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Situated between Poland and Lithuania, both members of the European Union and NATO, Kaliningrad Oblast is a Russian exclave on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, as well as the westernmost region of the Russian Federation.Tactically, in the event of conflict, Russia could form a land bridge from Belarus to the Kaliningrad exclave along the so-called Suwałki Gap, severing the Baltic states, including Lithuania, from other members of the Atlantic Alliance. In this scenario, troops stationed in Lithuania as part of a German-led NATO brigade would be surrounded and cut off from Central Europe. In addition, the deployment of...

As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” continues its downward spiral in Ukraine, the future of Russian-occupied or dominated territories is becoming a subject of interest, beginning with Kaliningrad. ...Moldova took what could be the first step on May 15, when Igor Grosu, President of the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova, announced Moldova was formally withdrawing from the Commonwealth of Independent States interparliamentary assembly — the Russian equivalent of the British Commonwealth ...In a worst-case scenario, if you were to overlay the domino theory of U.S. Cold War policy, substituting “getting out from underneath Russian oppression” for “the...

The inhabitants of Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave squeezed between Poland and Lithuania, will soon be able to travel without visas to Gdańsk and other cities on the Polish side of the border. Poles from the Pomeranian and Warmian-Masurian provinces, in turn, will no longer need a Russian visa to go to the Kaliningrad Region to buy petrol, for example, much cheaper there than in Poland, rejoices Gazeta Wyborcza. All this thanks to an agreement on small cross border movement which is to be signed in Moscow on December 14 by the foreign ministers of Russia and Poland. "Russian diplomacy can...