Sweden and Finland set to join NATO in May

[Sol]

Yeah there's no world where NATO ejects Turkey lol. Much more important strategically to keep it in there than to allow in Sweden or Finland. Probably NATO members will have to cave to every single Turkish demand if they want to allow either country in.

[Sol]

Turkey also has a problem of having issues being a democratic state that meets minimum Western standards these days, and that is an issue.

Hasn't been a problem in the past!

[Sol]

Do we have a sense of if Sweden is likely to agree to Turkish demands? It seems pretty doubtful to me that they can join without paying their pound of flesh by cracking down on Kurdish political groups, but I don't know if that's something they'd be willing to do.

[Sol]

If Turkey were a stable democracy (that looked like it would stay that way in the long-term) I would hypothetically support admitting them to the EU. That's pretty hypothetical though.

Even if Turkey was a perfect democracy, it will never join the EU. The populations of Europe do not want 70 million Muslims to join. Pretending there isn’t a bigoted element to Turkey membership debate is silly.

Serbia is more likely to join the EU than either Bosnia or Albania, despite Serbia being an a literal war with several EU members 25 years ago. Wanna guess what? Because Albania and Bosnia are Muslim nations. Well Bosnia kinda is.

Islamophobia is absolutely an element with Turkey (and religion more generally is involved with the construction of the concept of Europe, which is much of why Turkey is usually not considered European). But Bosnia and Albania are almost always considered European; the issue there is moreso that Bosnia has a political system incapable of political change and Albania is incredibly poor and politically dysfunctional.

[Sol]

There's still Kaliningrad.

Now completely surrounded, on land and sea, by NATO members.

An interesting alternate history scenario is if Kaliningrad was given to Lithuania, like Crimea was given to Ukraine in the early Kruschev period. Now that I think about it, another interesting scenario would have been if the Ukrainian SSR leadership refused the transfer of Crimea to their control because of similar reasons why the Lithuanian SSR refused adding Kaliningrad:
"In the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev offered the entire Kaliningrad Oblast to the Lithuanian SSR but Antanas Sniečkus refused to accept the territory because it would add at least a million ethnic Russians to Lithuania proper."

Amazing foresight on the part of the Lithuanians. There is no doubt that had there been 1+ million Russians in Lithuania for decades it would have created a very volatile situation upon the breakup of the USSR, and Lithuania could have possibly found itself in either Belarus' shoes as a Russian puppet state or in Ukraine's shoes as a target for invasion in the name of "protecting ethnic Russian's interests."

Lithuania is actually substantially less ethnically Russian than the other two Baltic states; a Lithuania with Kaliningrad is about 30% Russian, which is more that Latvia but not too much more. I don't know if it would be too different?