Kaliningrad, both the city and the Oblast, is these days receiving a lot of attention from international circles. The Russian Federation has been actively raising the awareness of European institutions about the peculiar situation of the region, separated by mainland Russia and surrounded by land by two countries, Lithuania and Poland, soon-to-become members of the European Union.

The perspective of the enlargement of the European Union to the Russian exclave's immediate neighbours is raising fears that the isolation of the Oblast will deepen, and its economic and social backwardness worsen. The Council of Europe has responded to these legitimate preoccupations by recently taking several initiatives. In 2002, the Parliamentary Assembly held a thorough debate which led to the adoption of Recommendation 1579 on the Enlargement of the European Union and the Kaliningrad Region. The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe directed its attention to transfrontier co-operation between Kaliningrad and its neighbours, which was the gist of its Recommendation 125 of 2003. And the Committee of advisers for the development of transfrontier co-operation in central and eastern Europe took last year the initiative of this study, which focuses on selected issues and recommends specific action. Its objective was the identification of measures that could be adopted and implemented by the various stakeholders concerned (the Russian federal government, the Oblast authorities, municipalities, euroregions, the neighbouring countries, the Council of Europe and the European Union) without upsetting the existing framework of legal obligations by which the countries involved are bound. This document is only available in English or Russian.