Sea Control - Sea Control 437 - Kaliningrad: Perception and Reality with Dr. Steve Wills

Episode Date: June 18, 2023

Links1. "Kaliningrad: Impregnable Fortress or ‘Russian Alamo?,’" by Dr. Steve Wills, CNA, May 15, 2023.2. Sea Control 211 - Bursting A2/AD Bubbles with Robert Dalsjӧ & Michael Jonsson, by Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, November 15, 2020.3. Sea Control 168 - Operation Albion with Dr. Bruce Gudmundsson and Tim Powledge, by Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, April 13, 2020. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. Dr. Steve Wills, the Center for Maritime Strategies resident navalist, joins us today to discuss perception and reality related to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. This episode was edited and produced by Brennan Costillo. We're once again looking for audio editors, so if you're interested in learning how we put these podcasts together, think you're able to learn our basic editing skills, we will teach you. Drop us a note at seacontrol at simsec.org. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org.

So if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pot of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Steve Wills, and we'll be discussing his article for the Center for Naval Analysis, Kaliningrad Impregnable Fortress or Russian Alamo. So, Steve, welcome aboard.

Could you start by telling the listeners a little bit about your background? As I mentioned, CNA, but we didn't even talk about your role with the Center for Maritime Strategy there. Hey, thank you so very much, Jared. It's an honor and a pleasure to be with you here today. I work at, like so many people, I wear numerous hats. So my primary hat is working as the navalist, which is a nice way of saying strategist, I think, at the Center for Maritime Strategy, working for Admiral Jamie Fogel. I've been here for just a little over a year, and it's very exciting and fun. I get to do a lot of neat things.

Before that, I was full-time, and now I'm part-time at the Center for Naval Analyses, where I continue to work projects and so forth for them in a variety of capacities. And before that, and before I got my PhD in history with a focus on Cold War strategy and policy from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Before that, I was a surface warfare officer, and I spent my last five years as a NATO person working for JFC Naples, Commander Joint Forces Command Naples, Italy. And then for a brief stint at the end, I went to the now defunct NATO Maritime Component Command that was on this cool place called Nisida Island, just down the road from Naples. And there I was a standing NATO Maritime Group scheduler. So I was like a deputy N3, and I had SNMG2 and SNMCMG2.

So while I had sort of a southern focus, NATO maritime was focused throughout, you know, the theater, and I spent time in the Baltics regions as well. I've been to Klaipeda, I've been to Helsinki, been to a couple places in Sweden too. So that's the focus there. But happy to be here with you today and talk about Kaliningrad and what it is, what it's been, what it could be in the future. Well, thank you for coming aboard. As a reminder to listeners, all opinions today are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. Yes. Also, timestamp this for the listeners. So we're recording this Friday,

June 2nd. So if there's any sort of dramatic developments that you, the listener, feel we should be addressing related to the war in Ukraine or something, the reason we're not talking about them is because they haven't happened yet. So Steve, back to you. Can you explain Kaliningrad's geography and how Russia came to possess the exclave? It's got an amazing history to it. So Kaliningrad was originally founded long ago by crusading Teutonic knights who were busy pushing Christian faith and, I guess, pre-Prussian militarism east. And it became sort of eventually the easternmost bastion of Prussia, eventually the German Empire after 1870, where it was extensively fortified and the city's outskirts today still are filled with sort of brick and

mortar fortresses that are sort of contemporaneous with like Fort Sumter and other U.S. fortifications from the Civil War era. The town is still ringed with them in a way that many other European cities long ago expanded, tore those down and got rid of them. The fortifications were largely obsolete. By the end of the 19th century, Germany really didn't fully update them. The active fronts expected for the German Empire and later the Third Reich were much further away. But then all of a sudden, at the beginning of 1945, modern warfare caught up with Kaliningrad again. Then Königsberg was the name of the city. In one of their last major offensives, up through May, actually the end of the war,

the Russians were busy encircling and eventually taking the city. And there was a great amount of damage done in the course of it. A lot of its iconic German and Baltic architecture was destroyed as a result. And in the aftermath of the Second World War, Russia and actually then the Soviet Union ended up with Kaliningrad in its possession. Königsberg, renamed for Kaliningrad, a somewhat do-nothing Russian president who was more of a puppet to the communist leaders than anything else, but he had a good record. So named Kaliningrad, apparently he didn't try and take anything from Stalin. And the city was again fortified, only this time by the Soviet Union. Even though it was still deep within the Warsaw Pact, it became this strange

exclave. As you pointed out, Jared, it's not contiguous at all with the rest of the Soviet Union, but it was still deep within Warsaw Pact territory and formed an important naval base for the then Soviet Baltic fleet in Bialtusk. But at that time, you could argue that the Baltic was a divided lake. Today, we call the Baltic a sunken meadow. Back then, it was sort of a divided sunken meadow. And NATO didn't have a really strong foothold there. I mean, if you look at the old Cold War strategies for fights in the Baltic Sea, the Danes and the Germans were going to mount a desperate attempt to keep the Russian Baltic fleet from breaking out into the North Sea. You had the Finns and the Swedes to the north who were neutral, weren't expected to be much

helped there. And you had a lot of Warsaw Pact, you know, Poland, East Germany, Soviet Union itself. So, so much has changed since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Baltic has become arguably a NATO lake now, even more so with the accession of Finland and the projected accession of Sweden, but yet Kaliningrad remains. And you can look up any number of references that suggest it's one of the most heavily armed places in the world, you know, compared to its overall number of square kilometers. There's a lot of weaponry attached there, missiles, warships, aircraft, a lot more troops, at least more before the Ukraine war, but still a significant Russian now base there on the Baltic Sea. And it remains sort of, again, a fortified place, now surrounded by NATO territory.

I'm going to go slightly off script with this next question here, because I want to talk a little bit more about Kaliningrad's role when the Soviet Union still existed. Was it still the primary base for the Baltic fleet at that point, or was it kind of one of many sources of Soviet slash Warsaw Pact naval power in the Baltic? It was still one of the most, it was the most significant forward base. You can still go back to Kronstadt and do repair work and so forth, but consider it an operational base within the Baltic Sea. And it was in reliably Russian territory, garrisoned by then Soviet forces. Not to say that the Poles or the East Germans weren't reliable Warsaw Pact members, at least for most of its history, but still a significant base

for the Baltic Sea Fleet, which at that time, the Soviet Baltic Sea Fleet was, of course, much bigger than the current Russian Baltic Fleet that you see today. So still an important operational base, even in the Cold War period. And what has Russia done to increase Kaliningrad's capabilities in the last two decades? Unlike other places that saw a complete exodus of Russian or, you know, Soviet and then Russian combat capability at the end of the Cold War, as, you know, the Russian military substantially shrank over the course of the 1990s. You know, everybody's military downsized in the wake of the Cold War. But as we know, the Russian military, especially downsized, had significant drops in capability across the spectrum. Notably,

submarines is my favorite one. You know, at the height of the Cold War in the 80s, the Russians had over 300 boats of all types. Last I checked, we're down to like 54, between 62 and 54 boats of all types, including experimental ones. But Kaliningrad, beginning in the mid-1990s, actually increased its amount of forces present, probably in response to NATO expansion over that same period. So you got a whole division worth of armored units and infantry and associated ground forces there. You got significant deployments of both surface-to-air and long-range surface-to-surface missiles, so not only defensive missile armament, but also offensive missile armament that, you know, could command, you know, big chunks of the Baltic further

out. You got several aviation squadrons, and while the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet shrank, what new ships it got were pretty good. If you look today, you've got a number of the, I'm going to mispronounce the steragucci class corvettes that are very appear to be a very capable warship you have russia's last two frigates the i'm going to butcher this one too mike kaufman's going to hit me over the head later for not saying this right uh new stromani and the other one is yaroslav mundi which are the last two sort of soviet era frigates uh designed that were completed in the 1990s and even though there's only i think one operational kilo class submarine right now The Russians are still having fits and starts with the Lada class.

The first of the Ladas, the St. Petersburg, didn't do well, but more are under construction, undergoing trials and so forth. So eventually you could see, you know, upwards of five modern diesel submarines within the Baltic that would be equipped to use the caliber land attack cruise missile as well. Kind of like what you're seeing in the Black Sea right now. Again, where Russian military capability contracted in other places in the post-Cold War era, it remained strong and in some cases increased in Kaliningrad. How have the forces in Kaliningrad or that were in Kaliningrad been affected by the war in Ukraine? Okay, so they've deployed some ground force units. There was a Marine Infantry Unit, you know, those iconic folks in the Russian military who wear the blue and white striped shirts, considered elite forces. So at least one battalion of those folks were moved. So the Russians did move some of their forces out of the Kaliningrad Oblast. Notably, the 11th Army Corps was largely moved out of the Oblast, and apparently it suffered some heavy losses fighting around Kharkiv in August and September of last year. and also, as I said, one battalion, and I didn't give you the name, the 336th Guards Naval Infantry

Brigade. Again, those iconic, well-trained, well-equipped Russian naval infantry forces was also deployed to combat in Ukraine and apparently won a number of decorations while it was there too. So they've moved some of the land forces out, as Russia has stripped land forces from many of its other fronts across the world, since it's such a large nation and faces multiple sea zones and multiple clusters of countries. But the aviation component remains strong. There's been no evidence that the missile components have changed. And the Baltic Sea fleet remains operational and doing exercises. No doubt it will shadow the next ball tops operation. It's shadowed the last ones. And there've been a couple of recent intercepts of NATO combat aircraft by

Russian aircraft in the region. So Kaliningrad is active. It's not a ghost town and it remains a significant concern to NATO in the region. What other options do the Russians have for basing in the Baltic? You mentioned Kronstadt previously, and that's pretty sure what we're going to talk about here. How capable are those in comparison to Kaliningrad? the problem with kronstadt is geographic it can be bottled up and and that's and the russians know this they've got a choke point that they've got to get out between the baltic states and finland to actually get out there into the baltic that can be mined if you chat with folks from the baltic countries and from finland finland has finland is one of the few navies out there that

has actual surface mine layers. So they practice this. And over the course of the post-Cold War era, we equipped, we in the West, equipped the Baltic states with what naval capability they did get was mine sweeping and mine countermeasure stuff. So those countries, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, know how to deal with and operate mines as well. The Russians get this. There is a mine sweeping capability within the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet. But, you know, if you've served a float, you know that, you know, mines are hard. I was the XO and the chief engineer of a mine countermeasure ship, USS Patriot MCM-7. And I got to tell you, hunting for mines is hard. It's not easy. It's very time consuming. And if you drop a whole bunch of mines out there, that's a

That's a significant barrier to Russian operations, whereas Kaliningrad fronts directly and Bialtusk, the port that they use, fronts directly onto the Baltic. They've got some more direct routes they can operate from there. So, again, it's a better operational base for what the Russians might want to do in the Baltic as opposed to Kronstadt, which is, again, subject to a choke point. Now, you mentioned Kronstadt being subject to a choke point, but isn't the same thing obtained for Bialtis? Because as I look at the straight of Bialtis straight or straight of Bialtis, I forget the correct exact terminology there. It's only 400 meters across. So getting in and out there, it's actually pretty confined space. And if you just seed it over and over again with mines, now you're running a risk every time you want to transit in and out of there.

No, that's very true. That's very true. But at least that is a lot closer to where the Russians can both defend it and hopefully sweep it, you know, as opposed to they would have to come out a number of miles out of Kronstadt and then transit between actual NATO territories to get to, you know, open water, which would make it potentially harder for them to keep that one open. But I agree with you, that's tight. That sounds like trying to drive into Guam, which, as I remember, was a terribly hard place to drive into. There's probably currents there, too, that make it even more challenging. Where do you come down, then, on evaluating whether Kaliningrad is a threat and why? I guess, how much of a threat? Because I think we can all agree that, yes, it is a threat. But the question of how much of a threat is, I think, open for some debate. fully fully agree and i kind of come down strangely enough in the middle in some ways and let me explain why this is important so people look at kaliningrad as in different ways as the article suggests some look at it as you know this base from which the russians can you know cut off the baltic states from the rest of nato the the suwalki gap being being the targeted

location that Russian forces in Kaliningrad might help take control of. On the other hand, it's surrounded. The Polish military has been building up a number of significant ground forces around the Kaliningrad ex-stave as well. I think I sit in the middle. It should not be lightly dismissed in any way because of the capabilities that the Russians have put there in terms of missiles, aircraft, and the Baltic Sea Fleet operational units. For that reason, I don't think you can dismiss it. At the same time, when people talk about A2AD as a concept and creating these no-go zones where U.S. and allied vessels just cannot venture, Kaliningrad is a great case study

in that because it's small. And in the article, I included a really, I think it's an important document written by the Swedish Defense Research Organization. Principal author was a guy named Robert Daljo, but there are a number of other smart folks who worked on this. And the Swedes who have been concerned about the Baltic forever, as one Swedish naval officer told me, we've been facing the Russians longer than you've been a country. So you have to understand this.

The Swedes took a lot of time and effort to look at Kaliningrad and break down its defensive systems. And that paper is worth a read because that's exactly what it does. It shows you that, yes, on a clear day, you can see forever from Kaliningrad and affect operations throughout the Baltic. But a lot of capability goes into letting you see forever. So you've got aircraft, you've got ground-based radars, you've got satellite coverage. A lot goes into, I think that some have called a reconnaissance strike complex that sits within Kaliningrad. For the Russians, you know, it serves an offensive and defensive purpose and creates sort of a bastion there against what my CNA Russia colleagues call the American aerospace blitzkrieg.

The Russians are aware of this. They've seen it in action over the post-Cold War period. And this is one of their attempts to create, you know, a defense against it, both offensive and defensive means. So I think I come down on the fact of saying respect Kaliningrad. It is not something you're just going to walk over suddenly. It's got some significant capabilities, both offensive and defensive. But at the same time, no defense is perfect. And while Kaliningrad has been surrounded by brick and mortar fortresses in the past that people thought were impregnable, they were taken. And the same thing goes for modern fortresses of missiles, electronic warfare complexes, and so forth. So respect Kaliningrad, but don't expect it to just be a complete walkover. And as always, there's been concern that nuclear weapons are present in Kaliningrad too, which for any strategist or operational planner is just an unknown.

If you read those 1980s naval strategy documents, the maritime strategy, when it gets to the nuclear thing, it said, Well, this is kind of an unknown, and they always refer to it as an unknown. So presence of nuclear weapons could obviate some of these concerns, too. But Kaliningrad's there. It's not going anyplace. Definitely Russian territory. It doesn't appear that the Germans want it back, but you've talked to German naval officers,

so they might have other opinions on that. Maybe Poland would like to have it be part of a greater Poland someday. The Poles occupied that territory at one point in the Deep Dark Pass. So so we'll see. But respect Kaliningrad. But it's not perfect. Yeah, I would say of all the Germans I've talked to, none of them wanted that. Just to be very clear, it's like if there are any concerns about, you know, militarism, anything like that, absolutely no one said that they want it back. What was interesting was the intel briefing that I sat through made it very much sound like and this was 2017, I want to say, made it very much sound like the Baltic Sea Fleet. man solely by 12 foot tall supermen with uh you know they have like the a2ad bubbles

set up there's like now if you if you get underway in this area you'll die and everything and then robert dalzo and mikhail johnson published bursting the bubble and we had them on c control 211 you want to go back and listen to it for listeners you can go back and listen to robert's stuff absolutely and they published a sequel i mean it's funny you mentioned like the swedes had more time dealing with Russia, but Gustavus Adalvas actually landed at what was then something else, Konigsberg, I think at the time, but actually landed there. And that was part of his 30 years war of sort of kickoff. Oh, yeah. Putting forces ashore there and establishing the first remnants of a fortress there. Ever since that report was published by Robert and

his team there I've had an increasingly declining opinion of but the importance or the like the threat level of Kaliningrad because as he points out like his entire the entire point there's like curvature of the earth is this thing that exists I'm sorry for any flat earthers listening like curvature of the earth is a very limiting factor on the reconnaissance complex which means you're gonna have to put aircraft up now if you actually want to threaten to the outer limits of where your weapons can reach and now the the war in ukraine has happened we're a year plus into it year and a half almost yeah and you see a reticence by the russians to operate in any sort of threatened airspace and makes you question even more is like so are they really gonna put their aircraft up and

like actually try to push out here because it's one thing to do it in the black sea where ukrainians kind of have to come around a corner and stuff if they want to threaten some of those forces that are in the Sea of Azov or even down in Crimea, something else entirely in the Baltic where, again, sort of the NATO strike complex can reach directly in there without having to go around anything else to threaten those, hold those weapons at risk if you want to try to deploy reconnaissance assets. So I'm as conflicted as you are. I also like your use of the Alamo. I felt like we should have explained that to our foreign listeners, because if you're not super familiar with the Alamo, everyone thinks it's just an incredible battle and story of defiance. It's

like, hey, look, there was a 13-day siege, but the actual fight itself was over in about an hour. And there are a few things less impressive than actually going and seeing the site of the Alamo. And you're like, wait a minute, they were trying to hold this? It's tiny. It's like a house. Konigsberg survived under siege for months with the Red Army, still having to fight its way through so yeah uh you're absolutely right it's a big difference from a mud brick mission and mythology certainly plays plays a role in that and that's why i use the uh the alamo as a as an example but the disney corporation did more for the battle of the alamo than any any historian no exactly and the opposing side had longer range artillery i think too in the end that

helped. There's a lot of interesting history at work here. The Russians have long had, I would argue, a very defensive outlook on the Baltic. If you go back to World War I, they created this very extensive sort of mine coastal defense and anchored ship bombardment sort of system to try and keep the Germans from advancing further up toward St. Petersburg. So very always, at least At least in the late 19th and early 20th century, the Russians had a very defensive outlook on the region. And then just thinking about, for our listeners, thinking about Russia in the long term and on a much wider scale. As we know, Russia is this huge country that has multiple fronts in different water spaces and against different groups of countries. There's a Baltic front. There's a Central European front.

There's the Black Sea front where conflict is occurring now. There's the Pacific and, of course, the Arctic. And if you look back in history, especially my favorite is the Crimean War. And there's a great book by Professor Andrew Lambert on the naval aspects of the Crimean War. And he makes, I think, a really interesting argument that if you can collapse one of Russia's various fronts in its vast geographic space, whether that's the Black Sea, the Baltic, the Pacific, etc., if you can damage or pin down the Russians in one place, then they can't act in other places so well because of that terribly divided geography. Even though it's interior lines of communication, they're really long interior lines. Ultimately, in the Crimean War, the allies then, Britain and

France, were able to defeat Russia on one of those fronts, obviously, and again, our current current combat location, Sevastopol in the Black Sea, but they also had extensive operations in the Baltic, and even some in the Pacific to tie down and pick at the Russians on those other fronts. And the folks who wrote their 1980s maritime strategy told me they thought about it afterward and thought, yeah, that's kind of what we're trying to do with our maritime strategy, tie the Russians down in all these other places. So what does that have to do with the here and now. So because this conflict is occurring that is sucking up so many Russian forces and assets and so forth, especially ground forces in the Black Sea region right now in the Ukraine war,

hopefully it makes it less likely that the Russians will act aggressively on these other fronts. That doesn't mean, of course, as I say, that they don't have strong defensive there. So it's not an open door for anyone to go in there and affect those other Russian locations like Kaliningrad. At least maybe the good news is they're not going to threaten the Baltic states. They're not going to threaten Poland. Nobody's going to be sending little green men into the Suwalki Gap or anything like that. But you never know. You must watch the Russians everywhere. I think I saw recently in the Barents Observer a snowmobile parade in Svalbard that looked terribly like little green snowmobile men outside Barentsburg. So I guess you always just have to

keep an eye on them. Well, thank you. One more plug here. So Sea Control 168, we discussed Operation Albion with Dr. Bruce Gumminson and Tim College. And then that was, if you want to listen to a couple of people talk about amphibious operations in the Baltic during World War I, that's a good one for you. But that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Steve Wills. Steve, where can we find you online? What are you working on next? you can find me at the center for maritime strategy uh under the uh the aegis the overall aegis of the navy league uh that's one place you can find me at uh center for naval analyses as well where i occasionally post and work various podcasts and things uh we've got extensive

programs on both sites the current article that i have up going uh that's gotten some buzz and criticism both is a look at habitability for U.S. Navy sailors during major overhauls and the thought that we might lease a few cruise ships to improve the habitability of sailors as opposed to those awful birthing barges that are so 20th century that smell bad, are damp, and are not very pleasant places to live. U.S. Navy has always led the way in improving habitability for sailors. We need to keep doing that we'll see thank you again for joining us to listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time ¶¶