Putin

Oddly enough, though surrounded by NATO in Kaliningrad, the Russians don’t seem the least cowed. In fact, they’ve used the area quite aggressively. Both President Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev have threatened to place missiles there, including some with nuclear warheads, in response to U.S. plans to install missile defense systems in Eastern Europe beginning with Romania, operational as of May 2016, to be followed by Poland in 2017. Russia launched live-fire war games in Kaliningrad right after the invasion of Crimea; the Poles and Lithuanians were so shaken that they invoked Article 4 of the NATO charter, which calls for consultation when “territorial integrity, political independence or security” is threatened.

But Kaliningrad is not so much Russia’s extended fist as its Achilles’ heel.

The Kremlin fears that the West can question the validity of Kaliningrad’s belonging to Russia. The original agreements about the postwar boundaries of Germany, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union were set out in the Potsdam Agreement of 1945. Those agreements were provisional and only became final forty-five years later, on September 12, 1990, with the signing of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with respect to Germany. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum the Russians agreed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity when Kiev surrendered its nuclear weapons. If Crimea can be an exception to that agreement, why can’t Kaliningrad be an exception to the Final Settlement? This is a pressure the West could bring to bear.

In fact, Russia believes that its sovereign control of Kaliningrad is already under assault by the West.

Kaliningrad itself has already become an active front in the information war, though it isn’t clear how much Russia’s “enemy” is actually firing. Yet the counteroffensive is being waged on the highest levels. The governor of the province has said: “It’s no secret that Western intelligence agencies are carrying out operations for a Ukrainian-style revolution in Kaliningrad.”

Those Western operations take many forms, many of them seemingly small and innocuous, like “creeping Germanization”—demanding that the historical name of the city, Königsberg, be sometimes used or that the region’s five-hundred-year history as part of Prussia and its being the birthplace of the philosopher Immanuel Kant not be entirely downplayed. But Germany has not evinced the slightest desire to reclaim this territory, which no longer has any ethnic Germans. And so: “Senior Russian intellectuals and officials have gone on record saying they strongly believe that Washington has secretly approved of the transfer of Kaliningrad to Lithuania.” Fear of outside agitators uniting forces with a “fifth column” inside Kaliningrad is rife.

Pressure on regions like Kaliningrad is one way of raising tensions within Russia; maintaining the sanctions and artificially keeping the price of oil low are another. Proof that Putin respects sanctions is that he chose to inflict economic, not military, pain on Turkey when it shot down a Russian jet that strayed into Turkish territory in November 2015.

But if Putin were merely worried about unpaid workers and an unhappy middle class taking to the streets, he could easily have left the OMON riot police and other troops as part of the Interior Ministry and not created an entirely new entity, the National Guard. The creation of a “superpower agency can be considered as the official recognition of the significance of a new threat—the threat of the internal enemy,” to quote a recent article from one of Russia’s still fairly free newspapers.

Who exactly is that internal enemy? The National Guard’s mandate to counterterrorism and extremism has some relevance here because many Chechen rebels have already pledged their allegiance to the ISIS caliphate, and from the Kremlin’s point of view, people like opposition leader Alexei Navalny are at best just this side of extreme. But even though those are real concerns for Putin, especially as jihadists with Russian passports begin returning home from Syria, it’s not what was foremost in his mind when creating the National Guard.