While looking at maps of Eastern Europe, in an attempt to better understand the whole Russia-Ukraine conflict, I noticed a piece of Russia that seem to be completely separate from the rest of the country.
Kaliningrad Oblast is a chunk of Russia trapped between Poland and Lithuania and the Baltic Sea, over 500 km from the nearest part of Russia proper. (An Oblast, incidentally, is just a "federal subject" of Russia with its own local government, similar to a state or county in other countries.)
Kaliningrad Oblast is an exclave, a portion of a state geographically separated from the main state by surrounding alien territories, or technically a semi-exclave because one side of it is international waters or sea. Historically, it was once part of East Prussia, and it's main city Kaliningrad was once known in German as Königsberg (Immanuel Kant and ETA Hoffman, among others, hailed from Prussian Königsberg). Ownership of the region bounced between Prussia, Germany and Russia over many centuries, before finally being annexed and settled by Soviet Russia in the aftermath of the Second World War.
It seems to me that Germany (or Lithuania ot Poland) have a better claim to Kaliningrad Oblast than Russia does to Ukraine, whatever Vladimir Putin might think.
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