The Kaliningrad question ( or ; or ; or ; ) is a political question concerning the status of Kaliningrad Oblast as an exclave of Russia, and its isolation from the rest of the Baltic region following the 2004 enlargement of the European Union.
In Western media, the region is often discussed in relation to the deployment of missile systems, initially as a response to the deployment of missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia views the region as a vital element of its ability to project power in the Baltic region.
A fringe position also considers the return of the province to Germany from the Russian Federation, or its independence from both. The former question is mostly hypothetical, as the German government has stated that it has no claim to it and has formally renounced in international law any right to any lands east of the Oder by ratifying the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany.
History
Kaliningrad, or Königsberg, had been a part of the Teutonic Order, Duchy of Prussia (for some time a Polish vassal), Kingdom of Prussia, and the German Empire for 684 years before the Second World War. The lands of Prussia were originally inhabited by Baltic tribes, the Old Prussians, with their language becoming extinct by the 18th century.
The incorporation of the Königsberg area of East Prussia to Russia became a stated war aim of the Soviet Union at the Tehran Conference in December 1943. In 1945, at the end of World War II, the city was captured by the Soviet Union (see Battle of Königsberg). As agreed by the Allies at the Potsdam Conference, northern East Prussia, including Königsberg, was given to the USSR. Specifically, it became an exclave of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, separated from the rest of the Republic by the Lithuanian and Byelorussian SSRs. The southern parts of East Prussia were transferred to Poland. In 1946, the name of the city of Königsberg was changed to Kaliningrad.
In October 1945, only about 5,000 Soviet civilians lived in the territory. Between October 1947 and October 1948, about 100,000 Germans were forcibly moved to Germany. About 400,000 Soviet civilians arrived by 1948. Some moved voluntarily, but as the number of willing settlers proved insufficient, collective farms were given quotas of how many people they had to send to Kaliningrad. Often they sent the least socially desirable individuals, such as alcoholics or the uneducated.
In the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev suggested that the Lithuanian SSR should annex Kaliningrad Oblast. The offer was refused by the Lithuanian Communist Party leader Antanas Sniečkus, who did not wish to alter the ethnic composition of his republic. In the late Soviet era, rumors spread that the Oblast might be converted into a homeland for Soviet Germans.
Kaliningrad Oblast remained part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991, and since then has been an exclave of the Russian Federation. After the Soviet collapse, some descendants of the expellees and refugees traveled to the city to examine their roots. According to the 2010 Russian Census, 7,349 ethnic Germans live in the Oblast, making up 0.8% of the population.
In Germany, the status of Kaliningrad (Königsberg) was a mainstream political issue until the 1960s, when the shifting political discourse increasingly associated similar views with right-wing revisionism.
According to a Der Spiegel article published in 2010, in 1990 the West German government received a message from the Soviet general Geli Batenin, offering to return Kaliningrad. The offer was never seriously considered by the Bonn government, who saw reunification with the East as its priority. However, this story was later denied by Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 2001, the EU was alleged to be in talks with Russia to arrange an association agreement with the Kaliningrad Oblast, at a time when Russia could not repay £22 billion debt owed to Berlin, which may have given Germany some influence over the territory. Claims of "buying back" Kaliningrad (Königsberg) or other "secret deals" were repudiated by both sides.
Another rumor about a debt-related deal, published by the Russian weekly Nash Continent, alleged that Putin and Edmund Stoiber had agreed on the gradual return of Kaliningrad in return for waiving the country's $50 billion debt to Germany.
After annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014, some newspapers proposed that Kaliningrad Oblast should be returned to West. On 28 April 2014, The Baltic Times proposed that the West should take back Kaliningrad from Russia in exchange. This proposal was quoted by several scholary articles.