Russian province sets off alarms about a Cold War revival

“These are intelligent, educated people,” she added. “It’s horrible propaganda. We had to explain that it’s not true, that we are an open people.”

Kaliningrad — the city and surrounding province share the name — was once the heart of East Prussia and a German redoubt for 500 years before the Red Army captured it from the Third Reich in 1945. In the first 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow worked hard to bury Kaliningrad’s reputation as an armed garrison closed to foreigners.

These days, the Kremlin seems determined to do the opposite, and senior Western military officials and other experts now regard the Baltic region as a main fault line in revived East-West tensions.

One of the most confrontational incidents in years took place Tuesday about 70 nautical miles off Kaliningrad, where two Russian Su-24 planes buzzed the US guided missile destroyer Donald Cook, simulating an attack. One plane roared within 30 feet of the ship, Pentagon officials said.

In the immediate post-Soviet era, Moscow tried to reinvent Kaliningrad, which is more than 200 miles from mainland Russia, as its own duty-free Hong Kong. Factories producing cars, electronics, and furniture blossomed. After the provincial government negotiated visa-less travel to Polish border areas, the Ikea outlet in nearby Gdansk became a Russian colony.

“More people visited Europe than big Russia,” said Ilya Shumanov, the local representative of Transparency International, an anti-corruption organization based in Berlin.

In recent years, however, Moscow has heavily armed Kaliningrad, analysts say, equipping secretive bases with the advanced, long-range S-400 anti-aircraft missile system and mobile, medium-range Bastion anti-ship missiles. Russia has also held maneuvers here deploying Iskanders, a short-range ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

During congressional testimony in February, General Philip M. Breedlove, the NATO commander, described Kaliningrad as a “very militarized piece of property” and a “complete bubble” capable of repelling attacks by air, land, or sea.

With recent Russian military adventures in Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and Syria, President Vladimir Putin has left the world guessing when or where he might intervene next.

Given his stated policy of safeguarding ethnic Russians who were severed from the motherland after the Soviet Union disintegrated, some fear the next target might be the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. All three former Soviet republics are members of the European Union and NATO.

An attack on them would trigger NATO’s mutual defense treaty. Any attempt to defend them would have to get past Kaliningrad, wedged between Poland and Lithuania.

In the few conflicts where NATO has intervened, it has always displayed overwhelming force, experts said, but Kaliningrad would be different.

“The overall balance is very hostile to NATO,” said David A. Shlapak, lead author of a new RAND Corp. study on the Baltics.

Russians here tend to agree, although they mainly scoff at the idea of such a war. At Baltiysk, home to the Baltic Fleet and Russia’s most western outpost, grizzled fishermen lined the sea wall, barely glancing up at the modern corvettes steaming out to sea. Yet people here find being cast as a Russian fortress disorienting. In downtown Kaliningrad, the Vorota Cafe and gallery fills the neo-Gothic Sackheim Gate, a leftover from the 17th-century city walls. Parts of the city still resemble Germany, including some suburbs of red-tiled, Grunderzeit villas.

Any NATO forces attacking Kaliningrad “will get their teeth broken,” one gruff angler said. A navy veteran, he stood beneath a symbol of Russia’s might and glory: a hulking equestrian statue of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna facing the West.

Kaliningrad residents, watching NATO forces edge ever closer to Russia in recent years, generally seem to support buttressing the military.

“If you are my neighbor and you sit there with an ax, I will get an ax, too,” said Sivkova, the museum director. “It is foolish, but people say that weapons have been moved to Russia’s borders, so there has to be some parity.”

The cafe’s young founders wanted an art space like those in Amsterdam or Berlin, and they were surprised by a question about life on the new East-West fault line.

“It is a strange question, because we look at ourselves as being a bridge, not a fault line,” said Eugene Makarkhin, 26, a computer engineer.

Yet fallout from the deteriorating relations between Russia and the West rains down on Kaliningrad.

BMW, one of the province’s largest employers, recently shelved expansion plans in the face of a 40 percent decline in Russian car sales. Decades of Swedish development aid are coming to a close. Cultural exchanges have been sharply curtailed.

Until the Ukraine crisis, the most dangerous flotilla dispatched from Kaliningrad toward Sweden was raw sewage dumped into the Baltic.

“Kaliningrad is really one of the last big hot spots,” said Anna Tufvesson, the regional environmental project coordinator for the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.

Kaliningrad, home to almost half the province’s 1 million people, was the last major Baltic city without a modern water treatment plant. Sweden has helped build about 30 in the southern Baltic region since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kaliningrad’s German system, built around 1928 and still in use, basically filtered out old bicycles, dead dogs and not much else, Tufvesson said.

The modern Kaliningrad sewage plant, delayed for years, should be operating by the end of this year. Tufvesson expects all Swedish aid to be terminated by 2018.

The aid is another victim of the economic penalties imposed because of the Ukraine conflict. Sanctions cut off European bank loans for development here.

“Cooperation with European countries was a good source of cheap loans, and now we don’t have that possibility,” said Alexander N. Ivaschenko, who runs the Kaliningrad city waterworks. “Due to the sanctions, future projects are frozen.”

Confrontation is eclipsing cooperation. Putin has fed Western concerns about a possible Baltic conflict by ordering snap military exercises in northwestern Russia and deliberate violations of NATO airspace. While military officials and other experts on both sides say war is unlikely, contingency planning proceeds. Sweden and Finland, Russian neighbors that once professed neutrality, are considering the once unthinkable prospect of joining NATO.

Russia, too weak to confront NATO directly, relies on two methods to punch above its weight, military analysts says. In Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin conducted “hybrid warfare,” deploying anonymous Special Forces soldiers nicknamed “little green men,” nationalistic local militias and a news media blitz to seize territory without provoking a large, conventional military response.

Kaliningrad embodies the other method, a concentration of highly effective conventional weapons lethal enough to thwart any invader.

“Hybrid warfare represents one pillar of Russian defense policy,” said a new report on Kaliningrad from the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a research organization in London. “Air defense and guided missile strength represents another.”

There is also the Baltic Fleet. In the post-Soviet years, it shrank to 190 ships from 450 and to two submarines from 42, before the decline was reversed and some new corvettes were delivered in recent years, according to the London institute. The fleet remains strong enough, analysts say, to turn the Baltic into a deadly caldron.

For Americans, the Baltic trip wire revives an old Cold War conundrum, said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. The question used to be whether Americans would sacrifice Chicago to save West Berlin, he said. The assumption was that if the United States intervened to rescue the German city from a Soviet incursion, nuclear missiles would have annihilated Chicago.

“This is the same question posed about the Baltic States,” Trenin said. “Whether the United States would risk a military conflict with Russia for the sake of the Baltic States, knowing full well that Russia is still a nuclear power and when push comes to shove, nuclear will be on the table.”