The modern Poland–Russia border is a nearly straight-line division between the Republic of Poland and the Russian Federation exclave Kaliningrad Oblast, a region not connected to the Russian mainland. It is long. The current location and length of the border was decided in the aftermath of World War II. In 2004, it became part of the boundary of the European Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
History
The history of the border between Poland and Russia can be traced to the early history of both nations, with one of the earliest notable incidents being the Polish king Boleslaw I's intervention in the Kievan succession crisis, 1018. Following the formation of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Poland's eastern border, most of it with the Tsardom of Muscovy (later, the Russian Empire), stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. During the period of the partitions of Poland, which shifted the Russian borders some west, several small Polish statelets such as the Duchy of Warsaw and the Congress Kingdom shared a border with the Russian Empire. Following World War I, the new Second Polish Republic shared a border with the Soviet Union (USSR), shaped during the Polish-Soviet War, and confirmed at the Treaty of Riga at the line Dzisna-Dokshytsy-Słucz-Korets-Ostroh-Zbrucz. That border was long. Following World War II, the new border (see territorial changes of Poland immediately after World War II) was drawn between the People's Republic of Poland and the USSR. The new Polish-Soviet border was long at first and, after a minor modification in the 1951 Polish–Soviet territorial exchange, reduced to .
Modern border
The modern border between Poland and Russia is regulated by a number of legal documents, many of them dating to the times of the People's Republic of Poland and the Soviet Union, including the Border Agreement between Poland and the USSR of 16 August 1945. The newly defined Soviet-Polish border included system of various engineered protection facilities up to a few kilometres wide such as ploughed strips of earth and no-man zone.
While the actual border line remained unchanged following the fall of the Soviet Union, the breakdown of the Soviet Union into a number of post-Soviet states transformed the Poland-Soviet Union border into a Poland-Russia, Poland–Lithuania, Poland-Belarus and Poland-Ukraine border. The Poland–Russia borders were confirmed in a Polish-Russian treaty of 1992 (ratified in 1993).
The Poland–Russia border is 232 km long between Poland and Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, which is an exclave, unconnected to the rest of Russia due to the Lithuania%E2%80%93Russia border. For most of this length, the Polish side is in the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship; the extreme east is in the Podlaskie Voivodeship, and the westernmost segment (on the Vistula Spit) in the Pomeranian Voivodeship. 210 km of the border is land and 22 km is sea.
The World War II ended in May 1945. The forming of the border began with huge restrictions on movement of civilians. The economic model typical of the USSR, reinforced by the dominant military role of the Kaliningrad Oblast, meant that it did not establish closer cooperation with the neighboring Polish areas (Olsztyn, Gdańsk and Białystok Voivodeships), and generally for a decade it played no role in the Polish-Soviet trade, economic and cultural contacts. East Prussia was divided by a kind of internal iron curtain. The lack of cooperation between both entities made it difficult to even deal with such basic matters as regulating the functioning of watercourses that crossed the border, for example the Łyna River. Only from time to time there were some Polish-Kaliningrad contacts, for example in November 1953, fish processing specialists from Gdynia met with colleagues from Kaliningrad and the three Baltic republics at a working conference in Riga. In turn, in 1954, the Soviet side became interested in navigation data regarding the water route from Kaliningrad to Elbląg and Gdańsk. However, this did not result in the launch of permanent cooperation.