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Comment by addaon | Hacker News Reader

I think this is why it's so important to figure out a path to returning Königsberg to western control before the war runs its course. If we assume that Russia is basically disassembled and parted out, it's looking increasingly certain that China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of those parts. For the most part this seems inevitable at this point, but there still seems to be a path to keep Königsberg as a western region; and an optimistic can imagine keeping St. Petersburg as well, but I don't see a path for forward action on that before Russia's collapse, and I don't really see how the west can act faster than China once the collapse begins.

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One should ask what do the people of Königsberg / Kaliningrad want to be.

>One should ask what do the people of Königsberg / Kaliningrad want to be.

Something tells me that given a choice between the EU and Russia (under Chinese boot, at that), we'll see number in favor of EU that even Putin didn't dream of for himself.

Kaliningrad is entirely ethnically Russian. Every other group has been forced out. No one wants Kaliningrad for that reason.

>Kaliningrad is entirely ethnically Russian. Every other group has been forced out. No one wants Kaliningrad for that reason.

....because we all know that all those Russians would rather be somewhere else.

But absorbing them is a cost that the EU would absolutely bear if there weren't additional costs to annexing pieces of a nuclear power.

No neighbouring country would want to add a population centre with a million Russians to its polity because then you'd have a million Russians agitating for closer ties to Russia, if not actively facilitating or planning a coup.

Lithuania, to the north, has a population of just under 3,000,000, of whom Russians are 5%. Take Kaliningrad and suddenly they would be 30% Russian.

Poland is 37,000,000, so Russians would only be around 3%, but that's enough to cause a lot of trouble, and they gain nothing they don't already have besides a ready-made fifth column.

As a Russian, I’d love to tell you that there’s hope, but unfortunately I agree. Integration is not as simple as “you’re in the EU now”, it will take time.

Frankly, the best way to approach it is probably leaving Königsberg / Kaliningrad be as its own state [1] for a bit, and do whatever EU integration programs do. If it works out, you’ll get a million Königsbergers who are a bit nostalgic about Russia but want nothing to do with it otherwise.

One final thing I’d like to note is that the “alien passport” approach taken by the Baltic states mostly, well, alienates the titular nation and Russians right now. If the path to integration was more clear and Russians born and raised in, say, Latvia didn’t feel like second-hand citizens, they wouldn’t really want to have closer ties with Russia either.

[1]: disclaimer for the эшник reading this: this is in a hypothetical scenario where Kaliningrad does get separated from Russia as a result of the “special military operation”. please don’t hurt my family

>No neighbouring country would want to add a population centre with a million Russians to its polity because then you'd have a million Russians agitating for closer ties to Russia, if not actively facilitating or planning a coup.

As the other commenter said, Kaliningrad / Konigsberg could be an autonomous area / city state (of which the EU has a-plenty already), with some form of Euro-integration (associate/candidate membership, etc) which allows for a gradual integration process.

Kosovo shows the formal path for that.

Hopefully, not the historical one.

(After all, if there's anything Russia taught the world, it's the power of Little Green Men)

Some of them are KGB, FSB and other shady government types with even more shady backgrounds and there’s no way to vet them.

Yes, ethnic cleansing and forced deportation are a very good way to make sure that later votes vote in your direction.

Those people, their parents and grandparents were mostly brought there precisely because what they want to be.

China currently cares most about the East till the natural resources.

The East because they are blockaded at sea currently, if they would invade Taiwan.

And they already have huge economical leverage there.

Russia is basically falling apart. But in a dictatorship, stuff like that is only seen sudden, when it collapses.

Putin seems to be making many of the mistakes of pre 1991.

> China currently cares most about the East till the natural resources

The simplest solution would be to reboot the Siberian Republic [1] as a Chinese suzerainty. Ideally after Putin dies as part of a deal to the new ascender. Maybe together with giving them personal co-ownership in some major ventures there.

> East because they are blockaded at sea currently, if they would invade Taiwan

Siberia and Outer Mongolia remain closer and thus cheaper and more-secure sources than anything coming in over ocean, which in essence means from Australia, South America or Africa.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Republic_(1918)

There's an opening through the Kuril Islands.

Russia is recently bluffing a bit there, Putin had a visit for the first time recently, I think it's China related:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute

China is already owning the area with investments and a lot of workers/projects there are already Chinese. Seems like Russia already lost control ( unofficially)

Good Luck annexing Kaliningrad back, it may already be filled with nuclear warheads pointed at its neighbors

>Good Luck annexing Kaliningrad back, it may already be filled with nuclear warheads pointed at its neighbors

Helped Ukraine much, did it?

Russia wants to keep Kaliningrad mainly because they want to keep on being able to access the world ocean from St Petersburg (and the nearby port of Ust-Luga) and Kaliningrad helps with that.

(Controlling Denmark would help tremendously, too, which is why Moscow once asked Berlin for Denmark during or right before WWII as a response to Berlin's asking Moscow for its consent for Berlin to take control of Romania or some such.)

And yes, I believe that continuing to be able to access the world ocean from St Petersburg has helped Russia in its war with Ukraine.

BTW, "China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of [Russia]" strikes me as so unlikely as to not be worth thinking about.

> BTW, "China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of [Russia]" strikes me as so unlikely as to not be worth thinking about.

Who does, then? There doesn't seem to be any internal power in position to gracefully take power when Putin inevitably proves mortal; whatever the power scramble looks like, it's going to take external funding (and thus external obligations) to secure it, which leaves whoever's providing that funding in effective control. And even if the US and/or Europe decide to try to buy one horse, China clearly is willing and able to buy a whole lot of them; just statistically they probably end up with it, no?

Russians decided that the tsar would be overthrown in 1917, that the Bolsheviks would take power, that Lenin would be replace by Stalin, Krushchev, . . . , Yeltsin, Putin.

The US, Britain, France and Japan actually invaded Russia (circa 1918) to try to influence the outcome of a transition of power without success.

None of the transitions I described depended on which leader or which faction had funding from outside Russia. I expect Russian self-determination to continue. Nationalism is a very potent force in most countries, Russians seem more nationalistic than average, and the Russian ethnicity is firm in control of the country, which increases stability and nationalism.

Just because Russia has declined in influence relative to the great powers doesn't mean it will break up or stop exercising self-determination.

> I expect Russian self-determination to continue.

I’d say that this is how every country should be. Unfortunately, there is no self-determination in Russia. Yeah, most people do support Putin, though it’s not as overwhelming as they would like you to believe, so they rig the elections. The problem is there’s no real alternative. There like four parties, only one of which does something other than show up and vote for whatever bullshit new law they’re trying to pass, and they’ve invented some new ones recently, which I believe are also all puppets with different branding.

There is also nationalism, of course, feeded by a metric shit ton of propaganda. Will it help keep Russia from breaking up? I don’t know. As a Russian, it’s not up to me, and honestly, I don’t really care about the borders at all. My nationalism does not extend to the state terrorizing my people.

IMO there is alternative, just repressed for now by extreme state apparatus measures to remove it from the public eye. I see it as a situation similar to Eastern European red bloc countries right before 1989, where communists have seemingly successfully repressed all the dissent, until the Velvet Revolution brought up many different parties that took power.

By "self-determination", I didn't mean democracy. I meant Putin's successor will be determined mostly by Russians, not Chinese people, Americans or Central or Western Europeans.

What I mean is that in post-USSR collapse, Ukraine ended up with a lot of warheads pointing into different directions.

So did Russia, of course.

It did not help Ukraine with independence (and the warheads were gone very fast), nor did it help Russia retain control of Ukraine.

So I'd say in the hypothetical of Russia falling apart into chunks, Kaliningrad having the nukes won't be a decisive factor in where Kaliningrad ends up.

And I hope that if it doesn't end up as a part of what's left of Russia, whoever gets it won't send the nukes back like Ukraine did.

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