KALININGRAD, May 10. /TASS/. The authorities of Russia’s westernmost Kaliningrad Region view the decision by Poland’s geographical standards body to change the Polish-language name for Kaliningrad to "Krolewiec" as an insinuation, regional government spokesman Dmitry Lyskov told TASS on Wednesday.

"Our city has a name and its official place-name is Kaliningrad. Anything else is nothing but an insinuation. For our part, we could just as easily call Gdansk ‘Danzig’ and the Republic of Poland the ‘Kingdom of Poland.’ However, we respect official place-names and demand that others do the same," Lyskov pointed out.

Poland’s Rzeczpospolita newspaper wrote on Tuesday that the country’s Commission on the Standardization of Geographical Names Outside the Republic of Poland had decided to use only the Polish name Krolewiec for Russia’s Kaliningrad. The move was explained by the fact that Krolewiec was the traditional name of Kaliningrad in Poland, while the Russian name was deemed artificial and unrelated to the city or the region.

After Nazi Germany was defeated, the northern part of what was Germany’s East Prussia was ceded to the Soviet Union under the 1945 Potsdam Agreement. The region became part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. In 1946, the region’s administrative capital was renamed Kaliningrad after Soviet statesman and party official Mikhail Kalinin.