The subject of Kaliningrad burst into the Polish media three years ago, when the local border traffic agreement came into force. The simplified border-crossing regime encouraged Poles and Russians to visit each other in search of whatever was cheaper to buy on the other side. Within a couple of months, new stereotypes had taken shape: the Russian shopping tourist and the Polish fuel smuggler.
The rapid increase in Russian shoppers in the shops and shopping centres of Olsztyn and Gdańsk, as well as of smaller towns such as Braniewo, Gołdap and Bartoszyce, was immediately noticed by journalists from various publications.
Almost every week one Polish news outlet or another reported yet another record number of Polish border crossings by Kaliningraders.
On top of this came information about the money Russians had spent in Poland, calculated from the tax-free receipts processed by the Polish customs service. A fairy tale, pure and simple. But the Polish media told this fairy tale in a peculiarly military manner. Here are two typical headlines from that period: "Russians storm Gdańsk and its surroundings. It's cheaper in Polish shops" or "Shopping in the Tricity. Russians from Kaliningrad occupy Polish shops". At first glance it is hard even to believe that these articles are about the positive sides of the LBT and its results. But this military element of journalistic rhetoric points to the associations that accompany Poles' thoughts about Polish-Russian relations. So it is no surprise that the image of Kaliningrad as a source of military threat, or at least of destabilisation, resurfaced against the background of the conflict in Ukraine. Polish and Russian society, for the most part, were clearly divided in their opinions on the Maidan, Crimea and Donbas, and this could not but affect relations in the Polish-Kaliningrad border zone.
European reporters' interest in the LBT
That feelings on both sides of the Polish-Russian border had cooled was reported almost a year ago by Ivo Mijnssen, a reporter for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. But perhaps more interesting is the fact that a journalist from far-off Portugal made it to Gdańsk and Kaliningrad. At the end of October this year the popular Portuguese weekly magazine Expresso published an article by Cátia Bruno, "The Giant Lives Next Door".
The Swiss journalist visited Mamonovo and Braniewo in December last year, but his report dealt mainly with the Kaliningrad Region and its problems.
Cátia Bruno from Portugal came first to Gdańsk and then to Kaliningrad. Her interest focused on how Poles feel about the nearby border with Russia. The giant in the title, after all, is not Poland as compared with the Kaliningrad Region, but Russia — or more precisely, the way Poles perceive living next door to Russian Kaliningrad.
"Kaliningrad. A Cool Neighbourhood in the Baltic"
A year ago, in his article, the Swiss journalist painted the Kaliningrad Region and its future in gloomy colours. His report makes it clear that the consequences of the rouble's collapse and of the sanctions policy are felt in the everyday life of Kaliningraders. Ivo Mijnssen calls the price rises dramatic, especially given the fall in the incomes of the region's residents. The difference compared with Poland, he writes, is large. Even in the poor Polish border zone, wages are on average three times higher than in the Kaliningrad Region (though the author does not cite any official data). To get around the sanctions, meat smugglers have appeared at the border alongside the fuel smugglers. The Swiss journalist writes that the ban on importing meat from the EU has bankrupted some Kaliningrad meat-processing plants. But 20% of the meat for shops and restaurants is supplied through illegal trade — by exactly these meat smugglers, who hide the goods under false floors.
Listing the problems of the Kaliningrad Region, Ivo Mijnssen calls its prospects for economic development "murky".
"The crisis in Mamonovo is impossible to miss," he writes. "In the centre stand neglected brick houses dating from the time when Kaliningrad was called Königsberg and was German. Next to them are Soviet buildings and the once famous fish factory, renowned throughout the Soviet Union for its sprats. But today production volumes are very different from those of Soviet times, and the building itself does not make a very favourable impression. Braniewo in Poland resembles a provincial town in Central Europe, with lots of shops and a well-kept Old Town — not very beautiful, admittedly, but lively".
The main cause of Kaliningrad's crisis and failures, in the Swiss reporter's opinion, is its excessive dependence on Moscow, and now also the need to compete with Crimea for money from the federal budget. Ivo Mijnssen also notes ironically that Crimea is, moreover, a means that allows the Russian authorities to channel any possible discontent among Kaliningraders in the right direction. The mass protests that accompanied the resignation of the previous governor, the journalist writes, are unthinkable today. Instead, Kaliningraders increasingly think of themselves in terms of a besieged fortress — a view supported by the state media.
Despite all this, the author notes, everyday Polish-Russian relations have remained constructive, and tension here comes down to a few isolated cases.
"But they cannot be called warm either", writes Ivo Mijnssen, and continues: "In Braniewo nobody speaks Russian, and Russian guests in restaurants consistently speak their native language. Mutual understanding remains rudimentary and geared towards economic gain".
A year ago the journalist from the Swiss paper only hinted that Poles, even those who profit from the border and the LBT, do not much like Russians. An employee of a Polish hotel near the border told him that Russians are not liked here at all, even though local business is oriented towards them.
"The Giant Lives Next Door"
The Portuguese journalist Cátia Bruno develops this theme in her article, observing that tension between Poland and Russia at the border is plain to see. Tighter controls, more frequent car searches, specially trained dogs — all this, in the author's view, has increased since the start of the conflict in Ukraine. And although the seat of the war is far away, some two thousand kilometres from Gdańsk, it affects relations on the Polish-Russian border. Her Swiss colleague wrote about the same thing a year ago.
But Cátia Bruno, unlike him, spoke mainly to Poles, in order to get comments on what she had seen. She talked to the Polish historian Jan Daniluk, who frankly admitted that, absurd as it seems even to him, last year he had stocked up on several large containers of drinking water.
"I don't know why I did it," he tells the journalist, and later in the conversation he asserts that any confrontation between Poland and Russia is unlikely.
Nevertheless, the subject of potential Russian aggression worries him every time he hears about the military exercises regularly held in the Kaliningrad Region.
The Polish historian draws the Portuguese journalist's attention to one more interesting fact: "Poland is the only EU country that borders both Ukraine and Russia". He then adds: "I'm permanently a little scared. I don't want to spread panic, but something is going on, and Poles are not far from all of it".
At her meeting with Jan Daniluk, Cátia Bruno also learns that the image of Russia as a threat is rooted in Polish history. In the Polish perception, Nazism and communism were two sides of the same coin, and he calls the liberation from German occupation by the Red Army "bitter". "The Russians can't understand why we aren't grateful," Daniluk goes on. "After all, they liberated us!" But this, he says, came at the price of the destruction of Polish cities and the deaths of their inhabitants.
For the Portuguese journalist, though, the Polish historian's explanations are not enough. She digs deeper and finds what she believes to be the root cause of the difficulties in Polish-Russian relations in the period of history when part of Polish territory was subject to the Russian Empire. It was then, in the 19th century, that the famous Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, who means to Poles what Pushkin means to Russians, wrote the drama "Dziady" ("Forefathers' Eve"), in which he speaks critically of Russia and its social and political order (it is worth recalling, by the way, that Mickiewicz and Pushkin knew, respected and translated each other, even if they argued). Mickiewicz's work became a symbol of Polish resistance to tsarist Russia and, in the twentieth century, to the communist rule imposed by the Soviet Union.
And it is from this historical perspective, the journalist writes, that today's Poles look at Russia and Putin.
It must be said that foreign journalists rarely have deep enough knowledge to explain current processes in such a broad historical and cultural context. In this respect the Portuguese journalist was a pleasant surprise.
For a while, the LBT project became a cure for bad memories. But only for a while... The initial euphoria and the undeniable success of the project were soon overshadowed by political, and then economic, problems. First the Ukrainian conflict already mentioned, and then the collapse of the rouble, led to a sudden drop in the number of Russian tourists in Poland. The author also recalls the incident with a restaurant in Sopot that hung a notice on its door saying it did not serve Russians. Against the background of the political crisis, old grievances resurfaced.
Cátia Bruno sees a threat to the further development of Polish-Russian relations, including cross-border ones, in the growing popularity of conservative political forces, especially among young Poles. She cites research according to which young people aged 18–24 are the most likely to declare that they dislike Russians (56%). The information gathered by the Portuguese journalist proved absolutely correct. It was young Poles who voted in the October elections for Law and Justice, a party known for its anti-Russian rhetoric.
An outside view is not always accurate
For various reasons, foreign journalists cannot always assess the state of affairs objectively, but it is always useful to look at ourselves from the outside. The picture of the Kaliningrad Region pieced together in Ivo Mijnssen's article is not comforting. But Cátia Bruno's article proved especially interesting. It shows that the peculiarities of Polish-Russian cross-border relations concern not only us, the participants on both sides of the border, but also, at the very least, journalists from even the remotest corners of Europe.
True, the Portuguese report lacks statements from Kaliningraders to counterbalance the Polish opinion.
We learn only that the LBT project, whose provisions state that it is meant to promote good-neighbourly relations, is not perceived very positively on the Polish side of the border, despite the attitude of many officials towards it. The Polish government, at least the previous one, boasted about the LBT and held it up as an example to other countries and regions.
In the Polish media the visa-free regime was described mainly as a source of financial profit for local entrepreneurs and traders. Cátia listened to those who get no direct profit from the LBT: a salaried employee of a Polish shop where Russians often shop, and a student from Frombork near the border who had taken part in a youth exchange programme with the Kaliningrad Region. It turned out that their experience of dealing with Russians had not changed the historically ingrained negative image of the Russian, let alone of Russia, which they speak of as a threat.
The opinions expressed by Cátia's interviewees contradict the enthusiasm of Polish border-area businesses and local officials for the LBT project.
It turns out that the desire to make money is easy to stimulate, but arousing love for one's neighbour is much harder. And if we take into account the situation described by Ivo Mijnssen, that is, the worsening economic position of Kaliningraders, it may soon turn out that the LBT leaves behind neither friendship nor profit.
Ivo Mijnssen of the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes about the growing feeling among residents of the Kaliningrad Region that they live in a fortress surrounded by potential enemies. Cátia Bruno of the Portuguese magazine Expresso shows that for Poles, too, humility and cooperation with their neighbour do not come easily.
The fairy tale of local border traffic never came true. But we must by no means give up on building good-neighbourly relations.
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
