Russian enclave poses EU dilemma

Kaliningrad is home to thousands of Russian troops

By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com Europe writer

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Europe's expanding Union may soon engulf a troubled Russian enclave marooned in a post-Soviet no-man's-land in the Baltics.

If Poland and Lithuania join the EU in the near future, as seems likely, Kaliningrad, an isolated pocket of sovereign Russia that is home to Russia's Baltic fleet, could end up stranded in a European superstate.

That prospect means Europe could soon have a Northern Ireland-sized wedge of Russian land, beset by high crime, poverty, environmental abuses and corruption, effectively squatting in its back yard.

The concerns over such a scenario were underscored earlier this year when a U.S. newspaper, citing anonymous American intelligence officials, reported that Russia had deployed nuclear weapons in the enclave.

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Speaking from Moscow -- 673 miles and two national borders (Lithuania and Belarussia) away from Kaliningrad -- Russian President Vladimir Putin repudiated the claims as "rubbish."

Kaliningrad's governor, Vladimir Yegorov, called the report an attempt to hinder cooperation between the EU and Russia as Europe prepares to expand.

Yet it was deemed serious enough to be raised by Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh to her Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov, during a whirlwind visit by the former to Moscow and Kaliningrad in February.

The episode offered a glimpse of the tensions that swirl around the enclave 56 years after Kaliningrad, previously known as the East Prussian capital of Koenigsberg, was captured by the Soviets after World War II, renamed, and incorporated into the USSR.

The enclave's capital, a city of around 420,000 perched on the Baltic Sea, bears the same name as its larger oblast, or administrative region.

The Kaliningrad issue is particularly sensitive at a time when Europe is struggling to curtail a rising influx of illegal immigrants, many from Eastern Europe.

During the Cold War, the Kaliningrad region (pop. 1 million) served as a base for up to 500,000 Red Army soldiers, a front-line of defence against Western Europe.

An estimated 25,000 remain today, many in severely straitened circumstances.

Amber galore

Almost 40 percent of Kaliningrad residents lived below Russia's official poverty level in 1999 -- above the national average of 30 percent, according to Gary Peach, a freelance journalist based in the region.

The territory is notorious as a transit hub for contraband, including vodka and Kaliningrad's famed amber -- known locally as the "sunny stone". The enclave has about 90 percent of the world's amber reserves, according to the regional administration.

"The situation so far this year has barely improved," Peach wrote in an editorial last August for the St. Petersburg Times, entitled 'Kaliningrad is responsible for own demise.'

"If two years ago, a Kaliningrader took home $124 per month, now he or she must live off a ludicrous $60."

Today, the capital where Immanuel Kant was born and wrote his most famous philosophical treatises, and where Otto von Bismarck once spoke of the need to protect a boundary running from Breslau (now Wroclaw, in Poland) to Koenigsberg is trying to get back in touch with its German heritage.

One local Russian official even envisions Kaliningrad evolving into a Russian version of Hong Kong, with its own liberalised economic and trade rules.

But such visions, if ever feasible, are a long way off. Moscow and Berlin swiftly dismissed recent reports that Germany was planning to assume economic control of Kaliningrad if Russia paid off some of its Soviet-era debts to Germany.

"We recognise without any reservations that decisions on the main problems facing Kaliningrad have to be made in Russia and Kaliningrad, but we also recognise that we should help," the EU's external affairs commissioner, Christopher Patten, said recently.

Peach argued that the enclave has failed to exploit advantages that include oil reserves, warm water ports, a virtual monopoly on amber production and a potential for leisure tourism pegged to the area's illustrious East Prussian past.

Direct investment into Kaliningrad would help but, as Peach noted, bank credits accounted for only 1 percent of all investment in the region in 1999 while outsiders pumped only $18.3 million into the local economy - less than half of levels recorded the previous year.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Kaliningrad city administration (in Russian)
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Government of the Russian Federation (in Russian)
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