Yeah, pretty much. We basically started the government, the military, the intelligence services from scratch right away. Whereas in Ukraine initially the same Soviet institutions persisted. Including the personnel.

But there are reasons for that. Our historical situation was markedly different. Latvia was a full fledged nation during the whole interwar period. One that was well developed industrially and socially. Think interwar Denmark or Finland. So from our perspective, and also according to internation law, we restarted that country, treating the Soviet Period as illegal occupation. As we didnt want a repeat of that situation we single mindedly took the geopolitical course "as far away from Russia as we can get".

For all the other ex-Soviet countries apart from the Baltics the situation was different in that for them the independence sort of 'happened'. E.g., they didnt spend late eighties trying to get out of it. So then the response was different too.