Other Borders with Michael Hillard of The Red Line
The Eastern Border
Kristaps Andrejsons
4.7 • 877 Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2026
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Greetings, Comrades! Today we are joined by our good friend Michael Hillard of The Red Line podcast to get updates about what’s going on in the other periphery of the post-Soviet sphere – central asia and transnistria. There’s also a bit about Australia, because the temperature differences at the time of recording between Michael and me couldn’t be more stark.
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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. |
| 0:32.5 | Thank you. Greetings, comrades, and welcome back to the eastern border. |
| 0:38.1 | This time I am literally freezing here because it got super cold for some reason. |
| 0:42.2 | But our guest for today, I hope you don't have such problems, Mike. |
| 0:44.4 | You have been lost for a long while. So one, I hope that you're safe and back home. |
| 0:47.2 | And two, I hope that you're warm because, well, you do have to visit me at some point |
| 0:51.5 | because I'm not sure you've experienced minus 12 degrees and having to heat up your house or did you when you were like traveling around the planet? Yeah, I'm back in Australia now. So it's actually quite, you know, ridiculously warm at the moment. But yeah, experience a lot of those cold temperatures. I spent some time up in the Arctic, spent a lot of time in Russia over the years. And I think the worst one I flew into, it was Bekistan a few years ago. It was during that massive cold snap that came out of nowhere. It was like negative 22 with no power, no water and no gas. And it was awful because I remember getting off my long flight from Australia, walking into the shower and seeing that there was just a slick of ice on the bottom of the shower and no hot water |
| 1:28.0 | and yeah that was a tough choice to make and i picked not being smelly over you know actually feeling my |
| 1:33.1 | heart you know not palpitating at a million miles a minute you'll be surprised because my aunt has |
| 1:39.0 | long like childhood friends living there and uh they were visiting us in the rig while the cold snap happened and everyone was just freaking out they |
| 1:46.1 | called their neighbors to like turn off the water and everything was pretty |
| 1:50.4 | great yeah it was they were burning garbage in the streets it was it was pretty |
| 1:53.6 | crazy time also don't flex your a lot of time spent in the Russia over here |
| 1:59.8 | come no no well what you missed since last time you were here? |
| 2:03.7 | I now live 22 kilometers from the Russian border. |
| 2:06.2 | I started a PhD in political science about, you know, Russia's theocratic |
| 2:11.3 | ideology and everything. |
| 2:13.1 | And glad to see you here, Mike. |
| 2:16.0 | For one, a little short thing, because I know a bunch of my listeners also listen to you. |
... |
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