Russian Kaliningrad Loses Electricity

Former German Konigsberg is a living reminder of Moscow's illegal annexations and Western geopolitical compromises.

On Sunday, June 15, the Ukrainian military intelligence reported that the Ukraine-directed saboteurs destroyed the power transformation unit at the largest substation in the city of Kaliningrad, Russia, cutting off power for local arms factories and the Russian Navy base. The estimated damage is $5 million.

The map of the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, situated between Poland and Lithuania, two NATO member states.

HISTORY INSIGHT: Before 1945, this city in the southeastern part of the Baltic Sea held the name Königsberg and belonged to Germany. The Potsdam Agreement of 1945 placed it provisionally under Soviet administration.

But the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin broke the Potsdam Agreement with the western allies, who saved his Communist country from a military defeat, and illegally annexed this city. The Germans were expelled, and it was renamed in favor of Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, a friend of Stalin and titular head of state of the Soviet Union (with no real power). He died of cancer in 1946.

In 45 years, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunited Germany renounced all claims to the city of Königsberg, caving to Mikhail Gorbachev’s request during the negotiations of the Final Settlement treaty of September 1990. This document is also known as the 2+4 Agreement (Zwei-plus-Vier-Vertrag), which was signed by West Germany and East Germany, as well as the four World War II victors: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union.

In fact, this treaty amended the Potsdam Agreement in favor of Moscow, allowing the annexation of this German city. At the same time, other WWII allies renounced their post-war rights on all German lands.

James Baker, the U.S. Secretary of State in the Republican George H.W. Bush administration, negotiated this compromise. Moscow also claims that Mr. Baker verbally promised Mr. Gorbachev “no expansion of NATO eastward.” But the alliance expanded eastward anyway, accepting the former Soviet colonies of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as the seven Eastern European countries that comprised the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, along with the once-neutral countries of Finland and Sweden.

In a twist of irony, in a mere year, after the United States gave away Konigsberg to Moscow, the Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared from the map. Theoretically, Washington could wait just a couple more years and negotiate the return of the city to Germany with the President of the newly emerged Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin. However, the pressure of the need for the rapid reunification of Germany, which included the expulsion of Soviet troops from East Germany and all of Eastern Europe—a more significant historical opportunity—was greater.

COMMENT: The annexation of neighboring lands, when they are not adequately defended, and then pressuring the West until it sooner or later formally acknowledges the illegal land grab, is a traditional, brutal way for Moscow to conduct geopolitics.

Similarly to Königsberg, Stalin annexed the Japanese Kuril Islands, promptly occupying the volcanic archipelago situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk after Japan capitulated to the United States as a result of two nuclear strikes in 1945.

The present head of the Moscow federal state, Vladimir Putin, made the same trick with the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 when Ukraine was completely militarily weakened by his “friendly government” of Viktor Yanukovych. Since 2022, Putin has invaded and annexed four more regions of Ukraine.

And now, during the ongoing peace negotiations with the Ukrainian government and US President Donald Trump, Putin is demanding that Ukraine and the United States legitimize his land grabs. He hopes that Washington will relinquish those faraway lands that are supposedly too costly for the United States to continue defending, similarly to how it once did with the “undefendable” city of Konigsberg in the early 90s.

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