Kaliningrad question
[4][5] This 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.
[6] 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.
[9] 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.
The offer was refused by the Lithuanian Communist Party leader Antanas Sniečkus, who did not wish to alter the ethnic composition of his republic.
[10] 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.
[24][21] A few months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Lithuania began implementing European Union sanctions, blocking about 50% of the goods being imported into Kaliningrad by rail, not including food, medicine, or passenger travel.
[27] Since the early 1990s there has been a proposal for independence of the Kaliningrad Oblast from Russia and the formation of a "fourth Baltic state" by some of the local people.
[32] Linas Balsys [lt], a former deputy in the Lithuanian parliament, has argued that the status of the exclave should be discussed at international levels.
[36] The notion of a Lithuanian claim has been brushed off by Russian media, even the liberal Novaya Gazeta newspaper dismissing it as a "geopolitical fantasy".
Stanisław Żaryn, spokesperson for the Polish Minister Coordinator for Special Services, dismissed the allegation as "fake news".
[38][39] In the 1990s, organisations with ties to far-right politics in Germany began to collect money to purchase land in Kaliningrad Oblast, to enable ethnic Germans to settle there.
[40] A separate group, affiliated with convicted terrorist Manfred Roeder collected donations to build housing for ethnic Germans in the village of Olkhovatka, in Gusevsky District, east of Kaliningrad.
[41] At Yasnaya Polyana/Trakehnen, fundraising by the organization Aktion Deutsches Königsberg financed the construction of a German-language school and housing in the neighboring village of Amtshagen.
[47] Although negotiations in 2001 were instigated around a possible Russian trade deal with the EU, that would have put the exclave within Germany's economic sphere of influence,[14] the current German government has indicated no interest in recovering Kaliningrad Oblast.
[50] In July 2005, the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder declared that "in its heart [the city] will always be called Königsberg", but stated that Germany did not have any territorial claim to it.
[53] After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's claim to Kaliningrad was not contested by any government,[54] however some groups in Lithuania called for the annexation of the province, or parts of it.
