Poland officially renames Kaliningrad

The Commission for Standardisation of Geographical Names Outside the Republic of Poland, operating under the country's Main Geodetic Service, has decided to start calling Russia’s Kaliningrad by the Polish name Królewiec.

The commission decided that only the Polish name Królewiec should be used for the city with the Russian name Kaliningrad, local news service Rzeczpospolita informs.

The commission’s communiqué noted that the change would take effect from the date of the announcement, that is on May 9, 2023.

The structure took into account when making the change that "the city, which now has the Russian name Kaliningrad, is known in Poland under its traditional name Królewiec" and that the current Russian name is artificial and has no connection with either the city or the region.

"The fact that a large city near Poland's borders is named after Kalinin, a criminal responsible, among others, for deciding on the mass murder of Poles (the Katyn execution), has an emotional, negative character in Poland," the Commission said in a statement.

The Commission stressed that geographical names, apart from their identification function, can have a symbolic function and that "the present Russian city name is an element of the Russian symbolic space, imposed also on audiences outside the country".

"Events related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the imposition of the so-called 'Russian world' and Russia's waging of an information war force us to take a different look at the issue of imposed names, which are highly controversial and not met with approval in Poland," said the Commission.