Kaliningrad Oblast: We visited this cut-off portion of the Russian state today,, it’s located on the Baltic coastline between Poland and Lithuania. In the Soviet era, westerners couldn’t visit Kaliningrad as it was a super-secret military enclave.
If we’re not the first regular cruise ship to visit Kaliningrad, we’re one of the first. They’re still trying to figure out what to show western tourists.
We saw considerable stocks of pre-positioned military hardware, waiting for troops who may never come, or may arrive, if Putin concludes we don’t have the will to defend our friends in the region: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania for starters, add in Poland and Finland, plus the Scandanavian countries - Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.
The port where we docked - Baltiysk - is the base for the Russian Baltic fleet, and we saw the usual smallish gray-painted warships. What was very unusual was two propjet-driven, ground effect amphibious vessels plus a Russian version of an LST. All three are designed to put troops on a hostile shore, all three were “parked” where we would see them as we sailed out. I wonder what that means?
In Kaliningrad town, there’s a cathedral which is no longer a church but functions as a concert hall and museum. It has a heck of a pipe organ, a huge tracker that can really thunder. That and an amber museum/sales room were all we were shown.
The Baltic region is where most of the world’s amber is found, it being petrified tree sap of course. They do some amazing art with it.
