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The Eastern Border: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Kristaps Andrejsons
A podcast about the politics and the history of eastern Europe - including, but not limited to the current state of Russia, politics of the EU, history of the USSR and the region in general.
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- 5 days ago2h 26m
3.10 Lurk More: A History of the Russian Internet
In 2005 the Russian-speaking internet was one of the freest, strangest and funniest places on the planet. Twenty years later, mobile internet inside Moscow’s Third Ring Road runs on a whitelist while the President hosts a summit. This is the story of how that happened.We start in 1994, with a telecoms licence numbered 777 and blessed by a priest, a national domain registered inside a nuclear research institute, and men with pistols outside the domain registrar. From there we go through the padonki slang of Удафф, the imageboards, ЖЖ as the country’s public square, and the encyclopedia that wrote it all down: Луркоморье, Lurkmore. Its co-founder Дмитрий Хомак ran it for fifteen years, through oligarch tea parties, FSB men in jumpers, a drug-police block and extremism cases, and on 4 March 2022 he deleted it and left two words: stop the war. Alongside it we follow RuTracker, the pirate library the state declared “eternally blocked” and never managed to kill.Then the hammer comes down: the Bolotnaya winter, Дуров's dog in a hoodie and his loss of VK, the “protecting children from information” law, the Ревизор routers, the failed Telegram block, the sovereign internet boxes, and the slowdowns, VPN purges and whitelists of 2025-2026. Our guides for that part are Михаил Климарёв, the exiled telecom engineer who calls himself an impostor and spends his days making the blocks fail, and Эльдар Муртазин, a Moscow industry analyst who has stayed and who says, carefully and with a disclaimer at each end, that the attempt to control the RuNet is killing it.At the end we look at why this matters: for understanding how an authoritarian state takes something away from its own people, for understanding the Z-sphere, and for those of us living on the Russian border.Become our patron:https://www.patreon.com/theeasternborderMerch store + another option for memberships:https://theeasternborder-shop.fourthwall.com/Follow what's going on here in the very border of Eastern Europe:https://bsky.app/profile/theeasternborder.lvDownload all episodes for free on our website; pictures accompanying certain episodes can be found there as well!http://theeasternborder.lv/Car4Ukraine Eastern Border Autumn Harvest Campaign!https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/autumn-harvest-2026-the-eastern-borderSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/theeasternborder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- 1 weeks ago49 min
3.09 Somebody Else Will Do It For Us
This week the Russian Federation finally wrote down its grand strategy, and it took three men to do it. Dmitry Medvedev asked Donald Trump to have the CIA “correct the unfortunate misunderstanding” of Zelensky, because apparently the FSB is busy. Valery Gerasimov, a week after reporting his troops five kilometres from Zaporizhzhia, needed a ceasefire agreed with Kyiv, the Pope, the Red Cross and the White House to get bread into Oleshky, a town Russia has occupied since 2022. And the people around the Kremlin, asked what they expect from Washington, answered with a proverb: from a mangy sheep, at least a tuft of wool.On The Eastern Border this week: the nationalist singer Misha Mavashi, found shot ten days after his wedding, “cleaning his rifle”, and a Z-sphere that doesn’t believe a word of it. Medvedev’s “son of a bitch” post and the Z-channels laughing at it. Ushakov admitting the post-Anchorage plan was for Washington to deliver Kyiv. Girkin from his penal colony: no way out under the current leadership. Missile strikes in Oryol and Yelets that Russians now call “our normality”, while the air defence rings Putin’s dacha at Valdai. Yuri “Unitaz” Vaganov and the small-sky war. Eleven soldiers in a military police pit. Borodai mourning the Donbas he set on fire, regional deficits twenty times over plan, Siluanov promoted to keeper of the obshchak, and Peter’s window to Europe being boarded up next door to us. Serbia’s back door slamming shut. And Michael Kofman’s cold shower: the infantry is dying at 42, but the drone line keeps running.Happiness is mandatory.Become our patron:https://www.patreon.com/theeasternborderMerch store + another option for memberships:https://theeasternborder-shop.fourthwall.com/Follow what's going on here in the very border of Eastern Europe:https://bsky.app/profile/theeasternborder.lvDownload all episodes for free on our website; pictures accompanying certain episodes can be found there as well!http://theeasternborder.lv/Car4Ukraine Eastern Border Autumn Harvest Campaign!https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/autumn-harvest-2026-the-eastern-borderSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/theeasternborder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- 2 weeks ago40 min
3.08 Not a fan, personally
On one night in October, Ukrainian drones hit the second city of the Russian Federation in five places at once - the oil terminal, the Ручьи depot behind its useless nets, an Ozon warehouse the size of eleven football pitches, a bridge, and a VK data centre, whose press office then announced that everything was working as normal. The next evening Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov told Putin on camera that Dobropillia was taken and Russian troops stood five kilometres from Zaporizhzhia. Within hours the Z-channels were correcting him in public, and one admin explained how villages get "taken" now: a Mavic, fifteen seconds of footage, and an AI-generated soldier waving a flag.This week on The Eastern Border: the Petersburg strikes and why Russian data has nowhere left to hide, the AI flag-planters, and Z-poets writing elegies for men who died for a photograph. Then the Duma budget hearings, where a Central Bank deputy chairman admitted that Ukrainian drones now set Russian monetary policy. Russian teachers posting pay slips while they staff the polling stations. Lawyers fleecing soldiers' families. Trump's "energy ceasefire", diesel deal and Starlink throttle. The deserter hunts in Bashkortostan. And the Russian officer with the upset stomach who, by the Wall Street Journal's count, helped Ukraine kill more than three hundred of his comrades.«Ебём и плачем». Happiness is mandatory.Support the trucks to the front, Autumn Harvest 2026 with Car4Ukraine:car4ukraine.com/campaigns/autumn-harvest-2026-the-eastern-borderSupport the show directly: theeasternborder.lvMerch: theeasternborder-shop.fourthwall.com/en-eurSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/theeasternborder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- 3 weeks ago50 min
3.07 "A Dolboyob, But Ours!"
First of all, yes, I know the thumbnail is wrong, but I noticed that a bit too late, I hope you won't mind.The Russian empire has a peculiar talent for producing spectacles that read like satirical fiction. This week, Mikhail Zvinchuk—the sanctioned founder of the largest military Z-channel on Telegram, Rybar—strolled into NATO-member Montenegro with a film crew, mocked the border guard on Telegram, and got detained by national security eight hours later. We trace the five-day meltdown inside the Z-sphere, from defection paranoia and Kremlin orders silencing volunteer fundraisers to the triumphant conclusion that their top military analyst is "an dumbfuck, but ours." Meanwhile, the backbone of the Russian digital state is catching fire. After Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centres in Sasovo and Kaluga, Moscow discovered that ten years of building a centralized "Sovereign Internet" simply put the country's entire digital life into a dozen flammable buildings within drone range—while air-defence radar data remains too classified to share with the targets. We also break down Donald Trump's diesel deal with Putin (and why Z-patriots are asking if soldiers died so Washington could permit oil trades), Dmitry Medvedev shopping for Western hostages, Russian depots running completely out of Soviet machine guns, soldados hiding like feral men in the Pokrovsk woods, and a front-line stormtrooper admitting that 70% of surviving veterans will turn to armed racketeering when they get home. Finally, through the lens of Lotman, Uspensky, and a former Storm-Z convict, we look at the void at the centre of the war—and why nobody can name the Tsar under the Kremlin stars. Become our patron:https://www.patreon.com/theeasternborderMerch store + another option for memberships:https://theeasternborder-shop.fourthwall.com/Follow what's going on here in the very border of Eastern Europe:https://bsky.app/profile/theeasternborder.lvDownload all episodes for free on our website; pictures accompanying certain episodes can be found there as well!http://theeasternborder.lv/Car4Ukraine Eastern Border Autumn Harvest Campaign!https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/autumn-harvest-2026-the-eastern-borderSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/theeasternborder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Oct 5, 20263h 2m
3.06 The Assembled Man: Life and crimes of Igor 'Strelkov' Girkin
In 2014, Igor Girkin crossed into Ukraine with 52 men and pulled the trigger on a continental war, convinced he was the reincarnation of a White Guard general destined to resurrect the Russian Empire. Twelve years later, he is sitting in a penal colony in the Kirov region, working as a pattern-chalker on prison textiles while the state feeds his followers into a robotic meatgrinder.This is a massive, definitive autopsy of the "Assembled Man." I dissect the absolute geopolitical counterfeit of the Novorossiya LARP, contrast Girkin’s pathetic bureaucratic demise with Prigozhin’s warlord exit, and listen in on the terminal despair of his remaining allies as the Russian ultra-nationalist movement collapses into web-rings and bad poetry.There's also YuGiOh trading card analogies involved.Become our patron:https://www.patreon.com/theeasternborderMerch store + another option for memberships:https://theeasternborder-shop.fourthwall.com/Follow what's going on here in the very border of Eastern Europe:https://bsky.app/profile/theeasternborder.lvDownload all episodes for free on our website; pictures accompanying certain episodes can be found there as well!http://theeasternborder.lv/Car4Ukraine Eastern Border Autumn Harvest Campaign!https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/autumn-harvest-2026-the-eastern-borderKam Sandwich: How 9 YuGiOh cards bankrupted a company:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VCdss4vTMwSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/theeasternborder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Sep 30, 20261h 5m
3.05 Virtual Zone of Our Control
Maxim Shevchenko gave the only operational definition of victory that functions inside Russia's neo-estate society: victory is whatever the President says it is, and everyone must agree, because any other point of view leads to prison. Lev Vershinin took it further: for the ruling class, victory is preserving status and hereditary control over financial flows; losing territory carries no fundamental significance. The reports coming out of the Russian General Staff were never meant to be true. They were meant to be said. In this episode of The Eastern Border, we trace what happens when that manufactured reality hits the ground. On the Lyman salient, Ukraine's 3rd Assault Brigade closes Phase 3 of Operation Vivaldi, routing the 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies and capturing over 250 Russian servicemen, including officers and pilots. When the Russian Ministry of Defense attempts to prove continued control over Nove with an official video, pro-war Russian analysts point out the fatal flaw: the broadcast features a fully intact telecommunications mast that combat footage showed destroyed on the ground twenty-four hours earlier. Ukrainian forces use remote-controlled kamikaze BTR-60s, heavy-drone machine gun ambushes, and deliberate informational silence to turn Moscow's own map-room vranyo into an air-defense screen. Meanwhile, Russia's domestic balance sheet cracks open. Official state data on budget.gov.ru reveals an actual federal deficit of 7.698 trillion rubles ($93bn / €82bn) by late September—shattering the government's revised full-year estimate with three months left to run. The draft 2027 budget pushes military expenditures to 17.1 trillion rubles ($205bn / €183bn). To pay for it, subsidies for oncology medications and cancer wards are slashed by more than two-thirds, while the only healthcare project to see a 35% increase is a centralized database linking medical records to military draft boards. From consumer vlogs revealing fast-food chicken wings at 4,200 rubles per kilogram in deserted shopping malls, to gig-economy workers burning microloans on 5-kopeck casino streams, the civilian facade is crumbling. General Alexander Lapin—the architect of the 2022 Lyman rout and the 2024 Kursk failure—is rewarded with a vice-premier post in Tatarstan; Yanukovych-era oligarch Serhiy Arbuzov enters the State Duma; while pro-war milblogger Trinadtsaty is tortured in a Volgograd isolation cell and Tatyana Montyan warns fellow loyalists to flee the country. Finally, Rosgvardiya Lieutenant Colonel Zakhar Prilepin confesses on camera that maximalist war aims are dead, and that the Presidential Administration is actively bankrolling domestic fascist cells inside Russia. Become our patron:https://www.patreon.com/theeasternborderMerch store + another option for memberships:https://theeasternborder-shop.fourthwall.com/Follow what's going on here in the very border of Eastern Europe:https://bsky.app/profile/theeasternborder.lvDownload all episodes for free on our website; pictures accompanying certain episodes can be found there as well!http://theeasternborder.lv/Car4Ukraine Eastern Border Autumn Harvest Campaign!https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/autumn-harvest-2026-the-eastern-borderSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/theeasternborder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Sep 27, 20261h 7m
3.04 Who Pays for the War
Three hundred and fifty-five seats. Whatever that was, it certainly wasn't the end. It was just the beginning.Within days of the vote, the bill arrived. A stealth tariff pushes the cost of missed drone strikes straight onto domestic electricity bills. Kapotnya refinery goes 100% offline. The Baltic states quietly reshape their entire nuclear posture while Brussels trades oligarch sanctions for political favors.And then, the vault door cracked: leaked chats between Mikhail Babich and Dmitry Peskov reveal the inner elite acknowledging that the mutineers were right, the President is hiding in courtyards, and the war is a catastrophic disaster they can only admit in private. Meanwhile, collaborator Oleg Tsaryov panics on camera because Ukraine's legal front is locking down hundreds of billions in frozen assets. They made a desert, and now the invoice has landed on the table.Become our patron:https://www.patreon.com/theeasternborderMerch store + another option for memberships:https://theeasternborder-shop.fourthwall.com/Follow what's going on here in the very border of Eastern Europe:https://bsky.app/profile/theeasternborder.lvDownload all episodes for free on our website; pictures accompanying certain episodes can be found there as well!http://theeasternborder.lv/Car4Ukraine Eastern Border Autumn Harvest Campaign!https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/autumn-harvest-2026-the-eastern-borderSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/theeasternborder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Sep 21, 20262h 35m
3.03 History of Non-Elections
Russia just held its State Duma elections. United Russia walked away with 355 of 450 seats, the largest faction in its history, on a result the Kremlin's own planners had reportedly tried to talk down to 45%. So how do you get 58%?You spend 120 years perfecting the method.ACT 1: THE ALGORITHMBloody Sunday, the October Manifesto, and the Tsar's four Dumas. How Stolypin broke his own constitution in 1907 and invented the core trick of Russian managed democracy: you don't fear the ballot box if you control the calculator. And the Grand Duchy of Finland, where, under the same Tsar, women got the vote and a seat in parliament.ACT 2: THE RITUALSoviet elections, told by the people who lived them. A Pioneer honor guard at the ballot box. A first-time voter in 1982 Riga waiting for a flower that never came. A PE teacher turned into "Citizen Linaberga" behind a folding table. The portable urn that drove out to your kitchen. The secret booth nobody dared to use, until 1989, when a Politburo member running unopposed lost to a pencil. And 2011's legendary 146%.ACT 3: THE TECHNOLOGYThe 2026 vote itself. The electronic black box two ministries can't agree the size of. Round-number turnout "shelves." The CEC announcing "only two" stuffing cases while voiding 36,850 ballots. Observers thrown out for "walking around too much." A green apple confiscated by police. Liberal exiles and pro-war nationalists landing on the same tactic. And the Z-patriots holding a wake for the supermajority they got.Special thanks to our family members who shared their memories of Soviet-era voting in Latvia and Belarus. This episode is built on their testimony. Happy birthday, Toms!Car4Ukraine Eastern Border Autumn Harvest Campaign!https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/autumn-harvest-2026-the-eastern-borderBecome our patron:https://www.patreon.com/theeasternborderMerch store + another option for memberships:https://theeasternborder-shop.fourthwall.com/Follow what's going on here in the very border of Eastern Europe:https://bsky.app/profile/theeasternborder.lvDownload all episodes for free on our website; pictures accompanying certain episodes can be found there as well!http://theeasternborder.lv/Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/theeasternborder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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About The Eastern Border
A podcast about the politics and the history of eastern Europe - including, but not limited to the current state of Russia, politics of the EU, history of the USSR and the region in general.
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