Perhaps it could be EU blue and yellow. Maybe it will be tangerine. (That’ll be tanning salongerine, the nickname of Kaliningrad’s Governor, Georgy Boos.)

Either way, the natives in Kaliningrad are getting restless. They’re tired of the lock-out behind the Schengen version of the Berlin wall and equally disenchanted with ‘Big Brother’, as locals call Russia.

The [...]]]>

Perhaps it could be EU blue and yellow. Maybe it will be tangerine. (That’ll be tanning salongerine, the nickname of Kaliningrad’s Governor, Georgy Boos.)

Either way, the natives in Kaliningrad are getting restless. They’re tired of the lock-out behind the Schengen version of the Berlin wall and equally disenchanted with ‘Big Brother’, as locals call Russia.

The topic of separatism is once again the big debate, currently the popular New Kaliningrad forum is asking  – ‘Does Russia Need Us?‘

All this follows a rally in December led by bad boy separatist Sergei Pasko, of the banned Baltic Republican Party. No, not exactly banned, but a clever piece of legislation (2006) was designed to deny Kaliningrad any political voice. A legitimate political party in Russia has to prove a certain following throughout the Federation. Of course, no one from Tomsk to Tatarstan gives a flying blini about Kaliningrad’s problem. Hey, it isn’t even in Russia.

At the time of the missile shield crisis, the New York Times’ Ellen Barry wrote a piece which perfectly captures the dilemma of Kaliningraders. Their loyalties lie with Russia, but of course there should be closer ties to the EU. After all, Kaliningrad is further from Moscow than a whole bunch of other European capitals.

(For the record: Vilnius 350 km , Riga 390 km, Warsaw 400 km, Minsk 550km, Berlin 600 km. Stockholm 650 km, Tallinn 650 km, Copenhagen 680 km, Oslo 850 km, Kiev 850 km, Moscow 1245 km.)

The forum debaters are clued in to the issues. They want to be part of Europe but not NATO. There’s little bonding with Big Brother, but what if they upset him? ‘Russia will take every rouble out and not pay our pensions’ warns one poster. Will they be better off in the EU? ‘Oh sure, free like the Poles to go and work in England as cleaners and chicken packers’ says another.

More elegant, then, if Russia and the EU could solve this issue. But a decade of truly inept diplomacy has produced nothing. And that’s when people take their protest to the streets, as is happening now.

I should have blogged this weeks ago but I was off the net. And maybe by now the New York Times has forgotten about Kaliningrad again. But at least its reporter, Ellen Barry, actually pitched up here.

I’m impressed. Ellen Barry really does work out of Russia (NYT’s Moscow office) and doesn’t sit in a London [...]]]>

I should have blogged this weeks ago but I was off the net. And maybe by now the New York Times has forgotten about Kaliningrad again. But at least its reporter, Ellen Barry, actually pitched up here.

I’m impressed. Ellen Barry really does work out of Russia (NYT’s Moscow office) and doesn’t sit in a London pub making stuff up  like the Daily Telegraph boys.

Ellen contacted me at the height of the Kaliningrad Missile Crisis, when a siloful of Iskanders were about to be trained on Poland in response to the US Missile Shield. Mind you, it is hard to be precise about the height of this crisis, like how high exactly and when even. It still hasn’t totally gone away, but it’s well on the back afterburner now they’re talking. By contrast, the legendary Cuban Missile Crisis was sorted in two weeks flat. I wonder if that says anything about the stalemate of modern diplomacy?

But, back to Ellen’s piece on the Kaliningrad Missile Crisis which I thought was truly wonderful. A couple of choice extracts:

‘Attracting tourists to see an Iskander is a creative idea,” said Mr. Abramov, a political scientist. ‘Especially for the Poles. When it is flying toward them, they may not be able to see it. Come to Kaliningrad! Pose next to the missile which is going to kill you.’

Ellen also took time out to visit Kaliningrad’s famous Zoo.

Lyudmila M. Anokha, the director of the Kaliningrad Zoo, found herself in an awkward position last month when she held a contest to name a new baby giraffe. One of the most popular suggestions was ‘Iskander,’ but Ms. Anokha immediately saw the problem. ‘The giraffe was delivered to us by the Berlin Zoo’ she said. ‘The giraffe came from the West. The Iskanders would be pointed toward the West. We at the Zoo are beyond politics.’

More Russia articles from Ellen are filed here