EU and NATO member Lithuania has announced that they’re applying international sanctions to rail traffic that crosses their territory from Russia (via Belarus) to the Russian enclave exclave of Kaliningrad.
Lithuania has begun a ban on the rail transit of goods subject to European Union sanctions to the Russian far-western exclave of Kaliningrad, transport authorities in the Baltic nation said on June 18.
The EU sanctions list includes coal, metals, construction materials, and advanced technology.
Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian oblast, said the ban would cover around 50 percent of the items that Kaliningrad imports.
Alikhanov said the region, which has an ice-free port on the Baltic Sea, will call on Russian federal authorities to take tit-for-tat measures against the EU country for imposing the ban. He said he would also seek to have more goods sent by ship to the oblast.
The cargo unit of Lithuania’s state railways service set out details of the ban in a letter to clients following “clarification” from the European Commission on the mechanism for applying the sanctions.
Previously, Lithuanian Deputy Foreign Minister Mantas Adomenas said the ministry was waiting for “clarification from the European Commission on applying European sanctions to Kaliningrad cargo transit.”
The commission stated that sanctioned goods and cargo should still be prohibited even if they travel from one part of Russia to another but through EU territory.
The European Union, United States, and others have set strict sanctions on Moscow for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
As to why Russia ended up with a formerly German enclave between Poland and Lithuania, History Matters provides a handy guide:
The importance to Kaliningrad is that it’s Russia’s only ice-free port on the Baltic Sea and home to the Russian Baltic fleet at Baltiysk.
Anyone who remembers the history of the Cold War knows that there’s no love lost between Lithuanians and Russia.
Peter Zeihan (him again) explains why this is such a big problem for Russia. “Russia is already shitting solid gold kittens over this…in any sort of meaningful conflict between Russia and NATO, Kaliningrad would probably fall in a matter of days if not hours.” So Russia is likely to put in more nuclear missiles.
Plus a bit on Europe abandoning their green delusions to embrace coal, and how German accounting chicanery artificially inflates the amount of renewable energy they’re actually generating and ignore a lot of coal generation for official figures.
Interesting times…
Tags: Anton Alikhanov, EU, Foreign Policy, Lithuania, Military, NATO, nuclear weapons, Peter Zeihan, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, sanctions, video
We’ll have to see what actually eventuates. I have no idea what the hell is really going on, but…
First point would be that I really, really doubt that Russia has the forces necessary to do anything in the Suwalki Corridor. If they did, those forces would be in Ukraine, trying to force a victory there.
Second point would be, I seriously doubt that Lithuania did this unilaterally. The fact that they’ve acted tells us that they’re confident that the Russians cannot or will not act, and that they have backing from others to prevent them from acting effectively. Or, at least, think that they do…
Third point is that the Russians brought this on, themselves: Without them having been playing games in the Baltic to try and intimidate Denmark (see the provocations of last week, intruding into Danish territorial waters…), I suspect this would not have happened.
Fourthly, this definitely represents an escalation. If nothing else, it’s going to put a blatant sign on the fact that the Russians are essentially impotent to do anything about it, and that Kaliningrad is vulnerable to blockade and starvation. If the Lithuanians wanted to make a point, they’d start blowing up the Russian broad-gauge rail lines running across Lithuania to Kaliningrad.
That’s something I would have to check, though… I vaguely remember a rail enthusiast telling me that there were only two lines between Kaliningrad and Russia that were the same gauge as Russian rail; everything else is European gauge… I am not even sure of where the hell to begin looking for that, TBH.
I’m sure they consulted with NATO and the EU (and probably NATO-aspirants Sweden and Finland).
You never know. Stranger things have happened… Might be down to one singular customs guy with a bee under his bonnet.
Remember that the Wall came down when it did solely because one East German official misspoke under stress. You can’t discount the possibility of Finagle and Murphy having intervened…
Russia is learning a lesson China might learn someday soon – exclaves can be liabilities as well as assets.
Well, I guess they’ve found a way around the banking sanctions…
Looking back on it, I think it was a mistake not to have demanded a full accounting and criminal proceedings for all concerned, when the Soviet Union collapsed. No idea how the hell that could have been accomplished, but I think that the fact that there has never been a full accounting of all the crimes and peculations of the Communists in power over the Soviet Union was a huge mistake. Too much was left unexamined, too much was glossed over.
The Russian people are damaged goods, in a lot of fundamental ways. They should be pitied, but at the same time, held accountable for their actions and what their acquiescence to the brutality of their leaders has meant to others. Czar Nicholas II either allowed or directed his intelligence agency to meddle in Serbian affairs, which led directly to the assassination of the heir to another throne in Europe. That act, or inattention, led directly to what happened to his family. Something I see as darkly karmic. Similarly, the crap that the Soviets got up to enabled the rise of Hitler, which also turned in their hand to cut more deeply inside the Soviet Union than anywhere else.
And, ironically? The Russian people are convinced that they are the victims in all of this, ignoring the very real responsibility they and their leaders have for causing all that misery. WWI would have played out very differently, had someone not lit that match in Sarajevo; WWII would have been a very different war, had Stalin not shipped all those resources to Hitler’s Germany when he did. I’ve seen speculation that the 1940 campaign that took down France would have been logistically impossible, without Soviet support. Not to mention, all the political aid that Hitler got in the French government, at the behest of the COMINTERN…
To add to the comments Kirk made, the Red Army rolling all the way to Berlin would not have been possible without vast numbers of US trucks, boots, spam and aircraft.
All of which was delivered at huge cost, primarily by the British Merchant Marine and the artic convoys.
Without that, the Red Army would have had to walk, just like the retreating Germans. That would have given the Germans time to set up effective rearguard actions to harass the advancing Red Army.
And of course, the Red Army would not have been able to supply their advancing troops without those trucks.
As far as I can tell, at least in Modern times the Russians have never fought and won a significant conflict absent significant external support.
Hapless Lithuania faces Russia (Kaliningrad Oblast) on one side and Russia’s closest ally, Belarus, on the other. They claim just to be following orders, but we know where that ends up. Very bad move.
Do not underestimate the belligerence of former Soviet satellites. There is a reason Poland, the Baltics and other Central Europeans are all in on Ukraine’s side. They know what’s really at stake for the future. They will not go back.
Lithuania might have just surrendered a portion of its south-eastern lands. For sure though, the Baltic states will lose their land passage through Lithuania to Poland.
The only haplessness I see is among the formerly-vaunted Russian soldiery. Those poor helpless schmucks bought the lies sold them by the organized crime cartel that runs their country, and look where it got them…
Russia is not going to be able to do much in the direction of Kaliningrad. The Belarussians are not stupid; even if Lukashenko wants to, he’s going to be unable to get his pisspot forces motivated to do anything, even inside Belarus, and the Russians can’t even finish their attempted coup-de-main towards Kyiv, while also being unable to effectively finish what they started in the Donbass back in 2014. The level of sheer “WTF?” on display is astonishing, from a perspective of military professionalism. They’re handing out Mosin-Nagant rifles to the poor saps in the Donbass, along with tanks built in the 1950s. This is not what a military “superpower” looks like. The amount of blatant corruption and malfeasance in the ranks is mind-boggling, and I cannot see the Russians recovering from this, unless their de facto allies in Germany and France push through a cease-fire that allows them to pump in even more sanctioned goods.
What people are missing with Russia is that they are quite literally eating their seed corn; the troops that are being torn apart in Ukraine represent their only reliable regime security forces, and the cadres they’ve killed off are the ones they needed to train the incoming conscript classes. Who mostly aren’t… Incoming, that is. I have it to understand that there was very minimal enthusiasm for reporting for the spring conscription levies, but what that level actually was is obscured by the usual smoke and mirrors.
The thing you have to remember, looking at all this? Putin himself doesn’t even know what the real state of affairs is, out in the hinterlands of the Russian military. He’s been told that there are X number of troops, Y number of tanks, and he planned accordingly. Then, when things didn’t go according to plan, he called forth things based on those numbers, only to discover the hard way that it’s all evaporated through graft.
I’ve been following what’s been going on in Russia since the Wall came down, and the Soviet Union collapsed. The level of sheer “WTF?” going on inside Russia is just nuts… I remember hearing about entire battalion sets of tanks and other equipment just being driven off into the forests and abandoned, found by the locals. I can think of about five or six separate incidents of that happening, with no explanation. Stuff just winds up being carved up for scrap, or being left to rot. A lot of it was fairly new equipment, inexplicably just left out in the countryside. That’s been going on since before the Soviet Union crashed and burned, and the amount of wasted resources that gear represents is mind-boggling. The fact that that has been going on? Major clue to the rest of the structure being entirely dysfunctional.
There is, however, a lot of ruin in any system or nation. The Russians haven’t reached the end of their rope as of yet, but you can see it tautening as we speak. The outcome is unknowable, at this point, but I don’t think it’s going to be at all to the benefit of the Russian people. Or, their criminal masters.
Oh, and for you Russophiles out there… Riddle me this: How is it that there were some 35 million AK47 family rifles manufactured, the majority in the old Soviet Union, and there aren’t enough of them left to issue out to the Donbass ethnic “Russian” conscripts…? Why are they getting bolt-action rifles designed in the 1890s, declared obsolete at the end of WWII, and put into storage, while all of the millions of AK47s are apparently unavailable? Hmmm?
Do the math. Corruption on a truly Biblical scale, translating into “the arsenal is empty, ‘cos we done sold all the good stuff for kopecks on the ruble to everyone who’d buy…” If Russia had AK47s to issue out, of any type or vintage, they would be issuing those instead of Mosin-Nagant antiques that more properly ought to be gracing a barrel in a surplus store somewhere in the Midwest.
Looks like various actors are ready to quietly ease some of the banking sanctions …
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-21/switzerland-imports-russian-gold-for-first-time-since-invasion?sref=UIESnLGc
Interesting excerpt from another Peter Zeihan talk :
In that talk PZ goes on to describe Russia is unlikely to stop with Ukraine, but move on to Estonia, Latvia, Poland, to re-establish their forward perimeter while they still can, because – demographically – this is their last chance.
I can’t speak to how true this is, but it’s a compelling talk.
OK, let us presume that the Russian leadership is insane enough to make a grab for the Baltic states. Where are the troops for that coming from? How many are they going to be able to scrape up out of the barrel bottom?
You’re already seeing them opening up the forces to “trained” men in their forties and fifties. What does that data point tell you about the availability of young conscripts…?
I don’t think they’re going to be able to do much at all past what they’re doing–Pumping more cannon fodder into the tar-baby of Ukraine. If they had what it would take to do anything at all in the Baltic states, then why would they not deploy that to assure victory in Ukraine? That does not make rational sense; you don’t go opening up another entire theater when your forces can’t obtain victory in the first one you stumbled into.
When the crash finally comes, it’s going to be massive. The contradiction in terms that everyone is missing with this is visible in what the Russians are not doing in Ukraine, which is winning. They tried for a coup-de-main, and missed. Now, they’re doubling down on what they were doing since 2014 in the Donbass, and in so doing, are killing off the men they claimed they were intervening on behalf of. Where’s that going to end, when this is all over?
The other thing here is that everyone is framing this as though Russia was somehow the victim of NATO aggression, while ignoring the multitudinous occasions where Russia went out of its way to do things like what they did in Danish waters just the last week. Kaliningrad being blockaded is what you get when you actually implement all those things historians suggest should have been done to push back against German pre-WWII aggressions and violations of the Versailles Treaty.
Floors me that people are framing this as anything other than rank Soviet/Nazi-style aggression. Russia could have simply said “Well, give it time… NATO will inevitably go away with there being no point to it, and our old satellites will come back due to economic reasons. If we behave as good neighbors, we’ll get what we want…” Instead? LOL… Sweden and Finland are trying to join NATO, NATO is revitalized, and the whole of Eastern Europe is up in arms against Russian aggressions. As well, nobody seems to be capable of recognizing the likely follow-on from this precedent, which is that China may make a choice to do exactly what Russia did in the Ukraine–Go after the territories taken from it under the Czars…
The sheer audacious stupidity of the whole program is just awe-inspiring. It’s matched only by BidenCo.’s moronic approach to energy and statesmanship.
This is none of our business. Our stupid involvement in WW1 got the entire “bloodiest” century rolling. We don’t need to do this again. Europeans simply are unable to stop killing each other; our spending tens of billion$ and who knows how many lives once the Complex really gets rolling, is insanity that will change NOTHING on the ground there.
The ONLY 45-year period of peace in Europe in centuries was the period between WW2 and the fall of the Warsaw Pact; as soon as the Pact fell, they began killing each other in Yugoslavia (while demonstrating the strength of multiculturalism and diversity). This is not our business.
What got the “bloodiest century” rolling was sheer European fecklessness and heedlessness to consequence, nothing else. You can speculate all you like about what Wilhelmine victory would have looked like, but the odds are that the same Germany that nurtured the Nazis and their ideology would have come up with something else akin to that. Imperial Germany wasn’t exactly a wonderland of humanitarian conduct; the Herrero would like to have a word with you, about that. Also, the nice people who were the first victims of chemical warfare and the planned destruction of civilian targets like London and Paris. I doubt that Germany would have been at all magnanimous in victory, and they’d have probably brought the same sort of treatment they meted out to Belgian Francs Tiruers to the rest of Europe. Not all of the nastiness ascribed to the Germans was propaganda from Perfidious Albion.
In any event, that’s a speculative counterfactual. The facts on the ground are that the longest period of European general peace has happened because the US stuck its nose in, and kept it there for the last sixty years. The dissolution of Yugoslavia happened mostly because we let the Europeans have their heads, and the German bankers decided it would be a good investment to break the country up for parts… Aside from the inherent structural problems and typical Balkan insanity, that was the proximate cause for it all. The Russians weren’t exactly clean-handed, either–They spent a lot of money on “influence” in Serbia, which got spent on things like Serbian militias. Lots of skeletons in those closets, on all sides–The French had their favorites, too, and they were not shy about exerting “influence”.
Europe is a mess, under the surface. Without some outside party keeping a lid on, that region would be a huge f*cking mess, and it’s far cheaper to spend a little every year to do that than to have to go in every other generation and keep them from wrecking the world. I rather like my Europe neutered and self-centered; leaves room for the rest of us to get on with our lives, sans imperial entanglements.