2.16 It's The Economy, Stupid!
The Eastern Border
Kristaps Andrejsons
4.7 • 877 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"It’s the economy, stupid." The Russian Federation is in full rigor mortis.
In this massive, breaking-news episode of The Eastern Border, we conduct a full Gonzo autopsy on a collapsing empire. We track the Kremlin's 3.5 trillion ruble deficit, a record 1.1 trillion ruble physical cash bank run, and the rotting 70-year-old infrastructure keeping the military-industrial complex barely alive.
But the rot goes much deeper than macro-economics. From freezing peasants being told to skip their morning coffee to afford heating bills, to state monopolies using OMON riot police to burn healthy Siberian cows, the Russian state is violently cannibalizing its own rural working class.
And then, the dam finally breaks. We cover the unprecedented, real-time mutiny of top Kremlin attack dog Ilya Remeslo. The man who spent a decade hunting the opposition just published a massive manifesto calling Vladimir Putin an illegitimate 13-ruble thief and a war criminal, openly inviting Vladimir Solovyev to join a media coup. The system is suffering a catastrophic psychological collapse, and we have the full, unfiltered intercept.
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Here's the link to YouTube as this has a video version too, I dressed up in my best Gonzo attire and set up the webcam to do a pretty one (for the views) this time. It should be up in about 2 hours, because that file is 10gb large and it takes time to upload. https://youtu.be/Asff_6RnfLo
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast? |
| 0:01.7 | Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. |
| 0:05.4 | It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. |
| 0:09.1 | Just click the link in the show description to support now. |
| 0:13.2 | Greetings, comrades, and welcome to the eastern border. |
| 0:16.7 | It's the economy, stupid. |
| 0:18.3 | That was Bill Clinton's war cry back in 1992. |
| 0:21.1 | It was a simple, brutal reminder that, no matter how grand your foreign policy is, |
| 0:25.9 | no matter how many missiles you build and how many speeches you give about national greatness, |
| 0:30.6 | if the peasants can't afford bread, your empire is already dead. |
| 0:34.5 | You just haven't felt the rigor mortis just yet. |
| 0:37.2 | And out here on the eastern border, |
| 0:38.8 | in March 26, the Russian Federation is in full Rigor Mertes. We need to talk about the macro |
| 0:45.3 | mutiny. Right now inside the Kremlin walls, there is a bureaucratic war, civil war happening, and |
| 0:50.0 | it's entirely about math. The Russian Central Bank, led by Elvira Nabiuddin, |
| 0:54.8 | who is essentially the only adult left in the room |
| 0:57.5 | trying to keep this suicidal system afloat, |
| 1:00.0 | is in an open, public, knife fight with Rostadt, |
| 1:02.9 | the state statistics agency. |
| 1:05.0 | Why? |
| 1:05.9 | Because Rostadt fake the numbers, |
| 1:08.2 | and not just a little bit. |
... |
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