Russia's Territory With No Road Back to Russia

Kaliningrad sits on the Baltic coast between Lithuania and Poland — two EU member states and NATO allies. The nearest Russian territory is 350 kilometers away across sovereign foreign soil. There is no road, no railway, no pipeline that goes from Kaliningrad to Russia without passing through a country that is not Russia.

The city was called Königsberg for 689 years. Founded by Teutonic Knights in 1255, it became a Prussian cultural center, the birthplace of Immanuel Kant, and one of the principal ports of the German Baltic coast. The Soviet Union captured it in April 1945 after one of the bloodiest urban sieges of the war — the battle killed approximately 42,000 soldiers. Almost the entire German population was expelled over the following two years.

In 1946, the city was renamed Kaliningrad after Mikhail Kalinin, a nominal Soviet head of state who died that year. His main contribution to history appears to be this: a city of 430,000 people now carries his name.

Since Lithuania joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in the same year, Kaliningrad's peculiar position has acquired strategic weight. Russia stations Baltic Fleet ships and, according to various Western assessments, Iskander missiles there. The territory is 200 kilometers from Warsaw. Every resupply must transit Lithuania under negotiated rail agreements — an arrangement that became politically fraught after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when Lithuania briefly restricted goods transiting to Kaliningrad by rail.