[Wrocław, 17 April 2022]

PUTIN MUST BE IMMEDIATELY REMOVED FROM KALININGRAD!

Kaliningrad has critical strategic importance. It is and never has been Russian. Putin is occupying this exclave illegally. While inexplicably the United Nations has not (yet!) addressed this issue, Kaliningrad has progressively been fortified and armed to become the base of the Russian baltic fleet and the forward offensive platform from which Russia could threaten Europe with conventional and nuclear aggression.

Putin has already demonstrated his keen following of Hitler's and Stalin's geopolitical stratagems. His next aggression is likely to echo Hitler's Danzig policy and pursue the creation of a "land corridor" to this illegal exclave through Lithuania and Poland. Putin is already using Kaliningrad as part of a veiled nuclear threat in response to Sweden's and Finland's desire to join NATO. We must act now!

At the end of WWII, Stalin brutally invaded this territory and ethnically cleansed it. However, the USSR (and now Russia) never acquired any legal title to this exclave. The Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 did not allow any annexation of this territory, it merely placed Kaliningrad under the temporary administration of the Soviet Union, as its Article VI states, “pending the final determination of territorial questions at the peace settlement”.

Kaliningrad was named by Stalin in July 1946 after Mikhail Kalinin, his second in command and a leading communist murderer (against some stiff competition). The very name of this illegal exclave is an insult to Poland, not least because in March 1940 Kalinin in person countersigned the order to execute 25,700 Polish officers and intelligentsia as part of the infamous Katyn massacre, a significant and tragic milestone of Polish national history. While I write this, Putin is threatening the destruction of the Katyn memorial site, in order to avenge Poland's steadfast support for Ukraine.

 
As part of any post Ukraine invasion peace agreement, the UN needs to seize Kaliningrad back from Russian control. Of course, Russia would veto this, so this move should be linked to Putin's removal from the Security Council, as per my first point in https://www.ney.world/after-putin-what-the-world-did-next.

Repossessing this territory cannot be illegal, as it is being occupied illegally. Stalin purged the Prussian population and then settled it with Russians trucked in from the steppes. They need now to be sent packing back to Russia. No pity and no compensation!

International order and the rule of law need to be visibly restored. Local assets, such as the real estate that the orc horde leaves behind, should revert in the first instance to the descendants/families of those dispossessed by Stalin in 1945 and the rest auctioned off towards a rebuilding and resettlement fund.

Kaliningrad should be placed under UN or other international administration, such as a coalition of Poland and the Baltic states. It then needs to be renamed and demilitarised, else it will continue to pose a threat to the world, a gangrenous growth on Europe's east shoulder.