As fast the Berlin Wall came down, the EU has been building it back up. You can’t paint nice murals on the Fortress Schengen wall, but it’s just as effective at keeping people in.

Russians always complain to me, ‘We can’t go anywhere on holidays. What have we done?’ I try to offer consolation by saying there’s still Turkey and that they wouldn’t like Blair’s Britain for a minute. But it all get’s more restrictive by the day. And now Russians in the exclave of Kaliningrad face excommunication from their own country.

All this is because Lithuania joins the Schengen in 2007 and Poland in early 2008, erecting two new walls around Kaliningrad. The detail is here.

An earlier Kaliningrad crisis was averted in 2003 with the issue of Facilitated Transit Documents (FTDs) - but these won’t meet Schengen criteria.

The EU, in its wisdom, has so far responded with the idea of ‘local border traffic permits’ - offering holders ‘a stay of up to 7 days in the EU within 30 kilometers of the border‘. But seeing that Poland and Lithuania are both more 30k across (and I suspect the EU knows this) it doesn’t exactly help anyone get from Kaliningrad home to Russia.

An earlier inspired proposal involved a high-speed train across Lithuania. Presumably high-speed so that Russians couldn’t jump off on the way to Moscow, which they obviously would do from slow-moving trains. This scheme, however, is cancelled because of cost.

So it looks as if we’re back to barbed wire and checkpoints and Kaliningrad will become new Berlin. As it happens, this highly sensitive document was leaked to me from the EU while I was in Brussels.

EU Proposal For Kaliningrad Oblast

KEY 1 Mauer 2 Reinforced Butter Mountain 3 Ugly Soviet Apartments 4 NATO Observation Tower 5 Wine Lake Moat 6 Asylum Seeker Shredder 7 Ukraine-Germany Gas Corridor 8 Ugly Polish Apartments

Graphic courtesy Berlin Wall Museum