least socially desirable individuals, such as alcoholics or the uneducated. In the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev suggested that the Lithuanian SSR should annex Kaliningrad Oblast. The offer was refused by the Lithuanian Communist Party leader Antanas Sniečkus, who did not wish to alter the ethnic composition of his republic. In the late Soviet era, rumors spread that the Oblast might be converted into a homeland for Soviet Germans. Kaliningrad Oblast remained part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991, and since then has been an exclave of the Russian Federation. After the Soviet collapse, some descendants of the expellees and refugees traveled to the city to examine their roots. According to the 2010 Russian Census, 7,349 ethnic Germans live in the Oblast, making up 0.8% of the population. In Germany, the status of Kaliningrad (Königsberg) was a mainstream political issue until the 1960s, when the shifting political discourse increasingly associated similar views with right-wing revisionism. According to a Der Spiegel article published in 2010, in 1990 the West German government received a message from the Soviet general Geli Batenin, offering to return Kaliningrad. The offer was never seriously considered by the Bonn government, who saw reunification with the East as its priority. However, this story was later denied by Mikhail Gorbachev. In 2001, the EU was alleged to be in talks with Russia to arrange an association agreement with the Kaliningrad Oblast, at a time when Russia could not repay £22 billion debt owed to Berlin, which may have given Germany some influence over the territory. Claims of "buying back" Kaliningrad (Königsberg) or other "secret deals" were repudiated by both sides. Another rumor about a debt-related deal, published by the Russian weekly Nash Continent, alleged that Putin and Edmund Stoiber had agreed on the gradual return of Kaliningrad in return for waiving the country's $50 billion debt to Germany. After annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014, some newspapers proposed that Kaliningrad Oblast should be return to West. On 28 April 2014, The Baltic Times proposed that the West should take back Kaliningrad from Russia in exchange. This proposal was quoted by several scholary articles. Regardless of the reality, Russia's annexation of Crimea opened doors to claim Kaliningrad by others. A few months after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lithuania started implementing EU sanctions, which blocked about 50% of the goods being imported into Kaliningrad by