Russia’s ‘island’ in the EU buffeted by tension in Baltic and Belarus

As the chaos of the Soviet collapse gradually receded through the 1990s, people in Kaliningrad caught glimpses of a bright future for Russia’s westernmost province.

Reunited Germany might invest heavily in a Baltic port that for centuries was Prussian Konigsberg, and trade with neighbouring Poland and Lithuania could flourish as they grew more prosperous and moved towards joining the European Union.

Many foreigners might come to see the ruins of Konigsberg Castle, former seat of the Teutonic Knights, as well as the cathedral where philosopher Immanuel Kant is buried and the Baltic coast where most of the world's amber is found.

Perhaps money and a plan could even be found for the gigantic “robot’s head” sitting forlornly in the city centre – the House of the Soviets, a brutalist 21-storey administration building on which work began in 1970 and was abandoned in the 1980s, when the communist empire’s cash and ambition began to run dry.

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But now there is no more talk of Kaliningrad becoming a "Baltic Hong Kong", and increasingly it is seen not as a promising bridge between Russia and Europe but as a Kremlin bastion bristling with weapons and ringed by nervous or unfriendly neighbours.

The province, which is slightly bigger than Northern Ireland and home to about 940,000 people, is separated from the rest of Russia by Poland and Lithuania, EU and Nato members that regard Russian president Vladimir Putin as a major threat to their security.

They also see him playing a key role in the current crisis in Belarus, where allies of Alexander Lukashenko have funnelled thousands of migrants to the border with Poland and Lithuania in revenge for EU sanctions imposed on his regime.

Much cargo sent to Kaliningrad from the Russian “mainland” travels through Belarus, and violent scenes on the Poland-Belarus frontier and growing tension around the Baltic Sea threaten to deepen the sense of isolation in the region, which has been hit hard by Covid-19 and the cessation of normal travel to Lithuania and Poland.

Polish premier Mateusz Morawiecki accuses Putin of being the "mastermind" of the stand-off at the Belarus border, and of using unconventional tactics across eastern Europe as part of a Kremlin plan to "rebuild the Russian empire".

Moscow rejects such claims, and in a wide-ranging speech on Thursday, Putin accused the West of flagrantly ignoring Russia’s interests in strategically sensitive regions such as the Baltic Sea.

“We constantly voice our concerns about this and talk about red lines, but we understand that our partners are very peculiar and ... treat all our warnings and conversations about red lines very superficially,” he told Russian diplomats.

“Despite the fact that relations between Russia and our western partner ... were simply unique, almost at the level of allies, our concerns and warnings about Nato’s eastward expansion were completely ignored,” he said of the alliance’s incorporation of much of central Europe, including Poland and Lithuania.

“And now look where Nato’s military infrastructure is – right up close to our borders,” Putin complained. “Of course, we will give a proper response to the military activity of Nato along our borders.”

Early optimism

The contrast to the early years of Putin’s 21-year rule is striking.

On a visit to Kaliningrad state university in 2003, Putin told students that “we should work together to turn the Kaliningrad region into a model of co-operation between Russia and the enlarging Europe.”

“I have very good and friendly relations with all the heads of European Union countries,” he assured them, “and this is the goal of practically all the [EU] leaders.”

The next year, seven countries joined Nato, including the Baltic states that were part of the Soviet Union until 1991, and the pro-western Orange Revolution gripped Ukraine, in a precursor to the 2014 Maidan Revolution that prompted Russia to annex Crimea and launch an undeclared war against its neighbour.

When in 2005 Russia marked 750 years since the foundation of Konigsberg and 60 years since it became Soviet Kaliningrad after the second World War, Putin was still happy to invite German and French leaders to the celebrations – but their counterparts from Poland and Lithuania were not on the guest list.

"How would you in Ireland feel, if a Russian military base appeared in, say, Scotland?" says Alla Ivanova, the minister in charge of Kaliningrad's agency for international and inter-regional affairs.

“In 1991, when Russia left its positions in Germany and all the countries of the Warsaw bloc, where were Nato bases located? And if you compare those maps [with today’s maps], the movement towards Russia – and Kaliningrad in particular – is clearly visible,” she adds.

“Of course, we did not think about it day and night [but] when you live in an exclave you should be ready for all sorts of unpredictability.”

In states that were occupied or dominated by the Soviet Union during the communist era, joining Nato was widely seen as a simple matter of self-preservation – and may seem even more valuable to them now, after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, while aiming only angry rhetoric at the alliance.

Yet as the geopolitical picture darkened – and Nato and Russia increasingly accused each other of conducting dangerous war games and military flights around the Baltic – Kaliningrad residents were becoming regular visitors to the EU.

"Of course we travelled abroad much more often than people elsewhere in Russia. We saw life in Poland and Lithuania and we compared the standard of living to our own," says Anna Alimpieva, a prominent sociologist, urban researcher and activist in Kaliningrad.

“Kaliningraders’ favourite city became Gdansk in Poland. It’s very close [165km] and, like Kaliningrad, it’s on the Baltic, it has a German past and was badly destroyed in the war,” she says.

“People saw how it developed, how services got better, how much there was to do there. It was really cool and raised the level of expectation here.”

Friends and neighbours

Simplified visa rules meant many Kaliningraders made regular tourist and shopping trips to Poland, boosting the economy of Polish border areas and providing a counterweight to lurid Russian state media warnings about the “Nato threat”.

“Lots of Kaliningraders have acquaintances and business links over the border. So despite all these stories we’re told about them joining Nato and being dangerous for us, most of us think of them very positively, as friends and neighbours,” says Alimpieva.

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has sent relations with the West to their lowest point since the cold war, and tit-for-tat sanctions had a heavy impact for a while on Kaliningrad, which imported many goods from its EU neighbours.

“When the ‘war of sanctions’ really started it affected the regional economy rather negatively. There used to be very wide trade connections with Poland and Lithuania. So all the trade chains were disrupted,” Ivanova recalls.

The sanctions were ultimately a “bitter but effective” way for Kaliningrad to become more self-reliant, she says, “but at the time it was really difficult for Kaliningrad entrepreneurs”.

“For the Kaliningrad region ... being dramatically dependent on the supply of resources and free movement via EU territory, all the deteriorations of Russia-EU relations are perceived with anxiety.”

Kaliningrad’s neighbours have watched anxiously as Putin rapidly modernised and strengthened Russian military bases in a region that was off-limits to foreigners in the Soviet period as the home of the Baltic Fleet.

In 2018, Moscow confirmed that its forces in Kaliningrad had been supplied with Iskander missiles, nuclear-capable rockets that could strike any of the Baltic states, much of Poland and potentially Berlin, depending on their specification.

Russia has also deployed powerful air- and sea-defence missiles to Kaliningrad, which, alongside the Baltic Fleet and the region’s attack jets and drones, could allow the Kremlin to isolate the Baltic states from the rest of Nato in the event of a conflict.

Open for business

Governor Anton Alikhanov insists his region is open for business, however.

“I would say the coronavirus crisis is a bigger obstacle and technical complication for work with European companies that any political aspects,” he tells me on a visit to a local factory this week.

“We work with foreign investors with pleasure. We don’t see any problems with this.”

Kaliningrad has introduced strict controls to tame a severe wave of Covid-19 that has put huge strain on its health service.

In tribute to the region’s medics, an artist recently covered one wall of a building in the city centre with a mural of a doctor’s masked face, which looks across to the glowering hulk of the still unfinished House of the Soviets.

Officials say the building’s fate may be decided in the coming months. It is still not clear when the pandemic will allow Kaliningrad to come out of isolation, but its residents and neighbours alike say a return to cross-border travel is the best way to build trust at a time of international tension.

"The situation in the region depends heavily on the situation in Russia as a whole," says Artur Zapolski, a diplomat at the Lithuanian consulate general in Kaliningrad.

“Nevertheless, it is in our best interest that Kaliningrad ... develops as a prosperous, open, friendly and non-militarised region.”