This is the script for my video posted on September 9, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
The exclave of Kaliningrad is not only disconnected from the rest of Russia, it’s also wedged between two NATO countries, making it an obvious target during a potential war. So how does Kaliningrad survive without a connection to the rest of Russia, and just how vulnerable is it?
Kaliningrad wasn’t always known by that name, because it wasn’t always Russian. The city of Konigsberg was founded in 1255 CE by the Teutonic Order, the Catholic military society best known for its Northern Crusades against the pagan peoples of the Baltic.
Konigsberg became the capital of the Duchy of Prussia when it was created in 1525 as a Polish fiefdom, and Konigsberg stayed the capital when the region was reorganized as the province of East Prussia in 1773.
See, Prussia was a major European power until it folded into a unified Germany in 1871, and after Germany's defeat in WWI it became a democratic state within the Weimar Republic, still making up about 60% of German territory.
The Treaty of Versailles created a corridor for Poland to access the Baltic Sea, which separated East Prussia from the German Reich and made it a German exclave with the semi-autonomous Free City of Danzig, now known as Gdansk, separating them.
Germans resented the customs and passport controls required for them to reach East Prussia, and Poland resisted demands for road and rail connections. In 1939 Germany demanded that Danzig and extraterritorial routes be handed over, and Poland’s refusal led Danzig to become the starting point for the second World War.
Konigsberg was bombed and burned late in the war, destroying the historic core of the city. Then in 1945, the Soviets began their offensive against East Prussia, and ultimately over 90% of the city was destroyed and tens of thousands of German troops were killed. The region evacuated about 2m civilians, and up to 100k civilians died.
Amid the Soviet occupation, the Potsdam Conference agreed in principle to their proposal to transfer Konigsberg and the area around it, meaning northern East Prussia, to Soviet control, subject to the terms of a final peace settlement, while the southern half would go to Poland.
But Germany was obviously divided between East and West, and a peace agreement did not come for several decades. In the meantime, the Soviets transformed the ruined territory of East Prussia and the city of Konigsberg into a heavily militarized and sealed off Soviet bastion. The remaining German population was expelled or fled, and Soviet citizens largely filled their place.
The 1990 Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany settled the German borders and had it renounce all territorial claims, but the settlement never explicitly named the former East Prussia, which by then had long been settled by Soviets and known as Kaliningrad.
And with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Federation became its legal successor, and Lithuania’s independence cut Kaliningrad off to make the region a Russian exclave.
Today Kaliningrad Oblast covers about 15000 square kilometers and has about a million people. It borders Lithuania to the north and east and Poland to the south, and though it’s hundreds of kilometers from the Russian mainland, it is only separated from Belarus by the Suwalki Gap, a 65km or 40-mile stretch of the Polish-Lithuanian border.
This is among NATO’s most critical borders due to concerns that Russian forces could close the gap to connect Kaliningrad to mainland Russia via Belarus, cutting off the Baltic States from the rest of NATO in the process. But its importance is sometimes overblown in the sense that Kaliningrad is itself heavily exposed as an alternative NATO route, closing the gap requires invading Poland or Lithuania directly and bringing all of NATO into conflict, and Poland and Lithuania are heavily fortifying the area.
Meanwhile, when Lithuania joined the EU and the Schengen Area, the EU-Russia Summit in 2002 produced new agreements for road and rail transit, allowing people to obtain a special document to travel between mainland Russia and Kaliningrad via Lithuania. Before 2022, about 1.5m people used this method every year, mostly by train.
But the full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed everything. In June 2022, Lithuania halted rail transit of EU-sanctioned goods to Kaliningrad, starting with steel and ferrous metals before expanding to cement, alcohol, timber, and luxury goods, which reportedly covered 40-50% of Kaliningrad’s exports and imports through Lithuania.
Russia threatened retaliation and demanded reversal, and about a month later the European Commission clarified that transit of sanctioned goods by rail is permitted because the sanctions regulation only prohibits road transit. Today the rail corridor functions, but the transit ceiling for sanctioned goods has shrunk dramatically, and the total rail transit through Lithuania has fallen severely since 2021.
The only alternatives are sea and air links. But ship capacity was badly overstretched after 2022 and has only partly caught up. It's also slow and highly vulnerable to any kind of conflict.
Lithuania also closed its airspace to Russian aircraft in February 2022. Civilian flights now route through international airspace over the Baltic, and NATO forces routinely escort Russian military flights transiting to and from Kaliningrad, which often fly with their transponders off and without a flight plan.
On the energy side of things, Kaliningrad was historically embedded in the synchronous electrical power ring for BRELL, which stands for Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Even with the fall of the Soviet Union, that survived for decades. But Russia preemptively built capacity before the invasion for Kaliningrad to supply its own electricity. It built three gas-fired power plants and a new coal-fired plant as well as an offshore regasification unit to convert LNG back into useable fuel.
This gave the Russian state energy firm Gazprom the option to cut off the pipeline that reaches Kaliningrad through Belarus and Lithuania. But it hasn’t taken this option. Pipeline gas is still the main supply, with the floating terminal held in reserve.
In February 2025, the Baltics finally desynchronized from BRELL and joined the continental European grid the next day via Poland, making Kaliningrad a permanent electrical island, though one that still depends on gas arriving through Lithuania.
Kaliningrad is obviously incredibly vulnerable, which is why Russia has consolidated army and naval forces there. They operate early warning radar, S-400 air defenses, short-range ballistic missiles, and the electronic warfare units known to jam and spoof GPS across the Baltic region. But in reality none of this is impenetrable. Analysts increasingly think these bubbles are smaller and more brittle than Russia wants you to believe, though suppressing them would still be a costly effort for NATO.
Kaliningrad is also suspected to host tactical nuclear weapons that could be used to deter NATO in a contingency. There's no definitive proof of their presence, but there is a lot of evidence. Russia's updated nuclear doctrine allows for nuclear use against conventional attacks that threaten its territorial integrity, and whether losing Kaliningrad would clear that bar is exactly the ambiguity that makes the territory useful.
This is necessary because since the war in Ukraine began, Russia has been forced to gut the forces placed in Kaliningrad, reportedly removing as much as 80% of its ground troops, though naval and aviation units have remained more or less intact. Russia simply lacks the resources to staff Kaliningrad as they would probably like, despite Sweden and Finland now being part of NATO and making the entire Baltic a highly unfriendly area for Russia.
Kaliningrad is in many ways a hostage to NATO more than it is a Russian weapon. Russia is incredibly sensitive to losing territory. But after years of war in Ukraine, realistically Kaliningrad would not stand a chance against NATO forces or even additional limitations on rail, sea, and air transit. Russia is well aware that its safest option is to play things quiet for a while, and to lean on nuclear weapons as a last resort.
Keep reading
- Is Russia weaponizing Russians in the Baltics?
- Why couldn’t Ukraine keep its nuclear weapons?
- Why is Iceland a NATO member if it lacks a military?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.