Kaliningrad

Königsberg

The Teutonic Knights built a fortress here in 1255 and named it Königsberg, “King’s Mountain”, after King Přemysl Otakar II of Bohemia.^[3] It joined the Hanseatic League in 1340, and from 1525 to 1618 it was home to the dukes of Prussia.^[3] In 1701 Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg crowned himself the first king of Prussia in the castle chapel.^[3] The philosopher Immanuel Kant was born in the city in 1724 and taught at its university.^[3]

Under Prussia and then Germany, Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia and the main naval base on the Baltic after Kiel.^[3] In the Second World War the Red Army besieged it for two months, and the siege ended in April 1945 with the city almost destroyed.^[3]

A Soviet city, in the Russian republic

At the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain agreed in principle that the city of Königsberg and the area next to it would pass to the Soviet Union.^[4] The line ran from the Bay of Danzig to the point where Lithuania, Poland and East Prussia met, and the final transfer was left for a peace settlement.^[4] The northern half of East Prussia became the Kaliningrad oblast (province).^[1]

The city was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946, after the Bolshevik revolutionary Mikhail Kalinin.^[3][5] Its entire German population was expelled in 1947, and hundreds of thousands of settlers, mostly from Russia and Belarus, moved in.^[3] It was a heavily militarised region and was closed to foreigners until 1991.^[3][2]

The oblast was made part of the Russian republic, although about 360 km of the Lithuanian, Belarusian and Latvian republics lay in between. When those republics became independent in 1991, Kaliningrad became a true exclave.^[1]

“The Conference has agreed in principle to the proposal of the Soviet Government concerning the ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the City of Koenigsberg and the area adjacent to it as described above subject to expert examination of the actual frontier.”^[4]

Surrounded by the EU and NATO

In 2002, before Poland and Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004, the EU and Russia agreed rules for travel between Russia and Kaliningrad.^[2] Transit traffic to the rest of Russia runs through Lithuania and Belarus.^[3] Kaliningrad is the headquarters of Russia’s Baltic Fleet.^[2]

South of the exclave, a thin strip of land separates it from Belarus, a Russian ally. This is the Suwałki gap: the border between Poland and Lithuania, and the only land link between the Baltic states and the rest of the EU.^[2]

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, EU sanctions on steel and other ferrous metals took effect on 18 June, and Lithuania stopped those goods crossing its territory by rail to Kaliningrad. Other goods kept moving.^[6] The Kremlin called it part of a blockade.^[2] On 13 July the European Commission said sanctioned goods could cross by rail, though not by road, as long as they were monitored.^[6]