Why is the Russian Military "Abandoning" Kaliningrad? - Paul Warburg

[TexasTowelie]

Russia has made some very interesting moves around Kaliningrad lately, all of which reveal that the beliefs of Vladimir Putin and Kremlin leadership about the current state of the world don't quite match up to what they say in public.

[Martin68]

1. I had never heard of Kaliningrad. Interesting history. Captured by Russia at the end of WWII, Germans expelled,

Soviet citizens moved in to populate it. A weird relic of the Soviet empire, with no historical relationship to Russia until it was invaded in 1945. There was a flurry of articles on the enclave's strategic significance from NATO's perspective in 2022, but not much since then.

[mitch96]

3. "Soviet citizens moved in to populate it" This is a ruzzian technique that has been used for a hundred years.

conquer, kill it's occupants and then repopulate it with ruzzians...
Started way back when with Ivan the Terrible I think.
m

[Martin68]

4. Yes. We've seen this more recently in Georgia and Crimea. The Nazis did the same.

[mitch96]

5. "The Nazis did the same." Ahh yes, the infamous Lebensraum or living space.. We need your land Poland/Czechia

so we will just TAKE IT... After all they speak German so they MUST belong to us..

Same with ruzzian in the Donbas. Speak ruzzian? you belong to ruzzia, da?
m

[Metaphorical]

2. Also known as Koenigsberg

It used to be the capital of Prussia, and is known at least partially through the seven bridges problem proposed and solved by the mathematician Leonhardt Euler in the 18th century. In 1945, the Soviet Union swept through the Baltic states and Poland, encompassing Koenigsberg and renaming it Kalinigrad. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Baltic States declared for the West, the Russians continued to claim Kaliningrad, primarily for its access to the North Sea.