by Marco Imarisio
Vilnius imposed sanctions: banned the transit of goods to the territory of the Federation. Medvedev: By the time Ukraine completes the accession process, the EU may already be gone
This is how the wars begin. That’s what matters. Fearing that the wishes of the propagandist Kremlin prince will come true, that Vladimir Soloviev, now a familiar face on our own television too, who every time he hears about the Baltic countries starts ranting and demands their immediate invasion even days, nuclear annihilation in the odd.
strip of land
The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad has been mentioned thousands of times since the war. Buffer zone, military outpost, base or Achilles’ heel, because it can threaten Europe directly, but it can also be completely isolated in the event of a conflict. What seemed certain from the start was that this narrow strip of land between Poland and Lithuania, a legacy of World War II, could soon become the benchmark for the new geopolitical instability created by the invasion of Ukraine. Judging by recent events, the fever is rising. Last Saturday, the Lithuanian government banned the transit of goods subject to international sanctions to Russia by rail on its territory. A measure that undeclaredly paralyzes Moscow’s traffic towards the Kaliningrad region, a small piece of Russia overlooking the Baltic Sea, unsurprisingly home to the Iskander missiles with nuclear capability but no land border with the motherland, closed by two countries, who join the European Union.
The Russians: low blow
State media speak of a low blow or even casus belli. Governor Anton Alikhanov immediately appeared on television to denounce the Vilnius government’s decision as illegal. These are steps that can have far-reaching implications, he said, recalling how the signatories to the 2004 agreement on Lithuania’s accession to the European Union had abided by the adoption of the principle of free movement of goods, including energy, between the Kaliningrad region and the rest of Russian territory. Konstantin Kosachev, vice-president of the Council of the Russian Federation, the upper house of parliament, a figure of some importance on foreign policy issues, stepped into the field yesterday. As an EU member state, Lithuania violates a number of legally binding international laws, it wrote on its Telegram channel, citing the ban on interference between the parties in their respective transport networks. Russian outrage tends to forget what the root cause of certain decisions is. The fear sparked by the invasion of Ukraine has reignited outbursts that seemed to be dormant. The embers between Lithuania and Russia have not stopped burning, and Moscow has never hidden its lack of tolerance for the existence of the small Baltic country, which was the first in the area to liberate itself from the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In recent months, Russian television has constantly called for the creation of a corridor between Kaliningrad and the rest of the country. That would only be possible, a small detail, with a military attack. Squares and streets dedicated to the January 1991 dead in Lithuania have multiplied since February 24, when Soviet troops attacked government buildings in Vilnius in a bid to interrupt the country’s ongoing independence process.
The insult
Anyway, don’t worry. Diplomacy is making great strides. In his usual wake-up call, Dmitry Medvedev wonders if the European Union will still exist once Ukraine’s accession process is complete. Perhaps the EU will be gone by then… Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, whom many in the international community believed to be the bargaining chip, perhaps also on the Lithuanian affair, said the US is working to keep Russia silent on international issues and forces it to bow to the laws they invent, but they will fail. Given the premises, one wonders what could possibly go wrong with the Kaliningrad exclave.
June 20, 2022 (Modification June 20, 2022 | 07:13)
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