16 hours ago
In the event of war, or sufficient provocation elsewhere, you'd think that Kaliningrad is compact enough that its harbors could be swarmed by underwater autonomous vehicles on missions ranging from recon to harassment to kabooms. After that it'd be an ECM battle to reduce its air defence.
16 hours ago
What could Russia do if the exclave were simply taken over or assimilated? It doesn’t seem very defensible, and I doubt Russia wants to provoke a bigger conflict at this time. Isn’t this the right moment to contain this “fear”?
11 hours ago
When Russia invade Ukraine within days I had made up my mind what I would do if I was in charge of "the west":
1) blow up nordstream
2) take Kaliningrad
We're 50% of the way there.
16 hours ago
[flagged]
15 hours ago
> Soviet Union invaded baltics because Paris had fallen to Nazi Germany and USSR rushed to capture it before the Nazis.
Something doesn't add up. The Battle of France started on May 10, 1940. Soviet forces entered the Baltics on October 18th, 1939.
14 hours ago
Yes, the other poster made a confusion.
The Ribbentrop-Molotov pact gave to the Soviet Union the 4 Baltic states, i.e. Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (this is how they were known before WWII, so this was how they were described in the official pact, and this makes more sense than the use of the term "Baltic states" today, because all 4 states occupy the Eastern side of the Baltic Sea, and all 4 of them form a linguistic enclave between the Germanic and the Slavic speaking countries, where the 2 Northern states speak Uralic languages and the 2 Southern states speak Baltic languages), and also a part of Romania.
It was the fifth on this list, i.e. Romania, which was invaded by the Russians a week after the fall of France, when Romania remained without any allies, as all of them had already been occupied either by Germany or by the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union had already invaded much earlier the 4 Baltic states, but from Finland they had succeeded to take only a relatively small part, the rest of it remaining free.
The Russians have never "rushed to capture" any of these states "before the Nazis", because the Nazis had already given these states to them before the war.
The Russians have only rushed to occupy a part of Poland as big as possible, because the split of Poland had not been decided in advance.
11 hours ago
Also because Russians hate Poles.
Actually if you ask Russians, they'll tell you they dont hate Poles, its the Poles that hate Russians. But then again, Russians thinks everybody hates them. It's engineered hysteria.
4 hours ago
It's comical that you write such things and don't see the irony.