If you asked most people....they have no real understanding of Kaliningrad. So this is an introduction.
Around 1255....Königsberg was set up....originally as a settlement of 'Twangste' from some Teutonic Knights, and name for the King of Bohemia (King Ottokar II). For the next 500 years, it was a major trading port in the Baltic (along with Hamburg, Bremen, etc).
For a long time, it was a Prussian territory, and for a brief period (a year or two), it was part of a Polish kingdom situation....reverting back to Prussia.
In the spring of 1945, the Soviets captured the city. It would be renamed in 1946 after the Soviet revolutionary Mikhail Kalinin. From that point on....it was never going to be returned to Germany.
Any Germans left from the 1940s era? NO. Fewer than 2,000 German ethnic people remain today.....virtually every single German packed up and left. Who makes up the population of the city today? 87-percent Russians. Around 16,000 Ukrainians exist in the city today as well.
If you drove around the city/region today? You'd say that it resembles a historic Prussian era to a great degree.
Potential conflict? Well....the relies upon sea traffic to some degree, and open access to roads that lead out through Poland/Lithuania to Belarus. If this traffic system were jeopardized in anyway, you'd see Kaliningrad become the next Ukraine-type target.
The fact that Minsk (the capital of Belarus) is only 50 km from the Lithuanian border or 100 km from the Polish border? Any NATO movement into Poland/Lithuania would 'pepper-up' the Belarus political authorities quickly.
All of this drawing Finland and Sweden back to NATO membership talks? It's simply talk and no real enthusiasm for this. Both have enjoyed neutral positions since 1945, and have no real reason to join.
The odds of Kaliningrad being the next step? If there is any movement by Poland/Lithuania to cut off access through their regions....I'd suggest this moves up very quickly as a problem.
Funny how all those scenarios hyped up in the 1984/1985 timeframe of NATO exist today.
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