Why Does Russia Own This Old Piece of Germany?

as the biggest country in the world russia is a pretty hard place to miss on a map stretching from the baltic sea in the west to the pacific ocean in the east the contiguous territory of the russian federation is nearly the same size as south america it's so huge that it borders countries as far apart as norway and north korea and spans across 11 different time zones but because the main part of the country is so huge and obvious to pinpoint there's a much smaller part of it further to the west in europe that's a lot easier for many of us to overlook or miss and it's right here this is the kaliningrad oblastor province a disconnected exclave of the russian federation separated by more than 370 kilometers as the crow flies from the rest of the country by the independent states of lithuania latvia and belarus nearly a million russians live here isolated from the rest of the country surrounded by the eu and native states of poland and lithuania to the south east and north and the baltic sea to the west in order to travel between kaliningrad and the mainland the russians who live here must either pass through at least two other countries when traveling by land or take a ferry or plane across the baltic sea and the gulf of finland towards saint petersburg this ultimately means that effectively the kaliningrad oblast is a russian outpost in the middle of the european union in nato who have each been keeping a much closer eye on it ever since 2014 and especially ever since february of this year when the russians invaded ukraine as the only year-round ice-free port that the russians control on the baltic sea the city of kaliningrad that the overall oblast takes its name from is the headquarters of the russian baltic fleet and is therefore home to substantial amounts of russian naval and air power on top of that beginning in 2015 after their first invasion and annexation of crimea from ukraine in the year before and the start of heavy western sanctions the russians began deploying their iskander m ballistic missile systems with a neoblast as well capable of striking major european capitals like warsaw berlin copenhagen and stockholm with nuclear armed missiles and perhaps most alarming of all to the perspective of nato and the european union is not necessarily the kaliningrad oblast itself but the narrow 65 kilometer wide gap between it and belarus a staunch russian ally an accomplice in russia's current ongoing invasion of ukraine these 65 kilometers of mostly flat and rural countryside is the only connection by land that the three baltic states nato and the european union's most exposed members to russia have with the rest of the alliance if nato ever finds itself in a hot conflict with russia in the future this vulnerability gives the russian military the potential ability to rapidly advance across the gap from both kaliningrad and belarus lock down a defensive position across the border with poland and fully isolate the three baltic states from the rest of the alliance leaving them largely to fend for themselves against further russian attacks from behind the main front line in europe while simultaneously the baltic fleet and iskander-m missile batteries based in kaliningrad can serve to deny much of the baltic sea to any nato re-supplies to them by ship but how did this little chunk of land hundreds of kilometers deep into europe even end up as being russian in the first place how did kaliningrad become well kaliningrad after all for nearly all of the 684 years of history before the city annie oblast became russian it was largely german and better known as konigsberg and east prussia the city was founded by the teutonic knights in the mid 13th century and eventually served as the capital city of prussia for centuries until 1701 when their capital was transferred westwards to berlin though konigsberg itself remained the easternmost major city of germany for two and a half more centuries afterwards the russians actually briefly annexed koenigsberg in 1758 but that only lasted for around four years until 1762 before they gave it back to prussia where it remained a major german city for the next 183 years until the closing days of world war ii by august of 1944 the nazis were in full retreat across europe and the soviet red army had just reached the frontiers of german east prussia at the time there were well over 2.6 million german civilians living within the area and the nazi government began organizing their full-scale evacuation to the west in order to escape from the rapidly advancing soviets but as time went on this evacuation gradually transformed into more of a panicked and chaotic flight as around 2 million of those germans mostly desperately fled towards the west after enormous bombing campaigns carried out by the british bomber command and overwhelming artillery shelling from the soviet red army the formerly beautiful city of konigsberg itself was almost completely destroyed and reduced to rubble by the fighting by the time the soviets fully occupied it in april of 1945. weeks before the end of the war in europe after the war's conclusion germany's new easternmost border was set by the victorious allies along the oder and nisa rivers and all pre-war german territory to the east of these rivers were ceded to either poland or the soviet union itself this included all of east prussia which had been an exclave of germany before the war separated from the rest of the country by the polish corridor in the free city of danzig east prussia itself was divided up between poland and the south and the soviet union in the north with the northernmost section going to the lithuanian soviet republic and the central most part including the city of konigsberg itself going to the russian soviet republic konigsberg was then renamed to kaliningrad after the bolshevik revolutionary mikhail kalinin the remaining 600 000 or so ethnic germans who didn't already flee were forcefully deported into east germany and the kaliningrad region was massively repopulated with ethnic russians and ukrainians over the next several years by 1950 the kaliningrad oblast was an island of the russian soviet republic within the greater soviet union separated by the belarusian lithuanian and latvian soviet republics but since they were all parts of the same country at the time this ultimately mattered very little it may have made more sense from an internal administration standpoint to have given kaliningrad to the lithuanian soviet republic next door but stalin chose to keep it as an internal exclave of russia for several probable reasons first the three baltic states themselves had only recently become a part of the soviet union by force after they were invaded and subjugated by the red army back in 1940 keeping kaliningrad within the russian soviet republic served to further isolate lithuania and the other baltics from the west and moreover the ice-free port that the city of kaliningrad now provided to the soviet navy was considered far too strategically valuable to be placed into the hands of the potentially disloyal lithuanians interestingly after stalin died his successor nikita khrushchev actually did offer the lithuanians a full transfer of the entire kaliningradoblast over to their administration but with perhaps decades of foresight lithuania's first secretary of the time declined the offer out of the concern that accepting would have suddenly added around one million ethnic russians to his republic and make lithuania about one-third russian since khrushchev also internally transferred crimea from russia to ukraine around the same time and we all know how that's gone ever since this decision taken by the lithuanians was probably a profoundly wise one throughout the decades of the cold war the soviets transformed kaliningrad into a hugely important soviet naval facility and blocked the entire city off to foreigners the city was rebuilt from the rubble into essentially a copy and paste soviet model city which is how you end up with fascinating pre and post-war photos of the same areas like this or this and this by the time the cold war was coming to a close in 1990 east and west germany were reunifying and the soviet union was collapsing but kaliningrad remained a part of the newly formed russian federation which simply inherited all of the land of the former russian soviet republic that included kaliningrad decades later after the events in 2010 the german magazine der spiegel published a report that claimed the soviets had allegedly offered kaliningrad back to the germans in 1990 as the country was actively reunifying though this has been denied by the soviet leader of the time mikhail gorbachev even if the offer were actually to have been made it's clear that the germans refused it for a variety of reasons first at the same time the offer was allegedly made west germany was actively negotiating the terms of german reunification with the former allies of world war ii many of whom were extremely skeptical of germany's real intentions margaret thatcher the british prime minister of the era was opposed to the whole idea full stop she even began carrying a map of germany's 1937 era pre-war borders in her handbag to show others what she referred to as the german problem thatcher was concerned that if west and east germany reunified it would only be a matter of time before they began going further and reclaiming germany's former lost territories to the east of the oder and nisa rivers they were annexed by poland and the soviet union following the end of the second world war and she wasn't alone the french president of the time francois mitron held very similar concerns as well and both heads of state appealed directly to the soviet leader gorbachev to do what he could to stop the reunification from taking place in order to calm down the british and the french and gain their trust and support germany signed a treaty that defined a united germany as being the territory of west germany east germany and berlin alone without the legal right to make any further outside claims germany signed a treaty with poland that firmly defined the odernisa boundary as the easternmost limit of the german state and renounced all claims and titles to lands that once belonged to germany any further east even further germany amended its own basic law so that it would be legally prohibited from ever accepting any application or offer from an outside entity to join the country and besides koenigsberg and east prussia no longer even existed in the sense of being remotely german if germany accepted kaliningrad in 1990 they would have had the same big problem as the lithuanians who were offered it back in the 1950s what to do with those one million russians who now lived there and called it home therefore if the soviets really did just offer germany back konigsberg during this era had they accepted it would have likely triggered catastrophic alarm bells in london and paris and made them strongly antagonistic towards berlin and germany's future integration in europe which is probably why the russians may have actually offered it to destabilize western european politics but regardless germany either refused or the offer was never made and kaliningrad has remained russian ever since although it has been getting increasingly more and more isolated from the rest of russia suddenly in 1991 when the soviet union collapsed kaliningrad became a fully separated exclave of russia hundreds of kilometers away from the mainland in order to overcome this isolation the russians transformed the exclave into what they called a special economic zone enabling the region to conduct trade free of any taxes or duties the plan was to transform kaliningrad russia's closest major city to the economies of europe into a baltic version of hong kong but unfortunately that's not really how things ended up going poland joined nato in 1999 and then poland and lithuania each joined the european union and nato by 2004 leaving the kaliningrad special economic zone deep within the west after russia's invasion of ukraine and annexation of crimea back in 2014 the west imposed their first round of economic sanctions upon moscow and all of a sudden kaliningrad's greatest strength its proximity to europe became its biggest weakness as well most of kaliningrad's tax benefits have since dried up today the average wage for the russians living within kaliningrad is only around 400 a month significantly beneath the russian average of nearly fifteen hundred dollars a month the kaliningrad oblast doesn't even represent a full one percent of russia's total nominal gdp and so the financial cost to russia for losing it would be overall pretty minimal but as mentioned at the beginning of this video russia cares about kaliningrad less because of money in history and more because of the geographic leverage and flexibility that it provides to the russian armed forces in dealing with the west during any potential conflict it can serve the russian mainland as an early warning station from western-based attacks while simultaneously acting as a forward air defense base of operations for russian jets advancing from the mainland russia's only year-round ice-free ports on the baltic sea within the oblast at kaliningrad and baltisque serve as the headquarters of the baltic fleet and give the russians the ability to operate on a sea that is increasingly becoming a nato lake with the highly likely admission of both sweden and finland into the nato alliance coming shortly the entire baltic sea coastline will be dominated by nato other than russia's own small outlets around st petersburg russia's second biggest city and kaliningrad which blesses the russians with the ability to conduct naval maneuvers in both the gulf of finland and the central baltics simultaneously while keeping the coastlines of lithuania latvia estonia finland and much of sweden relatively contained and finally when factoring in the friendliness of belarus to the kremlin kaliningrad also grants the russian army the flexibility to select a pincer attack across the narrow suvalky corridor across poland and lithuania that if successful would completely isolate the three nato baltic states from the rest of the alliance should the unthinkable ever happen in the future whatever one calls it the city of kaliningrad or konigsberg has had a long tragic and fascinating history full of ups and downs to me one of the more fascinating smaller stories within this overall epic was that of the seven bridges of konigsberg one of the most famous problems ever proposed in the history of mathematics during the 18th century a man named len hart oiler observed that in the center of the city konigsberg was set on both sides of the prego river and included two large islands all of which were connected by seven bridges euler's problem was simple create a walk throughout the city by crossing each of these seven bridges once and only once you can try and solve the problem yourself by pausing the video and tracing a walk in your mind but this is how euler solved it he showed that the choice of route inside of each landmass is irrelevant and that the only important feature of a route was the sequence of bridges that were crossed thus he restructured the problem through a more abstract lens by eliminating all of the features on the map except for the list of land masses and the bridges connecting them just like this image in a more modern lens one would replace each landmass with an even more abstract vertex or node and each bridge with an abstract connection or edge by visualizing the problem more simply in these kinds of abstract terms euler was able to prove that his problem simply had no solution it was impossible to create a walk throughout the city of konigsberg by only crossing each of the seven bridges once and only once solving interesting problems exactly like this one by breaking them down into simpler more bite-sized chunks is the biggest key to understanding math and science and today's sponsor brilliant does a great job of breaking down this problem in an interactive way brilliant is an interactive stem learning platform that helps you learn fascinating concepts by working through them in a visual hands-on way and you can get started right now on any number of courses for more basic concepts like the probability of casino games to cutting-edge fields like astrophysics neural networks or plenty of others my absolute favorite thing about brilliant is that regardless of which subject it is you choose to learn about you get to learn it at your own pace you can learn on the go with our mobile app and most importantly of all you get to enjoy the rewarding process and if you ever get stuck on a particular question brilliant never punishes you or impedes your progress instead they'll give you an in-depth explanation to guide you 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Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 5,226,752

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know

Id: b2f9Zf-MDtU

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022