Staunton, October 31 – The situation
of Kaliningrad, the non-contiguous part of the Russian Federation, has long
been “a headache” for the Kremlin, but the recent rise in East-West tensions
has so exacerbated the problems of that region that this week Vladimir Putin
convened a meeting to discuss what should be done.
According to “Nezavisimaya gazeta”
journalist Aleksandr Rabushev, Russian Economic Development Minister Aleksey
Ulyukayev reported that Putin had told the government to “accelerate the
adoption of laws for the support of the oblast” and its currently hard-pressed
industries (szona.org/kaliningrad-problemi/).
But it remains
unclear whether Moscow will do so and whether, even if it does, the Russian
government will be able to overcome not only the problems that it has faced in
Kaliningrad since 1991 but also the problems political as well as economic that
it faces now as a result of new East-West tensions.
The collapse of the USSR transformed
what had been “a major military advance post of the country into a
semi-enclave,” Rabushev says, but “the local authorities and the federal Center
did not immediately recognize all the aspects of this geopolitical
transformation” or take effective steps to meet it.
After 1991, transit through Lithuania
became more difficult, the size of the military garrison in Kaliningrad
declined, and the economic crisis in the enclave in the 1990s turned out to be
twice as serious as in the Russian Federation as a whole, with production
falling in Kaliningrad by 1998 to only 29 percent of what it had been in 1990.
New East-West tensions suggest that the situation in the
enclave, which had somewhat stabilized over the last decade, is about to
deteriorate further. The Baltic
countries have announced that they plan to exit “the unified energy system of
Russia” by 2020. Together with the closure of an energy plant in Kaliningrad, that
in itself will lead to “the complete collapse of economic activity” there.
The
construction of a new Baltic atomic energy station “could have stabilized the
situation,” but “the countries of Europe are not showing any desire to exchange
gas dependency on Russia for electrical” and consequently, work on that plant
has stopped. Moscow and Kaliningrad are
thus planning to build four smaller energy plants.
But
there is an even more immediate threat to Kaliningrad’s situation on the
horizon. That is the so-called “2016 problem,” a term that refers to the
planned end of the special treatment of Kaliningrad exports which have allowed
its firms to do better than they would otherwise have been able to do.
According
to Kaliningrad officials, when those special arrangements are ended, some 900
enterprises in the region will close, and some 30,000 workers will be laid out.
Proposals by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to prevent that by offering
50-60 billion rubles (1.25 to 1.5 billion US dollars) in annual subsidies have
not gained support in Moscow.
On
the one hand, as some experts have observed, Moscow does not see Kaliningrad
and its government as having met its earlier promises and is unwilling to throw
good money after bad. And on the other, the Russian government is operating
under increasing financial stringency and has little money to send to the
regions.
But
if Moscow does not do something, the economy of Kaliningrad is almost certain
to slide into a deeper recession, with lower production and more unemployment.
And that in turn will have political consequences, including at least
potentially the reactivation of groups which want either a special relationship
with the EU or even independence for their land.
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