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Russia's Kaliningrad to join EU
pravda.ru ^ | 2/14/2005 | pravda.ru

Posted on 02/20/2005 11:20:40 AM PST by eluminate

Ilya Klebanov, the presidential envoy in the North-West of Russia, stated last Friday that the Kaliningrad enclave would have to be granted the official status of a foreign territory. "The position on the matter is final," the official added.

The special status of the Russian western enclave implies an adaptation of the regional law to the laws of the European Union. Furthermore, citizens of Western Europe will have a right to visit the region, which will eventually be included in the euro zone. However, making any final decisions regarding the fate of the Kaliningrad region is a matter of distant future, the Izvestia newspaper wrote.

The opportunity of a special status for the Russian enclave situated between Lithuania and Poland has been an object of discussion for several years already. Ilya Klebanov, the presidential envoy in Russia's North-West, visited Kaliningrad last week in connection with the forthcoming celebration of the city's 750th anniversary and conducted a session of an expert workgroup for the problem of the Kaliningrad region. The above-mentioned statement was made after the session was over.

"The Kaliningrad region will have to be granted the official status of a foreign territory. It is common world practice, which has given a good account of itself. The decisions that we have made during this session are final - we will have to continue working on the matter on the basis of these decisions," Ilya Klebanov said.

France has several "foreign departments:" Martinique, Guadeloupe, Reunion, and French Guinea. Citizens of those territories enjoy full rights of French citizens. The USA has Puerto-Rico in the Caribbean, the Virginia Islands, and the island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. Great Britain has 14 colonial and dependent territories, including the British Virginia Islands and the Folkland Islands.

(Excerpt) Read more at english.pravda.ru ...


TOPICS: Extended News; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; Russia
KEYWORDS: eu; euro; europe; eussr; kaliningrad; russia
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so what do ya all think?
1 posted on 02/20/2005 11:20:41 AM PST by eluminate
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To: eluminate

I was under the impression that Kaliningrad was a non-contiguous but integral part of Russia, like Alaska and Hawaii are parts of the USA, and that residents of Kaliningrad are Russian citizens. Was I mistaken?


2 posted on 02/20/2005 11:25:39 AM PST by Slings and Arrows (Am Yisrael Chai!)
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To: Slings and Arrows

your right but they had to give it "foreighn status" in order for it to be able to join eu. In reality it would still be an integral part just like Puerto Rico for US.


3 posted on 02/20/2005 11:36:22 AM PST by eluminate
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To: Slings and Arrows
Was I mistaken?

Was the German Konigsberg (City of Kings) the capitol of the former East Prussia annexed after WWII.

4 posted on 02/20/2005 11:51:30 AM PST by Semper Paratus
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To: eluminate

Russian foreign ministry has denied that they have such plans.
http://www.kommersant.com/page.asp?id=-4886


5 posted on 02/20/2005 12:05:46 PM PST by AdrianR
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To: eluminate
There are a few flaws in the translation...there is no such place as French Guinea, but rather French Guiana, and it's the U.S. Virgin Islands, not Virginia Islands.

Kaliningrad used to be called Koenigsberg when the enclave was part of East Prussia. The Germans are gone and are not likely to be allowed to return, but Mikhail Kalinin (1875-1946) was just a Soviet official under Stalin who doesn't deserve any special recognition. The king for whom Koenigsberg was named was a Slavic king, Ottokar II of Bohemia, not a German...it would be more fitting to call the city after his name than Kalinin's.

Koenigsberg's most eminent native son was the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

6 posted on 02/20/2005 12:08:04 PM PST by Verginius Rufus
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To: eluminate; dennisw; Cachelot; Yehuda; Nix 2; veronica; Catspaw; knighthawk; Optimist; weikel; ...

Kaliningrad is one of Russias largest military bases. I say Europe is very unwisely allowing a trojan horse through her gates These are very dangerous times. See...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1347260/posts


7 posted on 02/20/2005 12:24:55 PM PST by TapTheSource
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To: TapTheSource

Kaliningrad is a run down city - it's not a huge military town -you are thinking of Baltiisk in Kaliningrad Oblast. At least get your facts correct before once again predicting the end of the world. K-grad is in disrepair and seriously needs some money to rebuild.

TTS, have you ever been on a Russian military base? Have you seen up close its "power" - you'd laugh. It's a sad thing to see. Rusting ships, starving conscripts, broken down equipment. But I guess you'll claim the "Soviet Commies" were trying to pull a reverse Potemkin on us, eh?

And regarding the Germans and Kaliningrad- They're waiting for the right moment to put more money into it. It needs LOTS of work. Putin's wife is from Kaliningrad, so I'm kind of surprised it's still so run down. The Germans have done a good job of rebuilding Svetlogorsk on the shores of the Baltic.

Seriously TTS, you offer nothing more than old articles as proof of this coming commie revolution. Why don't you visit these areas you claim to know so much about and then YOU write your observations. Don't you find it a little intellectually stilting to get all your views on issues from other people writing their own opinions?


8 posted on 02/20/2005 12:35:12 PM PST by koba37
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To: eluminate

I've got a feeling that sooner or later we will annex Kaliningrad.


9 posted on 02/20/2005 1:14:28 PM PST by Grzegorz 246
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To: eluminate

I read somewhere that it is a centre of European heroin trade - it's a terrible mess - Stalin destroyed Konigsburg. There have been plans on the table to make it sort of a Russian Hong Kong - I hope this is part of the plan.

Regards, Ivan


10 posted on 02/20/2005 1:15:54 PM PST by MadIvan (One blog to bring them all...and in the Darkness bind them: http://www.theringwraith.com/)
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To: Grzegorz 246
I've got a feeling that sooner or later we will annex Kaliningrad.

Who exactly is "we" in this instance?

11 posted on 02/20/2005 1:21:13 PM PST by Androcles (All your typos are belong to us)
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To: Androcles

We, the chosen people.


12 posted on 02/20/2005 1:25:27 PM PST by Grzegorz 246
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To: koba37; All

==TTS, have you ever been on a Russian military base? Have you seen up close its "power" - you'd laugh. It's a sad thing to see. Rusting ships, starving conscripts, broken down equipment. But I guess you'll claim the "Soviet Commies" were trying to pull a reverse Potemkin on us, eh?

Like I said, trojan horse...




Moscow Reportedly Moves Tactical Nuclear Arms to Baltics

Philipp C. Bleek

Russia has reportedly moved tactical nuclear weapons to a military base in Kaliningrad, an action that would contravene its apparent pledge to keep the Baltic region nuclear-free and could violate its 1991 commitment not to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Russian officials have vehemently denied the allegations.

The move was first reported January 3 by The Washington Times, which cited unnamed intelligence sources and classified Defense Intelligence Agency reports, and stated that U.S. officials first became aware of the weapons transfers last June. Following initial press reports, U.S. news organizations reported senior U.S. officials as confirming that the Clinton administration believes Russia has moved tactical nuclear warheads during the past year to the isolated Russian region, which is located between Poland and Lithuania.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright would not confirm or deny the reports when asked about them January 4, but State Department spokesman Richard Boucher indicated January 3 that the department would be pursuing the issue with Moscow. The Washington Post cited senior U.S. officials as saying they had been closely following Russia's "handling of non-strategic nuclear weapons at stockpile sites" and were neither surprised nor alarmed by recent developments.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called the allegations "rubbish" when questioned by a reporter January 6. And, in interviews with Russian news agencies, Vladimir Yegorov, a former Baltic Fleet commander and the newly elected governor of Kaliningrad, derisively dismissed the allegations as a "dangerous joke" and bluntly denied that the fleet has nuclear weapons.

Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew nuclear submarines from the Baltic Sea in 1989 and said that Russia was "prepared to come to agreement with all the nuclear powers and the Baltic states on effective guarantees for the nuclear-free status of the Baltic Sea." No formal agreement was ever pursued, but both U.S. and Russian officials, including Baltic Fleet officers, maintain that Russia has committed to keeping nuclear weapons out of the region.

In late 1991, responding to initiatives announced by President George Bush, Gorbachev pledged to withdraw all naval tactical nuclear weapons from service to be either destroyed or placed in "central storage sites" and to destroy all nuclear warheads for artillery and tactical land-based missiles. These pledges were reaffirmed in 1992 by Russian President Boris Yeltsin following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The presence of any stockpiled weapons in Kaliningrad would violate Russia's apparent pledge to keep nuclear weapons out of the Baltics, and the more serious step of deploying tactical nuclear weapons would clearly violate its 1991 commitment. Russian officials have so far failed to clarify whether the Baltic outpost serves as a storage site for tactical nuclear weapons, although U.S. intelligence officials told The Washington Post that Russia used Kaliningrad as a depot for tactical nuclear weapons that were removed from naval vessels in the early 1990s.

Currently, the United States deploys an estimated 200-400 tactical nuclear gravity bombs on NATO bases in Europe, deployments long protested by Russia, and reportedly stockpiles several hundred Tomahawk nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles and more than a thousand nuclear-armed gravity bombs. All of these weapons systems are classed as "tactical" and have yet to be included in any arms control treaties, although there has been some discussion of limiting tactical nuclear weapons under a prospective START III agreement. The size of Russia's tactical nuclear weapons stockpile is the subject of considerable speculation, but Russia has almost certainly not destroyed all its artillery and land-based tactical missile warheads, due at least in part to financial constraints.

Many analysts argue that any deployed tactical nuclear weapons would likely be intended to serve as a response to NATO enlargement and Western military power in the face of continued Russian conventional force decline. Russia vociferously opposed NATO's 1999 expansion to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Several Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—are currently vying to join the alliance in 2002, a move Russian officials have vigorously condemned. Kaliningrad, which is geographically separated from mainland Russia, is considered a key strategic site by Russia's military and would only be further isolated if Lithuania were to join NATO.

Russia conducted a series of war games in June 1999 that simulated a conventional NATO air and sea-based assault on Russia's western and central territory, reportedly beginning with attacks on Kaliningrad. Discussing the "Zapad-99" exercise at a Kremlin press conference the following month, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev stated that "the decision to use nuclear weapons was made" after conventional defenses "proved ineffective [and the] enemy continued to push into Russia." Sergeyev emphasized that the simulated nuclear use, reportedly several nuclear-armed air-launched cruise missiles, was intended to test "one of the provisions of Russia's military doctrine." (See ACT, January/February 2000.)

Baltic government officials have expressed concern about the reports of nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad, and in a January 7 radio interview Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski called for "international inspections in cooperation with Russia."

http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2001_01-02/tacnucjanfeb01.asp


13 posted on 02/20/2005 1:28:39 PM PST by TapTheSource
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To: Grzegorz 246

Help me out here....there's an awful lot of groups who refer to themselves or have been referred to as the chosen people (ie Jews, Christian, Muslims, Hindus, Israelis, American, English, etc).


14 posted on 02/20/2005 1:30:22 PM PST by Androcles (All your typos are belong to us)
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To: koba37; All

“Federation is a transitional form towards the complete union…of all nations”

Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions adopted by the Second Comintern Congress, July 28, 1920




“The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states, and all national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them…The merging of states is inevitable.”

V.I. Lenin, Imperialism and the Right to Self-determination, cited in a paper by the British Communist R. Palme Dutt, published in 1949 by International Publishers, New York.




“The right of self-determination, the stage of possible separation or alternatively federation is, Lenin insisted, only a prelude or transition to the ultimate aim of the merging of nations.”

R. Palme Dutt, British Communist, International Publishers, New York, 1949.




An example…is what is happening in the Soviet Union. Separation must come before integration.”

The United Nations in the 1990s: A Second Chance?, Max Jakobson, Twentieth Century Fund [UN front group], 1993, page 123.




“The Soviet United States of Europe is the only correct slogan pointing the way out from European disunity, a disunity which threatens not only Germany but the whole of Europe with complete structural and cultural decline.”

Leon Trotsky, writing in his journal The Bulletin of the Opposition, Number 17-18, November-December 1930, page 53.




“[The aim is to] carry forward the ideas of the New World Order.”

Karl Marx, cited in Karl Marx and the United States, James E Jackson, International Publishers, New York, July 1983.




“The transition step to the New World Social Order involves merging the newly captive nations into regional governments.”

F. Petrenko and V. Popov, Soviet Foreign Policy, Objectives and Principles, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1985.




“We set ourselves the ultimate aim of destroying the state.”

V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, International Publishers, New York, 1961 Edition, page 68.




“Our vision of the European space from the Atlantic to the Urals is not that of a closed system. Since it includes the Soviet Union [sic: he said this six month after the USSR had ‘ceased to exist’], which reaches to the shores of the Pacific, it goes beyond nominal geographical boundaries.”

Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, Oslo, June 1992.


15 posted on 02/20/2005 1:37:29 PM PST by TapTheSource
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To: Grzegorz 246

saying that Kalningrad will be annexed is a bit over the top. I kind off do not believe it will happen. My guess is it will become a very progressive investment center like northern-ireland with irish growth and will not seperate from Russia. Lets be realistic now.


16 posted on 02/20/2005 1:51:02 PM PST by eluminate
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To: eluminate
Kaliningrad is completely cut off from the rest of Russia and can be entered only by sea (or air), through Poland, or through Lithuania. Some kind of association with the EU makes sense. (The EU is badly run but compare that with Russia.)

Last October I was in northern Poland near the Kaliningrad border and a fair amount of cheap cigarettes and cheap vodka was being smuggled in from Kaliningrad. Economically, Kaliningrad doesn't seem to have much to offer at the present time.

17 posted on 02/20/2005 2:02:21 PM PST by Malesherbes
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To: eluminate

That is very good idea and I think that Poland would support this but Moscow don’t share this vision. EU would clean up this mess a bit and Russians would have own people in EU institutions. Fact is that isolation is not thing what Kaliningrad need now.


18 posted on 02/20/2005 2:09:30 PM PST by Lukasz (Terra Polonia Semper Fidelis!)
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To: Malesherbes

Basicly they will create an experiment in my view where Kaliningrad will have ecconomic laws of the Eu while keeping Russian criminal law which will enable good investment security. This might create for some importation of the ecconomic laws into Russia proper if those are deemed successful. I do not think Poland will Annex Kaliningrad as Gresgoz is suggesting.

The germans previously voiced interest in creating BMW plants in the region if ecconomic laws could be changed in certain aspects so I m guessing thats whats happening.


19 posted on 02/20/2005 2:10:09 PM PST by eluminate
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To: Androcles

Do not forget about the Poles, they are chosen people too LOL


20 posted on 02/20/2005 2:10:43 PM PST by Lukasz (Terra Polonia Semper Fidelis!)
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