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Has Russia's war against NATO already begun? Over the last 12 months, European governments, intelligence agencies and investigators have accused Russia of running a campaign of hybrid attacks across the continent. Railway sabotage in Poland, explosive parcels, suspected attacks on undersea cables, arson plots, airspace violations and attempts to interfere in elections. War below the threshold of war. Not one dramatic attack. A hundred smaller ones, each deniable and designed to make Europe feel unsafe without triggering NATO's Article 5 collective defence. One of the most important hubs for Russian hybrid attacks sits right where NATO would never want it to. In the middle of Europe, a peculiar piece of leftover history. Wedged between Poland and Lithuania is a small Russian exclave called Kaliningrad. It's not connected to mainland Russia, but it hosts Russia's Baltic Fleet, missile systems, electronic warfare infrastructure and some of the most sensitive military geography in Europe. Just east of it is a narrow strip of land called the Suwalki Gap. It's the only land bridge connecting the Baltic states to the rest of NATO, which means that if Russia ever wanted to isolate Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from the rest of the alliance, this is where you'd do it. So the question behind these headlines is why is there a Russian military pressure point sitting in the middle of Europe at all? And that takes us back to Prussia, the Second World War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a city that changed the names, empires and populations before becoming one of the most dangerous places on the military map. So why is Kaliningrad there to begin with? Let's look at a map of Russia, the largest country on Earth, stretching across 11 time zones from the Pacific almost to Poland almost. Because between Poland to the south and Lithuania to the north, entirely disconnected from mainland Russia, is Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian territory about the size of Northern Ireland or Connecticut, sitting on the Baltic coast. And it's what's known as an exclave, a piece of one country separated from the rest of it by a foreign territory. Alaska is a semi exclave of the United States, for example, and Kaliningrad is Russia's. It has a population of roughly a million people, and today it is overwhelmingly Russian. But for most of history, as we'll see, that was not the case. And that is because for most of its history, this place was not Kaliningrad. It was Konigsberg. In 1255, during the Northern Crusades, the Teutonic Knights built a fortress there after destroying an old Prussian settlement called Twangste. They named the new fortress Konigsberg, which means King's Mountain, in honor of King Ottokar ii Bohemia. One of medieval Central Europe's most powerful rulers, who'd just joined a crusade against the pagan Prussians. Over the centuries, Konigsberg became one of the great German speaking cities of northern Europe. It joined the Hanseatic League, which was that great medieval trading network of Northern Europe. In 1340 it became the coronation city of the Prussian monarchy. It was the home of Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment philosopher, whose work on reason, morality and human knowledge reshaped Western thought. And he spent almost his entire life there. It was also the childhood city of Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century's most important political thinkers. She coined the phrase, of course, the banality of evil. For centuries this area belonged to the Prussian and then the German world. East Prussia, the German Empire, Weimar Germany, then Nazi Germany. And then came 1945. In the final months of the Second World War, the Red army besieged Konigsberg, then a fortified German stronghold and the capital of East Prussia. By April 1945, the city was devastated at Potsdam, the Allied summit where the victorious powers decided much of Europe's post war settlement. The Allies agreed that the northern part of East Prussia, including Konigsberg, would be placed under Soviet administration, which then became permanent in practice. And what followed was one of the most dramatic demographic transformations in modern European history. So most of the German population had already fled or been evacuated during the Soviet advance. Those who remained were expelled. In the years after the war, the city's language, names, administration and population were remade in Russian form. In 1946, Konigsberg was renamed Kaliningrad after Mikhail Kalinin, A senior Bolshevik official and a former head of state of the Soviet Union. And not because he had some deep connection to the city, but because the Soviet state was stamping its authority onto a conquered place. So Kaliningrad, as the oddity on the map that we see today, is a fossil of World War II, a piece of conquered German territory absorbed into the Soviet Union, repopulated, renamed, and then turned into a military outpost. Then in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. Anyone watching this knows this. I'm sure Russia kept Kaliningrad, but suddenly the land route to it no longer ran through a Soviet empire. It ran through newly independent states. And after Lithuania joined NATO and the EU in 2004, Russia found itself with a sovereign piece of territory reachable by land only through countries no longer under Moscow's control, and partly through an alliance that Moscow treats as an existential enemy. So that's how a medieval crusader fortress became the modern pressure point that it is today. Kaliningrad is much More than a fascinating cartographic leftover, because Russia has turned it into one of the most militarized territories in Europe relative to its size. Its port at Baltiysk is the main base of Russia's Baltic Fleet and its key year round ice free forward naval position on the Baltic Sea. The oblast has hosted S400 air defence systems, Bastion coastal missiles, its scander ballistic missiles and electronic warfare units. This means that Russia can threaten ships, aircraft and military movement across parts of the Baltic region. In military speak this is usually called anti access or area denial. And Kaliningrad is placed almost perfectly for that purpose. Now back to that gap I mentioned. Sitting between the Russian exclave Kaliningrad and Russia's closest military ally, Belarus, now deeply subordinate to Moscow. The Suwalki Gap is named after the Polish town of Suwalki itself sitting in a borderland long pulled between Polish, Lithuanian and Russian power. Military planners and analysts have another name for it. Europe's Achilles heel. The Suwaki Gap is not dramatic to look at. It's mostly forest, farmland, lakes and roads running between Poland and Lithuania. But it is one of the most important corridors in Europe because it's the only land route connecting the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania to Poland and the rest of NATO. To the west is Kaliningrad, to the east is Belarus. So if that corridor were blocked, the Baltic states would be physically cut off from the rest of the alliance by land. Six million people would find themselves on NATO's most exposed edge, bordered by Russia, Belarus and the Baltic Sea. Which is why military planners fret about this. The Suwalki Gap itself is a trap made by several layers of history. First, because of the Polish Lithuanian border. So after the First World War, both Poland and Lithuania re emerged as independent states. Their borders were disputed and in 1920 they fought over the Suwalki Seni borderland, part of the wider Polish Lithuanian struggle over borders. After Empire collapsed, negotiations in Suwalki drew a demarcation line through this contested borderland. So at the time this line was a local compromise in the wreckage of Empire. Then came the Second World War. Lithuania was absorbed into the Soviet Union. Poland survived as a nominally independent state after 1945, but it was a Soviet satellite. It was under Soviet domination for decades. The border mattered less because both sides sat inside Moscow's strategic sphere. Then the Soviet Union collapsed. Poland joined NATO in 1999. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia joined in 2004. And suddenly a border that had once been a post war regional settlement became the alliance's eastern frontier, Kaliningrad, a Soviet internal outpost became a Russian exclave surrounded by NATO and EU territory. And the Suwalki gap, once obscure, became the Baltic state's only land connection to the rest of the alliance. Then Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And Finland and Sweden abandoned. Decades of neutrality, joined NATO. And that transformed the Baltic Sea into what's sometimes called now NATO's lake because it's surrounded. So from Moscow's perspective, Kaliningrad is both a weapon and a vulnerability. It lets Russia project pressure into Europe, but it's also isolated, surrounded and dependent on access routes through hostile territory. So what about today and these reports that we hear about hybrid warfare activity in Europe? Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, hybrid attacks have ramped up around Kaliningrad. The most obvious example is GPS interference. Modern aircraft, ships, ports, emergency services, phones, buses, financial systems and military units all rely on satellite navigation. Jamming blocks that signal. Spoofing falsifies it. So one makes you lose the map, essentially, and the other one gives you a false one. Researchers using sensor networks have traced Baltic GPS disruption to sites in Kaliningrad. Poland recorded 2,732 cases of electronic interference in January 2025. Lithuania recorded 1,185 in the same month. In March 2024, an RAF aircraft carrying the UK defence secretary was hit by GPS interference while flying near Kaliningrad. In May 2026. Lithuania's communications regulator said that Russia had massively exposed expanded its GPS spoofing capability from Kaliningrad, with antennae increasing from three in early 2025 to 1936. And Lithuania said that interference could now reach up to 450km, covering the Baltic States, much of Poland, parts of Finland and Sweden and the Baltic Sea. The EU has sanctioned Russian entities and individuals linked to electronic warfare from Kaliningrad, including, and this one's key, the 841st separate electronic warfare centre of the Baltic Fleet. It's wordy, but it's this highly specialised Russian military unit and they've also sanctioned senior figures overseeing operations there. So what's the response to all of this been? Lithuania has approved a military training ground near the Suwalki Gap designed to accommodate brigade size exercises of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 troops. Poland has become one of NATO's biggest defence spenders and Lithuania is also committing to spend around 5% of GDP on defence. Germany is moving thousands of soldiers and civilian personnel into Lithuania as part of its brigade deployment. And all these things that might sound separate are actually pieces of the same story. It's basically that the eastern edge of NATO is no longer treating Russian pressure there as theoretical. The their governments looking at this map and making the same judgment that the danger is not imaginary. A Russian conventional attack on NATO territory in the immediate term is still unlikely. Russia is heavily committed in Ukraine and a war with NATO would be a catastrophic escalation. But from a planner's perspective, the mistake is to think that unlikely means irrelevant. In 2013, many people did not think that Russia would Annex Crimea. In 2021, many dismissed the idea of a full scale invasion of Ukraine. Military planning is not based on what feels likely on a calm day. It's based on what would be catastrophic if unprepared. And the Suwalki gap is exactly that kind of problem. It's not dangerous because it's likely to explode tomorrow. It's dangerous because if it did, the consequences would be immediate. The Baltic states have very little strategic depth, which means that there's not much land between the border or coast and the capital cities, meaning there isn't much space to fall back, regroup and wait for help. Reinforcement routes are limited. And war games have suggested that NATO would struggle to successfully defend its most exposed Baltic members against a rapid Russian assault. Other analysts have argued that Russia's conventional advantage in the Baltic remains significant, even if NATO's position has improved since Finland and Sweden joined. The Suwalki gap is where several centuries collide. Medieval crusades creating Konigsberg Prussia, making it a German imperial city, the Second World War destroying it and transferring it the Soviet Union, turning it into Kaliningrad, the collapse of the Soviet Union isolating it, NATO enlargement surrounding it and Russia's war in Ukraine militarising the whole question. And that's how a medieval Prussian city, Soviet war settlement and narrow Polish Lithuanian corridor have become a live geopolitical threat today. It's the goal of this show to uncover the history behind today's headlines. Those deeper patterns of power, geography, empire and human nature that are shaping the world around us. So if you do want to understand not just what happened, but why it happened and what it tells us about what's likely to come next, you are in the right place. Subscribe so you never miss an episode. It makes a huge difference to the Channel at this stage. And it also means, hopefully you'll see the world differently and everything will make a lot more sense. See you next time.
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