There's a lot to unpack here. There is some macroeconomics, but most of the unpacking is politics, history, and revanchism. The legacy media isn't paying much attention to this yet, but the internet is just starting to notice the implications (here's articles at ZeroHedge and Politico). They both lack some background which I'll summarize here (this possibility has not been invisible on the internet for several years, but it's been pretty minor and speculative).
The macroeconomics is that over last weekend Lithuania announced that it would be blockading the transport of certain Russian goods across its territory.
Blockades are not overt acts of war, but if the blockaded country counters militarily it's typically viewed as justifiable. A blockade is a provocation.
A big difference here is that Lithuania is a member of NATO and the EU, and Ukraine is not and was not.
At its core, NATO has a treaty. In that treaty is Article 5. It states that an attack on one member country must be defended by all other members.
The lame response of many European states to Russia's attack on Ukraine has been justified because Article 5 does not apply to that situation. How will it play out if NATO, through Lithuania, provokes Russia, and Article 5 gets tested? That's the political problem.
Let's unpack.
Trigger warning: I'm not trying to unpack my prejudices here; rather I'm trying to clue you in to why other regions' peoples might see themselves as different and act upon that. This is missing from the two articles linked above.
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Whether we like it or not, we can understand a lot about what's going on by thinking about countries, nations, and states.
A country is the physical thing on a map, with flags, borders, signs, and so on to tell you where you are.
A nation is a set of people with some collective identity, often centered around language, religion, other aspects of culture (but let's face it, those are the big two), and shared history.
A state is a government that runs things in a certain region. A state that controls more than one nation, but is mostly run by one of them, is an empire.
Geopolitics works most smoothly when a country, nation, and state roughly coincide. The country and nation cover the same region, and the state is organized and powerful enough to keep the whole thing together. Think ... France, Japan, or even Egypt or Jamaica.
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Russia (and the Soviet Union) were empires that controlled some of Ukraine for 300 years and all of it for two hundred.
This was not too bad as far as empires go, since Russia and Ukraine share a religion, and their languages are both Slavic. The Slavic language group is divided into three parts: eastern, western, and southern, and both Russian and Ukrainian are from the eastern group. You might think of them as siblings, and an analogy to this case might be if France had an empire and controlled Spain (closely related languages, shared religion). Could they make that work? Maybe so (and they did for a decade here and there in the 18th and 19th centuries).
But, when the Soviet Union broke up, Ukraine went its own way (Lithuania too, more on that below). Some in Russia weren't happy about this (that's irredentism, which is different from, but often goes along with revanchism).
And the casus belli used for the war is that part of the nation of Russians was contained in the country of Ukraine, and the state of Ukraine wasn't being nice to them.
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The western Slavic speaking nations are more like Russia's cousins. The language isn't as close. Further, they're mostly of a different religion (Roman Catholic vs Eastern Orthodox).
This is Poland, Slovakia, and Czechia, and these are some of most active opponents of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Only Poland was part of the Russian empire (and only partially), and while not part of the Soviet empire initially, the Soviets took some Polish territory during World War II, and all three were certainly dominated by the Soviets for about 2 generations.
They have reason to worry.
An analogy for this relationship is if France tried to control England. As recently as 125 years ago these countries were enemies, they fought the last time 200 years ago, and they've problems go back to the 11th century.
If you've ever noticed historical and cultural friction between the English and the French, it's worse between the west Slavs and the Russians.
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How does Lithuania fit into all this?
The Lithuanians, while sandwiched right in between the east and west Slavs ... aren't Slavs at all. They're Balts.
What's a Balt? Within the European part of the Indo-European language group there are 7 groups. Three of those are big (one is the Slavs, while English is in a separate group), and four of them are small, including the Celts, Greeks, Albanians ... and Balts.
Further, Lithuanians tend to be Roman Catholic, unlike the Russians to their east.
To continue the analogy, Ukraine might be a sibling of Russia (that they don't get along with), Poland a cousin (that they're barely on speaking terms with), and Lithuania ... merely a neighbor (that they mostly ignore but are willing to be hostile towards if necessary).
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I wrote that there's a lot to unpack, and it's not done yet. Now we have to talk about the Germans.
In the 4th century, the Germans ... (the barbarians who were going to invade the Roman Empire) occupied lands going as far east as Ukraine. Note that this is ALL the Germans that end up spreading stuff like blond hair, blue eyes, tallness, and even limited government across most of Europe. The Germans we think of today are just the ones who stayed in what we now call Germany. Or more correctly, what Germany looked like around 1900 (that map isn't great, but it's simple and free).
They had raided to the west and south for hundreds of years, and we know this because the Romans kept decent written records. Maybe they raided to the east too, but we have no records of this.
Anyway, in the 4th century they start migrating west and south, rather than just raiding.
Behind them come a number of other ethnic groups. Amongst those are the Slavs, and the west and south Slavs are where they still are by perhaps 700 AD, and it seems like the east Slavs may not have moved at all. Interestingly, the west Slavs were quite a bit further west then than they are now (some of them even assimilated with the Germans).
Christian missionary work, conversion, and conquest, are also going on at this time. In the next couple of hundred years, that gets kind of settled: the west Slavs become Catholic, the east Slavs Eastern Orthodox, and the south Slavs are a mix.
Now, maybe they were doing this all along, or maybe it was something new, but the Germans start pushing back and migrating in small numbers back into Slav territory about a thousand years ago (FWIW: all that stuff Hitler said about lebensraum was not new, and may have resonated well because it was more of a tradition). I don't have a date for this map, but I'd guess that it is circa 1925 — anyway, the dark red areas are where they speak German and you can see that they're dotted all over areas of eastern Europe that no one ever thought of as Germany.
And it gets very little attention in European history classes these days, but part of that was honest-to-god Crusades against the pagans. These started up about 50 years after the First Crusade hit the Middle East, but they were fundamentally the same thing. The most important of these ran from the 12th through the 14th centuries along the south coast of the Baltic Sea against that last pagans in Europe: the Balts (less impressive Crusades also went into Romania).
Eventually the Balts were converted, but what's more important for this post is that they were mostly shoved out of some of their lands. Germans settled there. The kingdom they established was called Prussia.
Even casual students in high school history classes learn that the Germans weren't united as Germany until fairly recently. That starts with Prussia merging with another country called Brandenburg in the late 17th century (keeping the name Prussia, and the culture, but shifting their center further west towards Berlin). It finished with a united Germany in 1871, that had just beat up three of its neighbors, and began sulking off towards the two world wars.
Video games and pop-historical fiction make a big stink about the Templars (probably mostly because if you're gone they can say whatever they want about you, including that you might just be hiding). But more important historically are the Teutonic Knights: a religious military order, founded by Crusaders in the Middle East, within the affinity group of German-speakers there, who then went and crusaded in northeastern Europe, founded their own kingdom, and left behind a militaristic culture that came to dominate Germany. They don't cover this in video games and movies because it happened for real, and it was not fun.
The center of this was a city named Konigsberg. It was surrounded by a rural area known for its forests, lakes, and grain farming. On maps of Germany from before World War I it's that part that stick out at the top right, and in maps from after World War I it's that blob of Germany that's separated by a sliver of Poland.
Oh ... and as the Prussians settled down a bit and reconnected with their fellow Germans to the west, the Russians moved in and conquered the Balts in the 18th century.
Still with me?
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You may have heard the eastern front was a pretty big deal in World War II.
World War I too ... although in that war the Germans won on the eastern front. And took most of what is today Poland, the Baltic countries, and Ukraine from Russia (pretty much anything where there were a handful of German speakers in that map linked several paragraphs up).
That showed their intent. Reality intruded and they weren't allowed to keep those lands.
But you can imagine that this did not make the Russians/Soviets happy when there Nazis invaded in 1941.
On top of that add the genocidal policies of the Nazis towards what have been called the bloodlands, and the separate genocidal policies of Stalin's Soviets towards those same regions.
The name we use for all policies of this sort today is ethnic cleansing.
What later happened on the eastern front was that as the Soviets started to rout the Nazis from mid-summer of 1943 onward, they did some pretty serious ethnic cleansing of their own. This was not just against Germans, but if you were German and the Soviets were coming, you fled to the west (estimates are that there were 12 million German refugees).
The largest concentration of those were from the original Prussia. With the Germans out, but the cities and farms sort of intact, the Soviets moved Russians in to the best parts, and let the Poles have part of it too.
That best part included Konigsberg. The Soviets wanted this because Russia has always lacked for ports that are ice-free year round. Konigsberg isn't great for this, but it was an improvement over what they had. They renamed it Kaliningrad. (Note that a lot of places in Russia went back to their traditional names after the Soviet Union collapsed, but not Kaliningrad ... probably because any Germans that might have wanted it to be called Konigsberg had started new lives in other parts of the world 50 years beforehand).
Oh, and, ice-free port, and closest to the west, Kaliningrad became a hugely important military outpost for the Soviets ... probably full of loyal Russians who'd been given homes and land for free. It was and is widely believed that nuclear weapons have been stationed there for decades.
In short, Kaliningrad is part of the country, nation, and state of Russian ... even though it is not contiguous with the rest of it (because there's a country, nation, and state called Lithuania in between).
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Now, at this time there were still true believers in the communist system running the USSR. And we don't think about this much these days, but they did kinda' sorta' respect ethnic divisions.
They did this because they thought the major divisions between people were about class and not about ethnicity (oops!, that one came back to bite them).
But at that time as long as you formed a soviet system (based on councils of workers), and accepted that even though there weren't supposed to be any dominant ethnic groups but the Russians really were it, you could have some modicum of independence within the USSR (that's why it was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).
So in 1991, there was a Lithuanian SSR and a Ukrainian SSR, and twelve others, all ready to go out on their own when given the chance. And the biggest one was the Russian SSR, which is the huge blob of Russia you see on maps.
Included in that was the strategically important, and for the last 40 years heavily Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
Except that it was separated from the rest of Russian by Belarus and Lithuania. Belarus is friendly towards Putin, but Lithuania is scared to death of him (remember, they're neighbors but not family). And they were accepted into NATO and the EU to send a "hands off" signal to Russia.
No one thought this would be much of a problem in the 1990's because the Cold War was over, and Russia was going to play nice with its neighbors now.
There was even a book that dominated intellectual discussions at the time called The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. It's thesis was that humans could pretty much forget about most of what I've written above here because it wasn't going to matter any more.
Doh!
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OK. The background is all done.
What happened this week?
A few months back I posted about the problem of Transnistria in the Ukraine-Russia war. Transnistria is the part of Moldova that wants back into Russia, and is a problem because it's not connected to Russia.
Kaliningrad is Transnistria on steroids. Transnistria isn't Russian and was never a part of Russia. Kaliningrad is both.
And the feckless EU is going to blockade certain Russian goods, and the Lithuanians stated they will enforce it.
But this means they will be enforcing it in a place and way that the Russians may take extreme offense with. Oh ... and like Ukraine, there's a Russian minority in Lithuania that they can claim is being mistreated (no doubt, mistreated the worst right along the rail air corridor heading towards Kaliningrad, right?).
All Russian internal commerce with Kaliningrad either goes through Lithuania (by train), or through Poland (by road), or both through the air. Poland is even more militant than Lithuania, but the Russian can probably put up with them because they no longer share a border with them. Russia does share a border with Lithuania.
The region in question is called the Suwalki Gap (after the largest city in the region, on the Polish side). The president of Estonia named this in 2015, and pointed out that this could be the flash point for a putative World War 3.
Russia has demanded that Lithuania lift the blockade. There was panic buying in stores in Kaliningrad last weekend.
Kaliningrad governor Anton Alikhanov says that the ban, which was confirmed on Friday, affects roughly 50% of all imports.
Currently Russia is ferrying goods from St. Petersburg down to Kaliningrad.
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So it's all pretty simple. Macroeconomically there's a blockade going on. Politically it might start World War III because it might be a much bigger deal than just Russia and Ukraine.
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P.S. If you're a student of military history, the Suwalki gap is just east of the two big battlefields where the Germans defeated the Russians in 1914, and is the area where they fought a major battle in early 1915.
