2.4 When the War Goes Out of Fashion: Orthodox AI, Dead Economies & The German Hallucination
The Eastern Border
Kristaps Andrejsons
4.6 • 879 Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why did a German immigration officer deny asylum to a Russian torture victim by citing a press release from Sergei Shoigu? Why is the Russian Orthodox Church building an Artificial Intelligence to automate the writing of police denunciations? And why is Vladimir Putin personally designing a business plan for a single pie shop while the national gold reserves vanish?
In this episode of The Eastern Border, we smash the glass of the "Republic of Fake." We travel from the heated offices of Berlin bureaucrats who have accepted the Kremlin’s lies as legal truth, to the frontlines where "Turbo-Patriots" are realizing that their holy war has become nothing more than an unfashionable subculture.
We dig into the "Kickback Empire" where 50% of the imperial budget is stolen by handlers in Moscow, meet "Yura Unitaz"—the alleged toilet salesman in charge of Russia's drone war—and analyze the forensic data proving the Kadyrov regime is running on autopilot.
The cake is rotting, friends. Don't eat it.
IN THIS EPISODE:
The Shoigu Precedent: How German bureaucracy was hacked by Russian apathy.
The Mashenka Economy: The President, the Pie Shop, and the 1998 oil prices.
Orthodox GPT: Outsourcing Judas to a server farm.
The Kadyrov Glitch: Waze data, deleted Instagram posts, and the panic in Grozny.
The Dead End: Why Russian nationalists admit "The SMO is out of fashion."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast? |
| 0:02.0 | 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. |
| 0:13.4 | Greetings, comrades, and welcome to the Eastern Border. |
| 0:16.9 | Now, today, as we are continuing the Republic of Fake series, I suppose, let me take you to a museum. |
| 0:25.6 | Not a museum of art or history or science, but a museum of absurdity. |
| 0:30.9 | The writer Ivan Davidov recently reminded me of a place that existed in Moscow shortly after |
| 0:35.7 | 1953. |
| 0:37.3 | It was the Museum of Gifts to Comrade Stalin. |
| 0:41.1 | It was a strange place, a temple to a dead god. |
| 0:45.0 | Workers from all over the Soviet Union had sent gifts to the leader. |
| 0:48.7 | Carpets woven with his face, steel models of blast furnaces, |
| 0:52.4 | but the most impressive exhibits were the cakes. |
| 0:56.0 | Huge magnificent confectionery towers. |
| 1:00.0 | Cakes, the size of car engines, covered in sugar roses and march upon stars. |
| 1:04.0 | But there was a problem, you see, Stalin died. |
| 1:08.0 | The cakes remained. |
| 1:10.0 | The museum directors were terrified. They couldn't throw them away. |
| 1:13.7 | That would be sacrilege. You can't put Comrade Stalin's birthday cake in the trash. |
| 1:17.8 | So they put them under glass, huge airtight glass domes. And for years, visitors would walk |
| 1:24.0 | past these majestic white towers. They look perfect. But if you look closer, |
... |
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