alt Hacker NewsRussia wants to keep Kaliningrad mainly because they want to keep on being able to access the world ocean from St Petersburg (and the nearby port of Ust-Luga) and Kaliningrad helps with that.
(Controlling Denmark would help tremendously, too, which is why Moscow once asked Berlin for Denmark during or right before WWII as a response to Berlin's asking Moscow for its consent for Berlin to take control of Romania or some such.)
And yes, I believe that continuing to be able to access the world ocean from St Petersburg has helped Russia in its war with Ukraine.
BTW, "China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of [Russia]" strikes me as so unlikely as to not be worth thinking about.
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What I mean is that in post-USSR collapse, Ukraine ended up with a lot of warheads pointing into different directions.
So did Russia, of course.
It did not help Ukraine with independence (and the warheads were gone very fast), nor did it help Russia retain control of Ukraine.
So I'd say in the hypothetical of Russia falling apart into chunks, Kaliningrad having the nukes won't be a decisive factor in where Kaliningrad ends up.
And I hope that if it doesn't end up as a part of what's left of Russia, whoever gets it won't send the nukes back like Ukraine did.
> BTW, "China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of [Russia]" strikes me as so unlikely as to not be worth thinking about.
Who does, then? There doesn't seem to be any internal power in position to gracefully take power when Putin inevitably proves mortal; whatever the power scramble looks like, it's going to take external funding (and thus external obligations) to secure it, which leaves whoever's providing that funding in effective control. And even if the US and/or Europe decide to try to buy one horse, China clearly is willing and able to buy a whole lot of them; just statistically they probably end up with it, no?