russian scholar on North Korea who teaches at a Seoul university, said he was expelled from Latvia after being detained during a lecture in Riga and then transferred to immigration authorities before being taken to the border with Estonia.
Lankov said in a text message Wednesday that Latvian police did not provide a reason for his detention late Tuesday in Riga, where he was delivering the lecture. He said he was later turned over to immigration authorities and taken to the border with Estonia, according to the professor and his school.
“They basically expelled me from the country, and it was all,” Lankov said, according to the report. He did not elaborate further on what led to the detention and expulsion.
Officials at South Korea’s Kookmin University, where Lankov is a professor of history, said they confirmed he had been released and was headed to Estonia. The university’s account aligned with Lankov’s description that he had been transferred to immigration authorities after police detained him.
Earlier, the Russian business news outlet RBK reported that Latvian authorities had placed Lankov on a blacklist. Lankov told RBK that he was still being held around 11 p.m. Moscow time, adding that lawyers were working on his case and friends were helping with logistics.
Lankov, a native of Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg, has lived and worked in Asia over the course of his career. The report said he lived for years in North Korea as an exchange student in the 1980s and later worked in South Korea and Australia, before teaching in Seoul since 2004.
He holds dual Russian and Australian citizenship, and he has been known for a realist approach to North Korea, describing it as a Machiavellian regime that squeezes limited resources and manipulates major powers to ensure its survival. The report also said he has expressed critical views of Russia’s war in Ukraine and Moscow’s use of North Korean troops to sustain its campaign.
The AP report also said that in April 2025, a Moscow court reportedly fined Lankov 10,000 rubles for taking part in activities of an organization recognized as “undesirable” in Russia, and that he told RBK at the time he learned about the case from journalists.