Kaliningrad Update

Been busy. Summer. Enough said.

***

Cooler heads have prevailed in the Kaliningrad situation.

Officially, the first train in 6 weeks, from Russia to the Kaliningrad Oblast, transiting Lithuania, arrived this week.

Unofficially, that sort of transit has been in the works for about a month. So things actually stayed fairly calm throughout.

Initially, the EU said a list of goods were sanctioned, and could not be shipped to Kaliningrad. Ostensibly, this was all military stuff. Realistically that included anything that might be used by military forces ... so just about everything.

One of the sanctioned goods was cement.† Because you could use cement to make concrete for fortifications. Of course, cement has a lot of other uses too, so the Russians made a point of sending a train full of cement through first.

I think the bottom line(s) of all of this is are: 1) the Russians have shown a willingness to use military force, 2) the EU has not shown a willingness to use military force, 3) the EU tries to use macroeconomic force to influence Russia, 4) they're either not very good at that, compromised, or feckless (a good vocabulary word for any college student to learn), and 5) the Suwalki Gap still exists and may be a festering problem.

† Cement is surprisingly important in trade: it's one of the top (volume or weight, but not value) items in international shipping. A lot of students don't understand what cement is: it's the dry stuff you mix with (local) water, and (local) aggregate (mostly stones or pebbles) to make concrete. For an economics student, cement production has high fixed costs: that implies it's made in huge quantities by a smaller number of enterprises. So, making cement at a big plant in the main part of Russia, and shipping it to an outlying oblast makes sense.