alt Hacker News>Kaliningrad is entirely ethnically Russian. Every other group has been forced out. No one wants Kaliningrad for that reason.
....because we all know that all those Russians would rather be somewhere else.
But absorbing them is a cost that the EU would absolutely bear if there weren't additional costs to annexing pieces of a nuclear power.
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No neighbouring country would want to add a population centre with a million Russians to its polity because then you'd have a million Russians agitating for closer ties to Russia, if not actively facilitating or planning a coup.
Lithuania, to the north, has a population of just under 3,000,000, of whom Russians are 5%. Take Kaliningrad and suddenly they would be 30% Russian.
Poland is 37,000,000, so Russians would only be around 3%, but that's enough to cause a lot of trouble, and they gain nothing they don't already have besides a ready-made fifth column.
Some of them are KGB, FSB and other shady government types with even more shady backgrounds and there’s no way to vet them.