Russian president visits Kaliningrad bordering NATO countries
Russian President Vladimir Putin has arrived in Russia’s westernmost region of Kaliningrad, a Baltic Sea exclave that is largely surrounded by two NATO members Poland and Lithuania.
The Russian leader paid a visit to Kaliningrad Oblast on a planned working trip, said the RIA news agency in a report on Thursday, citing Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying that “militaristic statements” from Baltic countries posed a risk to the Russian territory.
“Countries that are permeated with Russophobic tendencies are dragging more and more military facilities, military equipment belonging to the alliance into their territory. This is, of course, a danger. It requires additional measures to ensure that the security of our country is reliably ensured,” Peskov emphasized, stressing that the exclave “is an integral part of Russia.”
The Kremlin spokesman, however, Putin’s trip to Kaliningrad is part of his work and that it does not send a message to member states of the US-led military alliance.
“When the president visits the regions of the Russian Federation, it is not a message to NATO countries. This is the main thing that the president does. The most important thing is not to send messages, but to do what he has been doing for many years – working on the development of our country and our regions,” Peskov emphasized.
Putin last visited Kaliningrad in September 2022, seven months after he launched his ongoing “special military operation” in neighboring Ukraine, which strives for NATO membership.
The war unleashed waves of harsh sanctions from the United States and its European allies against Russia. Moscow has time and again warned that these sanctions and the flood of arms by some NATO members into the ex-Soviet republic will only prolong the war.
Elsewhere in his comments, Peskov said the Kremlin did not request a direct air corridor through Europe for Putin’s flight to Kaliningrad.
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