>>and to my knowledge none of the neighbors wants to join that territory

Well, let me expand that knowledge then - Poland would love to integrate that bit of land, because currently the fact that the only entrance to the Polish port of Elbląg is controlled by Russia is a major ballache that stops the development of the region, enough so that the Polish government has agreed to spend billions of Polish zlotys to dig a canal that will allow ships to skip going through Russian controlled waters.

https://www.google.pl/maps/@54.4002206,19.5500717,10.75z

Poland has not expressed any wish to integrate that, nor any other territories. I can imagine it getting separated from Russia and even joining the EU at some point, but only as a sovereign entity.

EU is not a country, but it has its own economic and security interests.

The region is poor, but adding a statelet with 1 million people into a union of 450 million is a negligible burden. And local economy is already sort-of semiintegrated with the Lithuanian and the Polish one. There used to be quite a lot of cross border trade in peace times there.

I still can't imagine Lithuania agreeing to have a massive influx of Russians with an open border. In certain regions in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania the population speaks Russian exclusively.

Yeah, Russia is the specialist in puppets states (and rulers).

There's no good solution for Koningsberg.

"Germans effectively left" makes it sound almost voluntary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_of_East_Prussia#K%C...

Of course, but I tend not to rely on quotes in some cases. It's quite obvious it was not their intention.

"Germans effectively left in the late 40s" - Germans quickly evacuated in the face of the Red Army, because bad things happened to the ones who didn't.

My father-in-law's family considered themselves very lucky to have had distant relatives in Niedersachsen (West Germany) and to have gotten out of Tilsit (now called Sovetsk) at all. He's never been back.

Kaliningrad is of strategic importance for holding the Suwalki corridor, a.k.a. NATO's most vulnerable choke point. It doesn't matter whether it's poor or not.

> EU is not a country

I don't know about that. A lot of anti-Brexit folks really seem to have felt loyalty to it the way others feel to their states. It sends ambassadors to other states, so it has its own foreign policy. It doesn't have its own military, yet, but it does have a common defense framework. Seems to me that it is at least a semi-state.

Is the United States one state or fifty plus one?

Not a direct reply but I read a fantastic book about post-WW2 Europe that basically argued the wholesale redistribution of populations after the war turn Europe from a mixed, multiethnic set of countries to a group of countries dominated by specific ethnic groups.

Konigsberg (Kaliningrad) being a great example with Germans fleeing/being expelled and replaced by ethnic Russians wholesale.

I am reading Iron Kingdom, a history of Prussia, and was struck by how often it gained and lost territories. After every war (and Prussia fought a lot of wars), it won/lost chunks while also gaining/giving up chunks elsewhere. Silesia, Hanover, Saxony ... the various states that it absorbed/traded lands with are difficult to keep track of. Heck, "Prussia" was originally the term for land east of the original land, centered around Berlin, that the Hohenzollern monarchy ruled; after annexing it the term for that bit of new land somehow became applied to the country as a whole.

The Silesians, Hanoverians, Saxons, etc. all viewed themselves as different people from the Brandenburgs/Prussians and each other. As toyg said, ethnic-based nationalism—viewing themselves as "Germans" and thus deserving a single German nation—is a 19th-century phenomenon; further, the various German states (not excluding Prussia) viewed and suppressed such nationalism as subversive. Mutual cooperation nonetheless grew during the century, notably the customs union.

It's something that really started mid-XIX century, with the emergence of the concept of ethnic-based statehood in France and Prussia. The process continued unabated for about 100 years, until the populations were divided "cleanly enough" in most of the continent. The end of WW2 was just the last chance for big moves in that direction, and some countries grabbed it with both hands.

Obviously the EU is not a country legally but one of the things that makes this invasion into a spectacular geopolitical backfire is that Putin's war in Ukraine seems to have suddenly made the "EU" kick into life over defense.

Oh, yes, we haven't had this kind of internal unity for years. All the bickering is currently on the back burner.

That won't last forever, but as of now, the EU is quite a cohesive force - for the first time in this century.