Russian Latvians, not Russian Latvians

A friend of mine who's vacationing in the Baltics sent me this quote he heard in a documentary on the vexatious problem of Russian-language schooling there:

Мы не хотим быть российскими латышами, а русскими латвицами (my ne khotim byt' rossijskimi latyshami, a russkimi latvitsami)

Which means, in the simplest, most straightforward translation

We don't want to be Russian Latvians, but (rather) Russian Latvians.

Something's definitely lost in that translation!

The (also) vexing problem of русский vs российский (Russky vs Rossijsky) - that is, between ethnic and cultural Russian-ness vs that which belongs to the state of Russia (which is spelled in Russian "Россия Rossiya" (Русь Rus' being something different)) has been recognized since at least the Romanovs. There's a reason Muscovy was replaced by Rossiya, not Russia. Recently, the adjective Rossijsky has been used more and more often as Russia attempts to deal with its huge ethnic diversity and forge some sense of nation that doesn't depend on nationality (ethnicity, we'd likely say in the US where "nationality" has a somewhat different connotation). Reams have been written in Russian press and academia and political circles about what precisely being "Russky" entails...

And now they're doing it with Латыш (Latysh) and Латвиец (Latviets).

Often, "citizen of Russia" suits for Rossijsky. But is that young man quoted actually saying "We don't want to be ethnic Latvians who are citizens of Russia; we want to be ethnic Russians who are citizens of Latvia"? Or is it closer to "We don't want to be Latvians percieved to have political or social ties to the Russian state; we want to be Latvians who happen to be ethnically Russian"? Or, in fact, something in between?

It's a bit like that man who said the key to the Danish behavior in WWII was, the Danes didn't believe there were Danish Jews, only Jewish Danes... And if only "Latvian" and "Russian" had separate noun and adjective forms in English (as Dane/Danish, Swede/Swedish, Pole/Polish or even Frenchman/French) we could do this more easily. In speech, you could be clear by intonation - not RUSSIAN Latvians, but Russian LATVIANS - but in writing you need to add more words. Quite a few more words, at that.