Episode 346: Life on the Frontier: Kaliningrad and the New Geography of European Security
In this episode, we host Dr Stanislaw Domaniewski to explore life on Europe’s eastern borders, focusing on Kaliningrad, the Polish-Russian frontier, and the politics of the European Union’s external edge. Drawing on his work on cross-border cooperation, border mobility, and the lived experience of border communities, Dr Domaniewski explains why these regions matter far beyond lines on a map. They are places where trade, identity, security, and geopolitics meet, and where wider tensions between Russia and Europe are often felt first.
We discuss how Kaliningrad moved from being a space of everyday exchange to one of growing isolation, and what that has meant for the people living on both sides of the border. From local trade and service economies to militarisation, amber smuggling, migration pressure via Belarus, and the hardening of borders across Finland and the Baltic region, this conversation offers a grounded look at how macro-level decisions shape ordinary lives. It also asks what borderlands can tell us about Europe’s changing security landscape, and why the clearest signs of geopolitical change often appear at the periphery first.
Dr Domaniewski is currently a Grant Writer at LUT University in Finland. His published work has examined the small border traffic zone between Poland and the Kaliningrad region, the role of border permeability in shaping local development, and, more recently, how residents of Kaliningrad have adapted to isolation and changing border conditions after Russia’s war against Ukraine.
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Transcript
[00:00:01] Stanislaw Domaniewski: The unintended consequence of the whole thing is that normal people suffer. That’s it. Their businesses go under, their livelihoods can’t flourish, and they just suffer.
[00:00:12] Dominic Bowen: Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide.
[00:00:21] Dominic Bowen: This episode is brought to you by Conductor. Conductor software helps you design and deliver crisis exercises without needing a big team or weeks of preparation. You can create a central exercise library with Conductor Worlds, and you can generate reports that support your governance and compliance requirements. So, if you want flexible, realistic crisis exercises that are easy to adopt, then Conductor is worth a look.
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[00:01:18] Dominic Bowen: In today’s episode, we’re talking about Europe’s eastern borders, how European Union policy, Russian relations, and local border traffic can really transform life. We’ll be looking particularly at the Polish-Russian frontier, as well as wider EU-Russia border relations. To join us for this important conversation, we’re joined by Dr Stanislaw Domaniewski. He is a researcher and professional who specialises in the European Union’s external borders, cross-border cooperation, and the realities of people living in border areas, especially along the Polish-Russian border and in the Kaliningrad region, among other places. I think this is going to be a really important and interesting conversation. Dr Domaniewski, welcome to the International Risk Podcast.
[00:02:03] Stanislaw Domaniewski: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.
[00:02:06] Dominic Bowen: Whereabouts in the world do we find you today?
[00:02:09] Stanislaw Domaniewski: North-eastern Finland. Not too far from Russia, actually.
[00:02:14] Dominic Bowen: Fantastic. Has spring made its way to north-eastern Finland yet, or are you still in the depths of winter?
[00:02:21] Stanislaw Domaniewski: No, to tell you the truth, it’s sunny outside, around seven or eight degrees, and almost all the snow is gone. So it’s quite strange for this time of year. It should still be snowing like crazy.
[00:02:32] Dominic Bowen: But we’ll take the sun if it’s shining. Now, you’ve spent years studying the Polish-Russian borderland and the Kaliningrad region. This is a part of the world that people living in Northern Europe are certainly quite interested in, but much of the world doesn’t really know much about it. What drew you to this part of the world, and why do you think it’s so interesting?
[00:02:54] Stanislaw Domaniewski: It’s a funny little thing. You have a piece of Russia that ended up somehow in Central and Eastern Europe, and if you look into the history of how that happened, between the breakup of the Soviet Union and, before that, the Second World War, it’s just an interesting geographical curiosity.
[00:03:16] Dominic Bowen: And maybe that would be an interesting thing to explore because, again, I think Kaliningrad really came much more to the fore in early 2022, when many security analysts and even businesses were wondering what that region would mean for the Baltic states, but also for many of the Scandinavian countries. What is the situation in Kaliningrad like? It’s obviously a very heavily militarised location, but can you describe what life in Kaliningrad looks like today?
[00:03:43] Stanislaw Domaniewski: I haven’t visited the region in, I would say, six or seven years, so I can’t say what it looks like on the ground today. But I can say that the situation probably hasn’t changed very much. It’s a very militarised place. You can see it when you’re on the street: there are lots of people in uniform, lots of people connected to different armed services. It’s just a very different Russia, let’s call it. I’ve been to several other cities in Russia, and no place was like Kaliningrad.
[00:04:19] Dominic Bowen: And what’s it like on the European Union side of Kaliningrad? Is there a difference? Is there a mirroring of that security presence? Is there an equally strong military and security build-up?
[00:04:30] Stanislaw Domaniewski: There wasn’t really that kind of military presence on the Polish side of the border when I was doing my research. Certainly that has changed now, especially with the American air base that was put in around 2018. But previously, no, it wasn’t anything like that. It was just normal people living normal everyday lives.
[00:04:52] Dominic Bowen: I’m regularly travelling between conflict zones and non-conflict zones, and I find border areas particularly interesting. Some of them appear to be just marginal lines in the sand, and there’s no difference between the left and right side of the border. Whereas in some countries there is a significant difference. What was it like when there was more free-flowing trade and movement between Kaliningrad and some of the European Union countries? What was that like?
[00:05:25] Stanislaw Domaniewski: It was really interesting. A lot of money was getting pumped into Poland from the EU in 2017, and you could see a stark contrast as soon as you crossed the border. Roads were worse, power lines were all over the place, and the general condition of things in Kaliningrad looked vastly different from what you saw on the Polish side of the border. Trade was much more ad hoc. People had many, many small businesses. There weren’t many huge conglomerates, supermarkets, or anything like that. It was mostly small-scale trade. The biggest things you would see were the petrol stations, because they were state-owned, so it would be Rosneft or some equivalent. But overall, it looked like Poland twenty or thirty years ago. It was very strange.
[00:06:27] Dominic Bowen: And it makes me wonder about identity, conflict, crime, political tension, smuggling, and maybe even economic dependence between communities. From your research, what are the risks that concern local communities living along these borders?
[00:06:44] Stanislaw Domaniewski: There was some smuggling going on. Once in a while you would hear in the press that somebody had been robbed, or something similar. Amber was a big issue, with people from the Russian side trying to smuggle it into Poland and the wider EU. But mostly I would say it was a pretty safe area. I visited a couple of times and never had any real safety concerns.
[00:07:20] Dominic Bowen: The European Union’s external borders are often discussed in terms of security and migration control. But what does your work reveal when it comes to keeping borders open enough for local traffic and local life to continue, while also keeping them closed enough to maintain European and national security?
[00:07:46] Stanislaw Domaniewski: I think Kaliningrad was a good example of that balance, in the way trade worked between the two sides of the border. It was like a small experiment with the visa regime, and for the most part it benefited both sides. There wasn’t really immigration tension, if you know what I mean, until, I suppose, the second invasion of Ukraine. Then there was some chatter that immigrants would be sent across the border, as is happening constantly via Belarus now. But in the end that never really materialised. I think the Russians probably understood that this was a sensitive military area and didn’t want to complicate things by doing that.
[00:08:49] Dominic Bowen: And you mentioned amber, which is a really interesting example. It’s difficult to go to Poland and buy souvenirs without seeing amber everywhere. I’ve read that Kaliningrad holds around 80 per cent of the world’s known amber reserves. That’s a phenomenal amount. Is that still being trafficked into Poland and Lithuania, generally by road? Is this an important lifeline for people in Kaliningrad?
[00:09:23] Stanislaw Domaniewski: I think it’s more an important lifeline for the authorities than for local people. Most local people are not in a position to go out and dig these deposits out of the ground. That takes money and investment. So I think it’s more likely to involve the authorities, or larger smuggling rings already engaged in this sort of thing. Since the Polish government cracked down on cigarette and alcohol smuggling, amber became much easier in relative terms, because you only need a rock the size of your fist to make a very large amount of money.
[00:10:10] Dominic Bowen: You also mentioned Belarus. We’ve all heard about Russia and Belarus weaponising migration and encouraging migrants, particularly at one point from Iraq and Syria, to go via Belarus into the EU. Many listeners might wonder why the EU does not simply build bigger fences. How large a problem is the weaponisation of migration from Belarus into the European Union today?
[00:10:44] Stanislaw Domaniewski: I think it’s significant, not necessarily because of the number of people coming through, but because of the amount of money that the EU and the Polish government have to spend to stop those relatively small numbers. If you look at it from that perspective, Poland is spending a huge amount of money to keep a finger in the dam. Belarus could be sending a lot more people than it is currently. From one point of view, it is a geopolitical signal from Lukashenko: he wants to show that he has a stake in the geopolitical game between Russia and Poland. But for me, the people who pass through are ultimately going to Germany or another third country. They do not stay in Poland.
[00:11:47] Dominic Bowen: That’s really interesting. A lot of your work looks at what happens when borders are meant to become bridges, but instead become barriers. What do we know about the gap between political rhetoric, whether from former Polish governments, Belarus, Putin, or Medvedev, and the actual realities of communities living on the ground along these borders?
[00:12:16] Stanislaw Domaniewski: If you go to parts of eastern Poland along the Belarusian-Polish border, there are villages where migrants have been helped by local people. In other places you see something different. The point is that it connects directly to people on the ground. Many of these eastern communities are mixtures of what exists on one side of the border and what exists on the other. People see the suffering. They see what is happening to those in the forest who are being let through the fences on the Belarusian side and then apprehended by the Polish authorities, and many of them want to help. Yet at the same time those villages often tend to vote in a more centre-right way, and the centre-right in Poland has been very hardline on allowing immigration through that route. At one point they suspended asylum laws and then had to reinstate them after pressure from the EU. So I’m not sure there really is a clean rhetorical divide. Political narratives do filter down to people. On the Belarusian side, under Lukashenko, it is much harder to know what ordinary people actually think, because it is not a democratic state. There is no real way to gauge public opinion in the same way.
[00:14:13] Dominic Bowen: What happens along borders among communities is really fascinating. If I look at the Thai-Burma border, for example, Burma has very significant economic challenges, but parts of both sides of that border are flourishing. More recently I was in Syria and Lebanon. The Lebanese side of the border is flourishing because of trade, but on the Syrian side there are towns that are now effectively ghost towns, partly because of Assad-era corruption, regime control, and the militarisation of the border. Does that resonate with what you have seen?
[00:14:55] Stanislaw Domaniewski: Yes, very much so. On the Kaliningrad-Polish border, a lot of people on the Polish side invested heavily in services aimed at residents of Kaliningrad that were either unavailable there or of lower quality. If you went to Olsztyn, for example, you would find dental practice after dental practice, plastic surgery clinics, beauty clinics, and even birthing services, all catering to Russians coming from Kaliningrad. It wasn’t that those services did not exist in Kaliningrad, but they were often of a different quality. Then the border closed, and those people stopped coming. Many of those businesses had to shut down. Meanwhile, residents of Kaliningrad were left with the same lower-quality services they had before.
[00:16:06] Dominic Bowen: Across Europe we continually hear from politicians that tight, secure borders are essential for safety and security. From your research, where do policymakers get this wrong? What are the unintended consequences of strong security policies that ignore the realities of how borders actually function?
[00:16:27] Stanislaw Domaniewski: The unintended consequence is that normal people suffer. That’s it. Their businesses go under, their livelihoods can’t flourish, and they just suffer. I remember one especially interesting example from Kaliningrad. We were walking around a bazaar and came across a stall where a man just had a notebook full of pictures. I asked what it was, and he explained that he was, in effect, “IKEA”. You would pick what you wanted, he would drive to IKEA in Gdańsk, buy the items, and bring them back. He was one of perhaps twenty people offering that kind of service because there was no IKEA in Kaliningrad, and the nearest one was only about ninety kilometres away across the border. If you imported goods below a certain value, some taxes were not charged on the Russian side, and you could also reclaim VAT when leaving Poland. So he had built a whole business around this. It was completely ad hoc. He did not even have a laptop. He just had glossy printed pictures of furniture and product names, with prices written down in złoty, and everything was done in cash.
[00:17:58] Dominic Bowen: I love the ingenuity of people. It always impresses me.
[00:18:01] Stanislaw Domaniewski: Exactly. Some of the things we saw felt like stepping back thirty years. If you wanted a better rate on roubles, someone would tell you not to go to the bank, but to go to the man on the street corner with the waist pack. If you had dollars, there would be another person for that. It was strange, but it worked.
[00:18:25] Dominic Bowen: We often hear that borders are treated as the periphery, the outside, the edge of a country. But in reality they can be a kind of front line, where political, security, and trade changes become visible first. In your research and travels, do borderlands sometimes provide earlier warning signs than the rest of the country?
[00:18:55] Stanislaw Domaniewski: Definitely. On the Kaliningrad border, after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Poland started building watchtowers even though the small border traffic zone was still functioning normally and crossing could still take only ten or fifteen minutes. There was already a sense that something might happen there. The Russians also increased securitisation on their side. I had friends who were threatened in 2013 and 2014 simply for walking on the Polish side of the border too close to the markers. Russian guards pointed a Kalashnikov at them and told them to move away. There were definite signs that something was shifting.
[00:20:00] Dominic Bowen: You’re based in Finland, and Finland is often seen as a country that never really dropped its guard in the way much of Europe did after the Cold War. Based on what you see, and on border studies more broadly, what can we learn from Finland’s relationship with Russia?
[00:20:23] Stanislaw Domaniewski: You can say the Finns were right, but for the previous twenty years you could also have said they were wrong. If the situation had developed differently, people would have asked why they were spending all that money. So there is always some hindsight involved. That said, the Finns learned from experience that they are a much smaller country. They need to focus on defence and look after themselves in a neighbourhood where nobody else may do it for them. Then, of course, they joined NATO, together with Sweden, which is another form of securing themselves by joining the largest alliance in the world. Sometimes it is a dangerous place to go alone.
[00:21:31] Dominic Bowen: Finland is not just managing the border, though. It is hardening it legally, politically, physically, and psychologically. Finland is now in NATO, and it has the alliance’s longest border with Russia. We have also seen an increase in hybrid attacks since 2022. What lessons should others be learning from Finland?
[00:22:00] Stanislaw Domaniewski: I think perhaps the more useful lesson is what not to copy too closely. Finland is building fences and sensor networks, but in modern warfare fences are not going to matter much if things escalate seriously. They will get steamrolled. The sensor network may matter more, but it is a mixed bag. This is not a simple question.
[00:22:29] Dominic Bowen: That’s fair enough. And when we look at the Baltic states, especially Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, they appear much more concerned, partly because of their size and partly because of domestic politics. What actions are they taking, and how has that changed since 2022?
[00:22:55] Stanislaw Domaniewski: I can speak most confidently about Lithuania because it borders Kaliningrad. Lithuania has taken a hard line on border securitisation and on how it handles transit from Kaliningrad. At one stage there was even discussion of mining parts of the border, although I do not know whether that was ever implemented. They have definitely fortified parts of it with barbed wire and anti-tank obstacles. But Lithuania is constrained by another issue. It signed a treaty with Russia in 1991 that it cannot easily tear up, which allows rail traffic to pass through Lithuania between Kaliningrad and Belarus. The trains are heavily controlled: once the doors are shut, nobody gets on or off until they leave Lithuanian territory. What used to be a more normal transit arrangement has become much more restrictive. The train uses its own special track in Vilnius station and is completely segregated from the rest of the station. There was also a period when images of destroyed buildings in Ukraine and other wartime imagery were displayed facing the train, alongside slogans essentially telling passengers, “This is what your government is doing.” I know that was the case for a time, though I cannot say whether it remains so now.
[00:25:18] Dominic Bowen: You’ve written about living with isolation. What does that actually look like in Kaliningrad? And is this now the new normal, or do you think the European Union will eventually cool down again?
[00:25:36] Stanislaw Domaniewski: I don’t think the European Union is going to cool down any time soon. It sees Russia as a threat. People in Kaliningrad would obviously prefer otherwise, but they are now fairly isolated. Land traffic has been heavily restricted, and it is extremely difficult to cross the border. If you fly from St Petersburg to Kaliningrad, the plane has to take a huge detour. The same is true from Moscow. Rather than flying directly across Baltic airspace, flights have to route north and then back down through international air corridors. So what should be a straightforward domestic journey becomes much longer.
[00:26:45] Dominic Bowen: Has that isolation changed the way people in Kaliningrad see Europe? A large share of the population is either military or connected to the military. Has that affected how residents interpret their relationship with Europe?
[00:27:06] Stanislaw Domaniewski: I can only speak for how things felt in 2017, the last time I was there. There was a strange hybrid identity at work. Because the region had been German before the Second World War, you would see businesses opening with names like Brauhaus, or German-style pretzel shops. Very few people spoke German, of course, but there was a kind of cultural marketing built around the idea that Kaliningrad was a different kind of Russia. It was as though people were acknowledging that the place had another history and trying to incorporate fragments of that into everyday life.
[00:27:57] Dominic Bowen: If you were briefing the European Union on how to manage its external borders more effectively, what would be the top two or three things you would urge it to do better?
[00:28:09] Stanislaw Domaniewski: I think the EU’s regulations themselves are broadly fine. The issue is that individual countries need to improve how they implement them and move away from more ad hoc methods. They also need to remember that not everybody is automatically a threat. I’m quite strict on this point: regulations should be followed. They are not just guidelines. They exist for a reason. What I have often heard, especially on the Polish-Belarusian border, is that people involved in refugee assistance or NGOs say that, whatever governments claim publicly, rules are not always being followed properly on the ground. Under the previous administration that seems to have been more common, but even now there are reports of shortcuts being taken.
[00:29:20] Dominic Bowen: One question that we ask all our guests on the International Risk Podcast is this: when you look around the world, what are the international risks that concern you the most?
[00:29:30] Stanislaw Domaniewski: The Chinese-Taiwanese situation is clearly very serious. China does not yet have all the capabilities it would need for a full invasion of Taiwan, so it continues to apply other forms of pressure. That is deeply unnerving. The Cambodian-Thai border is another area that concerns me because so little information filters into the Western world. Kashmir is also a major concern. And then there is Iran, especially with the risk of disruption around the Strait of Hormuz and what that could mean for the global economy and the possibility of recession. There is a lot to worry about. Canada and the US as well.
[00:30:27] Dominic Bowen: There certainly is. Thank you very much for sharing those concerns, and thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast today.
[00:30:34] Stanislaw Domaniewski: Thank you very much for having me.
[00:30:36] Dominic Bowen: Well, that was a really interesting conversation with Dr Stanislaw Domaniewski from LUT University in Finland about the European Union’s external borders. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Ed Penrose. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening, and we’ll speak again in the next couple of days.
[00:30:56] Dominic Bowen: Thank you for listening to this episode of the International Risk Podcast. For more episodes and articles, visit the International Risk Podcast. Follow us on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Instagram for the latest updates and to send your questions to our host, Dominic Bowen. See you next time.