Donald Trump has a sickening fetish for cruelty -USA Today

[Fritz Walter]

23. Lets go to the map

Specifically, Kaliningrad. A tiny spit of land on the Baltic Sea, west of Lithuania, north of Poland.

It's Russian. A remote possession, but still flying the white, blue and red flag of Российская Федераци.

According to Wikipedia, before World War II, it was called Königsberg, a Prussian/German land, which was...

... renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 after the death of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Mikhail Kalinin, one of the original Bolsheviks. The survivors of the German population were forcibly expelled in 1946-1949, and the city was repopulated with Soviet citizens. The German language was replaced by the Russian language.

My close friends in Lithuania are painfully aware of what happened in the 20th Century. They were the first Soviet republic to evict their Soviet occupiers, and have struggled ever since to rebuild their millennium-long identity.

Kaliningrad is an all-too-painful reminder of Putin's penchant for rebuilding the USSR and raping lands and citizens in his as yet unbridled quest for wealth and power.

I've been there. I've seen how Putin's buddies turned churches into foundries and sanitariums. When they watched Drumpf stealing the election, they knew exactly what they were in for.

We must not turn our backs on this NATO ally.