Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia had trapped the remaining Ukrainian soldiers in its western Kursk region, where they have held on for more than seven months in one of the most important battles of the war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia had trapped the remaining Ukrainian soldiers in its western Kursk region, where they have held on for more than seven months in one of the most important battles of the war.
Kaliningrad was German before (Königsberg) but was annexed by the Soviets after WW2 and Russified. At the time there was a land border through the Baltics. When these former Soviet states broke free, Kaliningrad remained Russian.
That raises a lot more questions
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Why? Lol
There are two "why"s: Why Kaliningrad became.part of Soviet Union and why it ended up as part of the Russia in 1991. Here the answers to both:
After WWII, Germany had to give USSR a lot of land as a form of reparations. Mostly this was done by handing parts of Germany in the east to Poland, expanding Poland to the west AND them handing the same amount of territory from Poland to USSR, essentially forcibly moving Poland westwards. This was quite an a-hole thing to do to Poland. Also, it had the weird effect that the culture and dialects of easternmost Poland suddenly moved to westernmost parts of Poland. There is a weird dialect border where if you go west past the old German border, suddenly you have eastern dialects. But, the Königsberg area had been an integral part of Germany for a long time before WWII began, so it was possible to simply annex it to USSR and that’s it. Germans were expelled from it, and the area was largely empty. Soviet Union decided to make it part of the state called RSFSR, not a new state, even though the annexed parts of easternmost Germany were not connected to the rest of RSFSR.
When parts of Poland were annexed to USSR in the process of moving Poland westwards, those parts were made part of the “Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic” (which was called “USSR” within Soviet bureaucracy, heh!)
Why the Kaliningrad area wasn’t made a part of the neighbouring “Lithuanian Socialist Soviet Republic”, is an interesting question! Probably because in Ukraine the Russification was already quite far, in Lithuania absolutely not.
In any case, in 1991 the Soviet Union fell. Each state became an independent country. Kaliningrad was a part of RSFSR, and that became the Russian Federation, so Kaliningrad ended up as a part of the Russia.