Kaliningrad: the slow retreat from Russia’s burden

In this real-world version of Risk, the threat is obvious and ominous. The adversary’s large, well-equipped garrison is deep within alliance territory and can cut off easy access to smaller allied states. With a year-round port, the naval base has the potential to command naval traffic in the area.

That is the current narrative about Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad. The 15,100 square kilometre territory on the amber-rich Baltic coast is separated from mainland Russia by Lithuania and Belarus to the east. To the north and south, it is sandwiched between NATO members Lithuania and Poland. The Kaliningrad region de facto isolates the Baltic countries and questions whether NATO’s Article 5 can ever be meaningful for them. Based at the port of Baltiysk, Russia’s Baltic Fleet constitutes a would-be ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ well within NATO’s boundaries. Recent reports have local Russian forces equipped with advanced Russian Iskander ballistic missiles. In an even more modern threat, Kaliningrad is ideal to serve as a platform for long-range drones to disrupt just about everything in northern Europe. From a strategic perspective, the entire territory can be seen as an enormous forward military base.

With Russia adopting an increasingly bellicose stance toward the Baltics and Poland, Kaliningrad would appear to be a very real challenge, not only to those neighbouring countries, but also to the very notion that post-Soviet Russia no longer poses a threat to Europe in general. Russian media does little to dissuade foreign and domestic audiences from this conclusion.

It is, however, possible to argue the opposite: that within the framework of Russia as a declining hegemon, the fortress of Kaliningrad is as much liability as asset. Russia is suffering a decades-long retreat. Like the former Roman and Ottoman empires – both large, contiguous, land-based hegemons – Russia is systematically shedding its border lands and appendages. The reasons are many: failure to develop economically beyond resource extraction, an utterly bleak demographic outlook, the geographic curse of having too much territory to manage effectively, the generic exhaustion of an aged hegemon, among manifold other challenges. In this context, the seizure of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were desperate attempts to turn back the hands of time.

This analytical framework casts Russia’s outpost on the Baltic into another example of Russian imperial overstretch and a source of future geopolitical instability. Kaliningrad’s particular history creates a nearly unique dilemma for the territory: while it makes little sense as part of a shrinking Russia, Kaliningrad makes even less sense as part of any other existing entity.

Russia’s precarious position creates challenges for western policy-makers in general, as well as for the specific choices of neighbouring countries in the Baltic and Eastern Europe. A declining hegemon poses threats, but not in the same way as an expanding one. And a zero-sum-game, balance-of-power approach in an imagined geopolitical equilibrium is equally if not more inappropriate. As Tolstoy’s General Kutuzov understood in War and Peace, history will take its course regardless of what the players sitting around the Risk board think they are doing to direct events.

Kaliningrad’s status as a frontier outpost with shifting fortunes is far from recent. Founded in the 13th century, the city of Königsberg was initially part of the Teutonic Order, came under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and finally served as the eastern reach of Prussia and, ultimately, Imperial Germany. From the 16th century on, the city’s denizens were mostly Prussian Germanic, but it was surrounded for centuries on three sides by Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian populations

Notably, from 1919 to 1939, Königsberg was also an exclave, divided from the rest of Germany by the Polish Corridor carved out of Prussia in the aftermath of the First World War. After the Second World War, the city and surrounding area were renamed for the first Soviet head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, and flew the hammer and sickle for 46 years. Kaliningrad achieved rare double exclave status in 1991 when the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the Baltic Republics and Belarus became sovereign states. It has been an administrative part of the current Russian Federation for the last 35 years.

The on-again, off-again exclave has been ruled from a distance for centuries. Initially it was subordinate to the Teutonic Order’s headquarters at Malbork (now in Poland); then to the Prussian, subsequently German, capital in Berlin; and finally, since 1945, to Moscow. That is, Kaliningrad’s rulers arrived from somewhere else, administered it from somewhere else and then departed, leaving it without a clear geopolitical identity. The surrounding territories have also shifted considerably, as ruling powers came and went. For instance, much of the southern tier of the former province of Königsberg was transferred to Poland after the Second World War as that latter country was reconstituted and moved westward.

Exclaves are inherently unstable political formations. Kaliningrad is an extreme case, having been stranded twice in the last 100 years. In neither instance has it been part of a stable geopolitical equilibrium. The Treaty of Versailles left East Prussia as unfinished business. The separation from the rest of Germany was resented by Germans and resulted in their demand for a road and rail corridor through the Polish Corridor. That demand, in turn, was among the stated causes for the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. The place simply did not fit into any redrawing of the European map. It was too far east to be geographically German, yet too historically and culturally German to be comfortably Polish or Lithuanian.

The second stranding in 1991 has created a similar instability. Initially fashioned to be a new ‘window on the West’ for the young, post-Soviet Russian Republic, Kaliningrad has instead become a flashpoint for conflict. A territory that could not find its place in the interwar order has not found its place in the post-Soviet order either. Kaliningrad’s status is not just a First World War accident or a temporary outlier for Russia, but a recurring symptom of empires rising and falling. Unlike the prior instances, there is no obvious ascendant hegemon to assert control, at least for now.

Kaliningrad’s status as neither-here-nor-there is not purely geographical. The medieval cathedral that stands on Kneiphof Island in the middle of the city offers a parallel blurred history. Left as a ruin after the Second World War, it remained a roofless, four-wall shell for decades. In 1992, a restoration foundation was established. Throughout the 1990s, the exterior was reconstructed and a roof was built. The four walls became, once again, a building.

But what kind of building? In the west towers, two new small chapels were installed: one Lutheran, one Russian Orthodox. They co-exist in the same structure. The vast Gothic nave between them belongs, effectively, to neither. Like the great Mezquita in Cordoba, the building defies narrow explanations.

The city’s population tells a similar story. The transition from Königsberg to Kaliningrad was a radical act of postwar social engineering. The 300,000 Germans who remained in the summer of 1945 were expelled over the next two years. In their place arrived Soviet settlers. The population transfer was intended to be permanent. The Soviet leadership determined that 700 years of Königsberg was to be erased, and Soviet Kaliningrad constructed in its stead.

What was created was, above all, a military garrison. Kaliningrad was designated a closed city where access was restricted not merely for foreigners but also for Soviet citizens. This closure was central to the Soviet project. The value of Kaliningrad and the surrounding territory was military: it provided an ice-free port for the Soviet Baltic Fleet, and a forward staging area for potential military conflict with the western powers in the tension-fraught Cold War.

Kaliningrad’s isolated location, history and closed status could not but influence its postwar development. For decades, the historic portion of the city remained a wartime ruin. The territory’s population consisted of recent arrivals with roots elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Little of the German history was preserved, and the Soviet present was kept under lock and key. The place existed as a military-administrative entity. When the Soviet flag was lowered in 1991, what emerged was a place that had neither a meaningful German history, nor a well-developed Russian present.

This is a crucial point that distinguishes Kaliningrad from the other peripheries at risk as the Russian hegemon fractures. The North Caucasus, with all its colourful history, has deep ethnic, linguistic and religious roots going back many centuries. The Russian Far East, for all its emptiness, has a frontier history associated with China that suggests certain natural outcomes. Crimea had a tourism industry, a wine culture and a beach economy. It can eventually return to them.

In contrast, Kaliningrad’s identity has been shaped almost entirely by its recent strategic and military function within the context of the Cold War. Its Soviet-era closure hindered the development of a tourist economy. Its post-Soviet opening coincided with chronic economic underperformance and the gradual tightening of the geopolitical noose. The amber trade – Kaliningrad sits on top of roughly 90 per cent of the world’s known amber reserves – is not highly relevant to a modern economy. Despite efforts over the past two decades by the territory’s administration to build up Kaliningrad’s cultural ‘Russianness’, the area still lacks a compelling Russian, or even Soviet identity, as opposed to just an anti-German one. It has become something of a modern, northern Potemkin Village, operating for the benefit of those sitting in the Kremlin looking at maps.

All of this had the opportunity to change starting in the 1990s, but, during the past three decades, Kaliningrad failed to reach exclave escape velocity. Now it is stuck in time and place. Plus ça change…

When the Soviet Union fell, western-oriented Russian officials, and their counterparts in the EU, saw Kaliningrad’s unique positioning as the basis for integrating Russia into the western economy. Despite becoming a ‘Special Economic Zone’ in 1996, the territory suffered a near-total economic collapse in the 1990s and failed to align meaningfully with the Baltics and Poland before the opportunity to do so disappeared over the past decade.

Still, for most of that period, exclave status did not constitute a major challenge to life in the territory. Trains and roads and boats and planes operated as normal, many passing through Lithuania without restriction. The border crossings on the Polish side operated normally. The former Soviet electrical grid continued to function across new international borders.

Since 2014 and more specifically since 2022, those lines of commerce and communication have been materially reduced. Lithuania has forbidden the transit by rail of military and dual-use goods. On the Polish side, local border traffic has fallen sharply. Kaliningrad’s electrical grid became separated from Lithuania’s and now operates as an energy island, supported by several local power plants and a floating LNG platform. In this context, the territory’s maritime ferry link to Russia from Ust-Luga, a port 900 kilometres and more than a day’s sail away, takes on heightened importance, but it is costly and highly exposed.

The demographic trajectory of the Kaliningrad region tells its own story. For much of the post-Soviet period, the area actually defied the broader Russian pattern of demographic decline: in-migration from other Russian regions, combined with relatively high birth rates, gave it a modest population stability that contrasted favourably with the depopulation plaguing Russia’s interior regions. The territory’s population of around one million comes to just over 60 inhabitants per square kilometre, a robust figure compared to most areas of the Russian periphery. But Kaliningrad’s days of demographic stability have come to an end. In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the region now faces a direct decline resulting from an aging population, falling fertility and less in-migration. Among critical populations of young people and skilled professionals, out-migration has intensified.

Kaliningrad’s vulnerability contradicts the claims of the Russian state that the territory is a stronghold, and an embodiment of Russian resolve on the Baltic. Instead, it is highly dependent on Moscow directly, and it can no longer look toward its neighbours for meaningful economic development.

Russia characterises Kaliningrad as an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’, but, from a purely military standpoint, Kaliningrad is difficult to defend. Its land access depends on the Suwałki Gap – a 65-kilometre strip of territory along the Polish-Lithuanian border that separates Kaliningrad from the Russian ‘mainland’ via Belarus. From NATO’s perspective, the Suwałki Gap poses a tremendous risk to the Baltics and is viewed as the alliance’s single greatest terrestrial vulnerability.

The dual character of the Suwałki Gap – dangerous to both Russia and NATO – encapsulates the predicament in which Kaliningrad places Moscow. The post-Soviet expansion of NATO to Eastern Europe and the Baltics put Kaliningrad inside an alliance perimeter, transforming what was once a forward salient into a vulnerable pocket. For the Russians, Kaliningrad may end up being a ‘bridge too far’ awaiting an Operation Market Garden to defend it.

The post-2022 context has only deepened this dilemma. Poland and Lithuania are among the more committed members of NATO, both in terms of defence spending and in terms of political will. Poland has been undertaking an ambitious military and defensive fortification build-up on its eastern and northern border. Lithuania is building a base to host NATO troops from Germany. More broadly, the Baltic Defence Line’s obstacles and pre-positioned forces continue to be strengthened. Just this June, the Gallant Boar exercise involved Polish, Lithuanian and French troops operating near the Suwałki Gap. At the same time, while Russia’s verbal aggression has increased in the area, its military forces, degraded by the war in Ukraine, present a less immediate conventional threat than they did in 2022. That being said, Moscow continues to demonstrate its local military capabilities, with regular exercises involving the Baltic Fleet and land forces. In all of this wargaming, Belarus remains a wildcard. As long as the Lukashenko regime maintains its alignment with Moscow, a Russian advance through Belarusian territory toward the Suwałki Gap to create a land link with Kaliningrad remains a realistic scenario.

Offshore, Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO has transformed the Baltic Sea into a ‘NATO lake’. That has altered the strategic balance. Kaliningrad’s sea lines of communication now pass through waters that NATO navies can manage far more effectively than they could a decade ago. The port at Baltiysk, once a reliable base, is now highly exposed.

There is a further, longer-term consideration, which rarely appears in tactical accounts of the region: that distant garrison settlements are expensive. Kaliningrad’s military infrastructure must be funded, supplied and maintained across supply lines that are costly and increasingly contested. As long as Russia’s overall fiscal position continues to deteriorate under the combined weight of war expenditure and structural economic weaknesses (notwithstanding the temporary fillip of high energy prices), the opportunity cost of maintaining Kaliningrad as an exclave military base increases. Hegemons usually fail from within, often due to their metaphoric but also very real fiscal ‘weight’. Read your Gibbon for Rome, or your Graves for Imperial England. A weakening Russia cannot indefinitely subsidise its Far East territories taken from China in the middle of the 19th century, its more recent Far Western spoils of war, or, as is playing out before our eyes, its claim to Crimea.

Empires in contraction hold on to the symbols of their power even after their substance has been hollowed out. Kaliningrad allows Russia the illusion that it can still project power as it did in former years, despite the economic and demographic data and even geopolitical realities telling a different story. If the broader logic of this series holds, this exclave will naturally separate from its declining and distant ruler. But what exactly will happen to it?

Unlike the Russian Far East, which will likely be reabsorbed by China either formally or de facto, or the North Caucasus states, which will go their own separate way, there is no natural path for Kaliningrad. It could be divided by Poland and Lithuania, but those are not rising hegemons and they would face the same challenge that the Soviet Union did in 1945: creating a community de novo. Germany, for sure, is not an option. Perhaps Kaliningrad remains affiliated with Russia but largely independent of it, as Greenland is to Denmark, and as other smaller territories retain relationships with their former colonial powers.

Russia’s botched invasion of Ukraine has accelerated the process of hegemonic decline, further draining it of resources, manpower, international credibility and directly subordinating it geopolitically to China. While Russia may end up controlling Crimea for years to come, if it does, it will merit an updated definition of a Pyrrhic Victory: Russia is bleeding out trying to defend an outpost modestly larger than Kaliningrad and about the same distance (by land, not the Kerch Bridge) from its core territory. The direct implications for Kaliningrad are, as yet, unclear, but the unravelling of empire is measured in decades. When and how Kaliningrad finds a home, or charts its own course, will be among the most revealing episodes of Russia’s imperial retreat.

In the meantime, western policy makers would be best served by managing responsibly a process that is well underway already, rather than assuming that they are in a position to determine the arc of history. Of course, the risk of near-term military conflict cannot be ignored in Warsaw or Vilnius. These countries and the other Baltic and NATO entities can and should prepare an energetic defence of the area should Russia ‘lash out’ as it has in Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine. But over the long term, a cautious containment would reduce the chance of an unnecessary conflict and of a wasted effort to interfere in the natural evolution of a hegemon in decline. The longer Russia views Kaliningrad as a territory that must be maintained at any cost, the greater the burden, and the faster its ultimate retreat.