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…