Poland will stop using the Russian name Kaliningrad to define the city and region constituting the Russian exclave in Europe, returning to the previous denomination of Königsberg (“Krolewiec” in Polish). The decision was announced in Warsaw by the Polish Minister of Development Waldemar Buda, and justified with the desire not to «facilitate Russification processes in Poland».
The historical name Krolewiec will be used in official documents, signage and maps. The decision led to an immediate protest by the Russian government, through its spokesman Dmitri Peskov: “it’s no longer even just about Russophobia, but about decisions bordering on insanity”. Peskov then called the Polish choice to abandon the name Kaliningrad “a hostile act”.
Kaliningrad is an exclave, i.e. a piece of Russian territory in the heart of Europe. Its territory, which includes the city of Kaliningrad and theoblast, i.e. the region around it, is the size of Northern Ireland and is home to approximately one million people. It overlooks the Baltic Sea and is completely surrounded by Lithuania to the northeast and Poland to the south. In April 1945 the city, then called Königsberg and German, was captured by the Red Army of the Soviet Union. After Germany’s surrender, peace negotiations gave the Soviet Union control over Königsberg and its territory. In 1946 the city was renamed Kaliningrad, after the Soviet revolutionary Mikhail Kalinin. The Kaliningrad region turned into a Russian exclave in 1991 after the independence of the Baltic countries: previously there was territorial continuity within the Soviet Union.
