Andrei Lankov, a prominent Russian scholar on North Korea who teaches at a Seoul university, was detained in Latvia while delivering a lecture, Russian media reported.
Mr Lankov confirmed to multiple news agencies that he was detained by Latvian police just minutes before delivering a lecture on North Korea and placed on a blacklist by the country’s authorities.
Mr Lankov said police officers took him to an immigration office and then placed him in a car that took him to the border with Estonia. He was eventually expelled from the country.
At around 11pm Moscow time, Mr Lankov said that he was still being held, adding that lawyers were working on his case and friends were helping with logistics.
“About thirty minutes before the event, police and immigration came and told me that the foreign ministry of Latvia included me on its list of undesirable people,” he told NK News.
While Latvian authorities haven’t issued an official clarification, Me Lankov believes it could be related to his views on North Korea. “I believe they see my writing style as excessively objective and they see it as a problem,” he said. “I say positive things about North Korea sometimes, and when negative, not in a hysterical style.”
Officials at South Korea’s Kookmin University, where Lankov is a professor of history, said they were trying to assess the situation.
Mr Lankov’s lawyer later confirmed that the scholar was blacklisted from the country, however, the designation didn’t prevent him from entering the country, according to the Russian Anti-War Committee.
“Overall everything is fairly clear. The authorities do not like the fact that I refuse to turn real-life situations into politically convenient caricatures,” the scholar said in a post on Telegram.
A native of Leningrad, now called St Petersburg, Mr Lankov lived for years in North Korea as an exchange student in the 1980s and has studied the country throughout his career. In the 1990s, he worked in South Korea and Australia, and since 2004 has taught in Seoul. He holds dual Russian and Australian citizenship.
Mr Lankov has been known for his realist view of North Korea, which he often describes as a Machiavellian regime squeezing limited resources and manipulating major powers to ensure its survival. He has also expressed critical views of Russia’s war in Ukraine and Moscow’s use of North Korean troops to sustain its campaign.
In April 2025, a court in Moscow reportedly fined him 10,000 rubles (£92) for taking part in the activities of an organisation that had been recognised as “undesirable” in Russia. Mr Lankov told RBK at the time that he learned about the case from journalists.
