Reaction To The EU's Move On Kaliningrad

Media reaction to the situation in Kaliningrad has been slow. The best I've seen so far is from CNBC:

Timothy Ash, senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, commented Tuesday that “it’s fair to say that Kaliningrad is a strategic imperative for Russia” noting that defending and sustaining it certainly is.

“Russia will react for sure, the only question is what that will be ... [and] what Russia could do militarily,” he noted.

“A land attack to drive a corridor through Lithuania would be a direct attack on Lithuania triggering NATO Article 5 defence. Putin knows this - that’s war with NATO. Can Putin afford that when he is struggling to deliver on even his now much-reduced strategic objectives in Ukraine? He would also have to launch an assault through Belarus, stretching his supply lines, and splitting his forces,” he noted.

Ash suggested that Russia could seek to use its sizeable naval assets in the Baltic Sea to enforce some kind of tit-for-tat blockade on Lithuanian trade although again that would be seen as a huge escalation by both NATO and the EU. “It would then be a fine dividing line whether that would trigger the NATO Article 5 defence,” however, he noted.

When asked on Wednesday whether Russia’s response would be exclusively diplomatic or would go further, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said “the answer is no. They will not be diplomatic, but practical.”

“As for retaliatory measures, now possible measures are being worked out in an interdepartmental format. It was stated to both Lithuania and the EU through their diplomatic missions in Moscow about the inadmissibility of such actions and the need to change the steps taken and return the situation to a legitimate course,” she said.

“If this is not done, then, of course, and this was emphasized at all levels in Moscow, retaliatory actions will be inevitable.”

Following the initial announcement, Lithuania extended its ban to include highway traffic.

Yesterday I quoted Reuters concerning EU envoy Markus Ederer's visit to the Russian Foreign Ministry, where he is reported to have asked the Russians at the meeting "to refrain from escalatory steps and rhetoric". The relative rhetorical stance here is intriguing: the EU appears to be giving Putin a parental pat on the heard, telling him to calm down. As far as anyone can tell so far, Putin has few options that woud not trigger NATO Article 5, when his own military is pinned down in Ukraine while NATO's forces aren't engaged there and free to act over Lithuania and Kaliningrad if needed.

But the current Kaliningrad crisis is just a follow-on to an earlier Russian srategic loss. According to CNN:

In 2002, the EU and Moscow reached an agreement on travel between Russia and Kaliningrad, ahead of Poland and Lithuania joining the European Union in 2004. When those countries joined, the exclave became surrounded on three sides by EU territory. Russia says the 2002 agreement has now been violated.

In other words, since 2002, there's been an uneasy equilibrium on the Baltic that effectively finessed a Russian strategic loss with the entry of Poland and Lithuania to the EU and NATO. (Poland joined NATO in 1999; Lithuania in 2004.) The botched Russian invasion of Ukraine, by revealing Russian military weakness and proccupying Russia there, shifted this equilibrium out of balance and resumes the long-term trend of Russian strategic decline.

But an interim result will leave Russian satellite Belarus surrounded on three sides by Poland, Lithuania, and a west-facing Ukraine, whose membership in the EU and de facto NATO membership are inevitable. The problem for Putin is this domino, as well as others, is still to fall.