8th Federal District

The decision is to be confirmed at Thursday’s Security Council session. In fact, the decision has been already made, and the Security Council is deciding if the new super-district should be formed de jure, or if the enclave should still be called a region but have a special regime of government. Gazeta.Ru received the news on Wednesday evening and we turned to the office of the presidential plenipotentiary in the North-West Federal District, in which the Kaliningrad Region currently lies, for comment. However, the staff neither confirmed nor refuted the information and advised us to come back with our questions after Thursday’s Security Council session. The Federal authorities’ special interest in the Kaliningrad Region is due to its unique geopolitical position. The region is a Russian enclave on the Baltic coast and is bordered by Lithuania and Poland, both of which are expected to join NATO soon. The fact that Russia’s main Navy base on the Baltic Sea will be surrounded by NATO member states is obviously a cause of major concern to the Russian leadership. The enclave’s isolated position has made it unique in the economic sense as well. In 1996 Boris Yeltsin signed the Law “On the Special Economic Zone in the Kaliningrad Region” and granted significant benefits to the region. These were, first of all, tax-free imports and exports. However, in late 2000, the State Customs Committee canceled a part of Kaliningrad’s benefits listed in Yeltsin’s law. The region appeared on the verge of bankruptcy and the governor Vladimir Yegorov could only appeal to President Putin. Putin canceled the ruling by the Customs Committee and ordered his strategists to come up with a federal programme for the region’s development. The very fact that a federal programme is being prepared for a region is significant. Of course, there are a lot of strategies being conceived in Russia at present, but they are for the newly created 7 Federal Districts - Programmes are ready for the Siberian, Far Eastern, Southern and North-West Federal Districts.