242. Battleground returns to Ukraine & a Russian microcosm in Transnistria.
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Friday the 17th of January 2025, Patrick, it's day one of our return to Ukraine. We're actually heading on a bus from Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.

into southern Ukraine and eventually Odessa is where we plan to get to later today. I flew in yesterday, you came in the day before. What have you been up to, Patrick, since you arrived? I just want to say something about the landscape we're driving through. It's quite sort of, it's got a kind of very Balkan feel to it, doesn't it? It's all, it's got, it's quite drab. It's a

bit of an overcast day, unusually for Moldova, which boasts of enjoying 300 sensual days a year. This isn't one of them. Yeah, well, yesterday I met up with Julius, who listeners will know Julius Strauss, who's a great friend of the podcast. And Julius and his partner Kim had spent the day in Transnistria, which is the separatist region of eastern Moldova, more or less controlled by the Russians.

And so I had a conversation with him last night and he told me what they'd seen and experienced on their trip. And give us a little bit of an insight into what's happening there, Patrick, via Julius. Listeners will probably be aware that it's effectively been cut off from its gas supplies since the turning off of the tap.

coming through Ukraine. So what is happening there? Well, as Julius will explain, this is, of course, energy and gas in particular has been used as a weapon by Russia to try and, A, destabilize Moldova and, B, support their people in Transdnistria. So he's better at explaining it than I am. We will hear all about it from him in a moment. Julius, you've just come back from Transdnistria.

which is really, in a way, a kind of microcosm, isn't it, of the problems that whole communities, whole countries like Moldova are facing here, being caught in this kind of tug of war, really, between the

and the dangers offered by both the East and the West. Tell us about what you saw there and why it was interesting. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Transnistria is probably the closest thing you can get to Russia today without a visa. It is effectively part of Russia. It feels like part of Russia. It looks like part of Russia. It's got a few idiosyncrasies. It's got a large Lenin statue. But then again, there are places in Russia that also have a large Lenin statue. So the aesthetic and the feel is very much different.

It's a kind of an accident of history. Very briefly, what happened is that after the Second World War, the Soviets imported lots of Russian speakers and non-native Moldovans to the area, who were mostly Russians, but also Ukrainians and other nationalities. And when communism fell, they suddenly faced the prospect of living in a country that was run by ethnic Romanians or ethnic Moldovans, which is a very close thing, very closely related to ethnic Romanians.

and having to learn a language they didn't speak and they felt marginalized and they were going from a position of being the powerful, the elite of society, the top engineers and so on and so on to really being sort of second-class citizens. At least that's how they saw it. So they rebelled and there was a war between 1990 and 1992, mostly in 1992, during which about a thousand people were killed, three thousand people wounded and eventually Transnistria won its

if you want to call it that. It's not recognized by anybody else, but it is a type of independence. And yes, so you have Moldova on one side, Rump Moldova, if you like, and you have Transnistria on the other side, and they both suffer from very much the same circumstances.

sort of social problems. One of them happens to belong to the Russian world and the other belongs to the European world, just about. Just better explain to listeners geographically, we're in Moldova at the moment and Transdnista, as you would imagine...

is on the east bank of the Dniester River which runs down the right flank of Moldova tiny countries and you got a very small population 2.4 million but as a microcosm really of a lot of the tensions and a lot of the currents the political currency and the cultural Currents of the ethnic currents that are so turbulent in this part of the world But just give us a taste of what it actually looks and feels like it's

Quite underwhelming in some ways. You cross from Moldova. I must admit I was a little bit nervous. It was the first time I'd been in Russian-controlled territories since 2017, and I'm involved with various Ukrainian charities. I've worked for NATO in the past. I also have multiple passports, and I have a long stretch of working in Russia as a foreign correspondent.

But there weren't any real checks. You had to show your passport, but they didn't seem to really do anything with that. You crossed over and immediately you're in almost what feels like a sort of a Russian theme park. And you can see the sort of brave end of the tourist market head over there. You know, young people, backpackers, that type to get a flavor of Russia without actually having to go into Russia proper and get a Russian visa.

And it seems that the Transnistrians almost sort of know that. So they've egged it up a little bit. So there are various historical statues to people like Potemkin, Pajomkin, as they would say in Russian, Catherine the Great. But there's also a big statue of Lenin. There are lots of sort of strange idiosyncrasies for Westerners, which are not quite so strange if you live in Russia. One is that something like 60% of the economy is owned by one man who,

owns all the restaurant, owns all the chains, owns the football club, owns most of the trade, owns most of the processing plants. He's the local oligarch. And he's not shy. His brand name is absolutely everywhere that you go. So you feel you're in this kind of, it's sort of like a time warp that's been somehow modernized and sort of almost, you know, sort of renewed to bring it up to 2025. Yeah.

On the sadder side of things, there are very few people there. Most of the people are old. Most of the people we saw were pensioners. There's a few young women around, but it feels largely deserted. And...

If you talk to the locals, that's exactly, well, if you talk to the locals, first of all, talking to the locals is difficult because as a journalist, you're not supposed to travel there. You're only supposed to go as a tourist. So you kind of have to fit in with that expectation. But I had a long chat with the man who took us there, who operates between both worlds. Part of his family is over there. Part of his family is in Moldova.

And he explained that the youth have simply left. They've either gone to Russia or they've gone to the West. So there is this sort of empty feeling about the place that it's keeping up appearances, but there's no longer much content to it. It's quite sad in a way. Not dissimilar in terms of the emptiness of the streets that we're seeing here in Chisinau. I was very struck by how in the capital city as well from a sort of bustling metropolis, it's very much empty.

kind of open space whereas there's not much traffic and there aren't that many people on the streets. Having said that it is a very fine city. We spent a day in the wandering around looking at the site, spent some very interesting couple of hours in the art gallery. So you can see it's got the potential. It wants to be Western. That's the feeling you get isn't it Julius? It wants to and this very much a kind of echo of the struggle for the soul of this very small, very poor country it has to be said. It's the second poorest country in Europe after Ukraine and

At the moment, you've got a president, Maya Sandu, who's a young woman, a youngish woman, who is very much on the side of the West. She's very much aligned with Ukraine. She's very much pushing for the country, which is really a candidate for the EU to achieve full membership. But on the other hand, you've got this countervailing tendency among, as you say, the old, among people who've got some sort of cultural, historical background.

connections with Russia. And I believe you've got a kind of quite an eloquent statement of that point of view about why some people look to Russia for betterment from your driver. Yeah, I mean, that's totally correct. You get softer echoes of this in places like Hungary, which I spend a lot of time in.

where you have predominantly pro-Western populace who looks to the West as their natural place of being, who travels to the West and so on. And then you have another section of society that really feels they haven't benefited since the fall of communism. And those people

and felt more strongly in Moldova. It reminds me, I was in Georgia last year, which is another country that's in this kind of spot between Russia and the West, caught in that spot, caught in the sort of geopolitical struggle. And Moldova reminds me of that place

But you know that my driver yesterday who was a traffic cop for 26 years, which for anybody who's lived in Russia usually means one of the more corrupt members of street society. But I'm not saying he was corrupt or not. I really have no idea. But he painted a particular picture and he said, look, it's really expensive to live here now compared to what we're used to. All the bills have gone up dramatically. It's five times more than it is in the Russian world.

yes, the EU gives us some money in terms of grants, but then they close down all our businesses and bring their own businesses in. And he said, you know, we give them more money in their supermarkets than we get from them in terms of help. It's simply not a good deal for us.

These people don't represent us. They don't represent our values. He expressed admiration for Viktor Orban of Hungary, for Lukashenko in Belarus and for Putin. And he said, these are strong men who are fighting for their countries. They're fighting for their people. You in the West don't do that.

He didn't say it, but there was a strong suggestion that he didn't like the sort of LGBT thing, the globalization element of the West, the sort of multiculturalism of the West. He made some quite racist comments. He was very rude about Ukrainians, and he was even ruder about people with sort of different colors from various places.

So you have this split in society between a section of society that's more Soviet, more conservative, feel that they've lost out, look at their country and just don't see a picture that they like. And then another section of society that is sort of built

their identity on the aspiration of becoming more Western, becoming part of the West. And, you know, it's very easy to sort of fault the older people for being blind and short-sighted and whatever it is, but the fact is they feel it and to a certain extent it's real. When you start looking at prices compared to salaries or incomes, you realize they're in a very, very difficult spot. Perhaps not by traffic policemen, but certainly the pensioners.

And, you know, I often feel that we're very quick to judge these parts of society and maybe they do deserve to be judged, I don't know. But

the fears and the views they're expressing are logical at a certain level. It's not just some kind of old-fashioned wishing for the past prejudice. It's more complicated than that. At various stages in the conflict, people have looked at Trans-Trystria and the situation, its relationship with Moldova, and seen it as a potential flashpoint. There are Russian troops, there are about a thousand Russian troops, but you've just got to look at the map to see that there are big difficulties in Russia's way if it were to try and create any kind of

military initiative there. Moldova is a very small, thin country. It's basically kind of strip of land between Romania and Ukraine, and it's bounded on the north and east Ukraine and on the west by Romania. Then below, of course, you've got the Black Sea.

But there is plenty of opportunity for mischief making, isn't there? And particularly, you know, what the Russians go in for big time, which is trying to sort of disrupt, trying to unbalance people. And they can do that largely through energy, given that the state company here, I think, is half owned by state energy companies, half owned by Gazprom, the...

the Russian energy giant. Tell us something about that and what you think the potential is for further troublemaking by the Russians on that front. Yeah, I agree. I don't think the Russians will try and impose a military solution here. I think that's very unlikely. There's a lot of gas politics going on here and it's fairly complicated. It took me a while to get my head around it, but the very sort of basics...

the gas politics go something like this. Moldova and Transnistria used to get their gas from Russia through Ukraine. Ukraine has now turned off those taps, both to this part of the world and to Slovakia, Hungary and Austria, because they say the Russians were simply making too much money out of it. The estimates are that the Russians were making $6 billion a year from that gas, and the Ukrainians were being paid something the best part of a billion dollars in transit fees. So the Ukrainians made a bit, the Russians made a lot,

and Zelensky has said enough of that. So now what the Russians are doing is they're kind of playing a game with Moldova and Transnistria. So they cut off all supplies to Transnistria, which for the last two weeks has been freezing. Not quite freezing yet because there's always a few reserves and there's a bit of coal and there's a bit of wood and there are ways of patching through a few weeks. And yesterday they said, well, of course, you know, you're our friends and you're in such terrible humanitarian trouble. We will help you a little bit.

But that involves pumping gas through Turkey and ultimately through Moldova, which again has a political impact. Just going back to the original part of the question, you know, what mischief can they make? We do have a playbook in Georgia for this, and it's a very sad playbook.

And what it basically is, in simple terms, is that you win a democratic election somehow. And it's quite possible that the pro-Russians could win a democratic election here for all the reasons that we've mentioned. This is coming up when the election? The elections have got to be held this year. They'll probably have to be held by the end of the summer, but there are some constitutional possibilities for pushing it into the autumn. But it's probably going to be held by the end of the summer. And if they win that election,

they can then bring in a pro-Russian strongman who then starts to erode the political process, making sure that they never lose an election again. And this is the sort of thing that's happened in Georgia. And, you know, very sadly for Georgia, Ivanovich Vili, who's the pro-Russian strongman in Georgia, basically has control of the country now. And it's looking very unlikely that he can be unseated in the short term. So that's the sort of democratic playbook, if you like, where it begins being democratic and then becomes something more autocratic.

the gas is just part of that picture. Okay, we'll leave it there. Thanks very much indeed. We're now going to go out and sample some Moldovan wine. Moldova is main export. It seems to be wine of which it produces enormous amount. I think 0.7% of the cultivatable land is under grapes. So we're going to go out and sample them now. Fantastic. Okay, we'll take a break there. Do join us in a moment. Music

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Go to Blinds.com for 40% off site wide. Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. Hi, it's Katty Kay here from The Rest Is Politics US. We felt at this time, as America is heading into the Trump administration, that we should look back on one of the darkest moments in recent American history. So we have done just that with a series on Trump's insurrection and his attempts back in 2020 to steal the election from Joe Biden.

There was an incitement of an insurrection. They stormed the Capitol. They literally have senators running for their lives. We break it down. We give a hour by hour of all the incidents, the fences smashing, the windows breaking, gunshots firing. Trump supporters smoking joints in statutory hall. Just imagine the bedlam. And incredibly, some of these people are going to be pardoned by Mr. Trump. And so January 6th, I've never told Katty Kay this, but January 6th is my birthday. Okay, tune in.

and listen. Yeah, that's not the only extraordinary thing about the date of January the 6th, however. I mean, this is why this story in this series is so important and so gripping because so many of these characters are coming back with us today and so much has been forgiven and swept under the carpet and

America decided in the election last year that they were going to reinstate Donald Trump. With that, there really is no better time to take a look at these events. To hear more, just search the Restless Politics US, wherever you get your podcasts. Hear a clip from this miniseries at the end of this week's episode. Okay, we've just crossed the border into Ukraine after a pretty painless one-hour delay, which is...

Not bad going given our last halt. We're going to have a quick chat now with Kim Ryszek who was with Julius on her little trip into Transnistria a couple of days ago. Kim, tell us about what you found there. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm working as the photographer so it's quite a treat for me to chip in with some verbal impressions. I guess I can try to paint a picture of what I saw, fill in the pixels I guess.

We were pretty lucky. We got one of those famous sunny Moldovan days, a really gorgeous one, cobalt blue skies and the like. We were scooped up by taxi, went to the border near Bender. Again, pretty painless. Sorted out the paperwork and boom, we were in.

We were dropped off in the heart of Tir Spol. We walked along the Dniester River up to the vast Alexander Suvorov Square, which is dominated by this gargantuan version of the General, mounted on that charging horse, very socialist realist. It's flanked by tons of bright flags of the kindred regions like South Ossetia or Abkhazia. And there's an enormous emblem of the Hammond Sickle nestled amongst wheat and corn and potatoes and grapes.

And of course there were lots of people and they were all bundled up in furry hats going about their day, resting on benches or pushing prams. And there was a huge white 12-foot fiberglass 2025 sign. Must have been left from the big New Year's celebrations. But it reminded you that this was not a time machine.

And I guess, I suppose that's really my main thing. I was struck by this contrast of sensations. One, you feel like you're in the largest open-air Soviet museum in the world. And two, you've got a real tension of Transnistria's current situation.

And that was palpable. We were told not to ask too many questions. There was a paranoia in the people. There was a funny sense of being followed. Lots of carts of wood being hauled around the city's main drag. And that wasn't bucolic or charming. That was really people trying to stay warm with the current energy crisis.

the orange and black you know St George ribbons you see in the markets weren't just nostalgic for Soviet times they were pretty dark when you give the context of what's happening in Ukraine next door. Very graphic Kim thanks so much for that that was absolutely fascinating I wish we'd been there with you I have to say. Okay we're on the final approach now to Odessa stay tuned you'll be hearing lots more from us.

We're now sitting in a charming sort of covered terrace, I suppose you'd call it, in downtown Odessa.

The place is buzzing actually, having come from Chisinau, which was like a ghost town at this time of night. This place is very, very lively. The lights are all on. Christmas is still being celebrated here, even though Ukraine is meant to have moved back to the Roman, I suppose the 25th of December being Christmas rather than the Orthodox Christmas. But the place is very, very lively. It's got a very kind of positive feel about it. We've just come from the opera, which was absolutely wonderful and a beautiful, sensationally beautiful

ornamented Odessa Opera House, a wonderful performance of a Puccini opera. Kim will tell us what that opera was. But basically, it doesn't feel very warlike, does it, chaps? No, absolutely. Kim and I were last here about 18 months ago, and probably my fourth or fifth time in Odessa in the last five years. And it feels a lot more relaxed now than it did last time we were here.

One possible explanation for that, we were talking to the driver who picked us up and took us to our hotel and he said that

Odessa now has a Patriot missile battery defending it and therefore it's a lot less susceptible to attack. So it could be that or it could just be that we've hit it on a particularly easy day when it's not being targeted by the Russians. But we're in the main street here, Deribazovskaya in Russian. I'll try and say it in Ukrainian but I'm not sure. I think it's Deribazivka.

and we've got kids walking up and down the street, small infants playing, and quite a kind of a happy atmosphere. Yeah, no, I agree. It's extremely buzzy compared to Kishinau, and you'd be surprised there's a war raging somewhere close by, except for the fact that at the opera there was a remarkable lack of

men on the stage. It was Angelica, about Sister Angelica Puccini's story of the nun who was banned from her noble family and ended up committing suicide and reuniting with her long-lost boy. But it was a perfect opera for an opera house with very few men to be on the stage. You really could be forgiven for thinking, couldn't you, that...

This is a normal city. Patrick, I remember when we came to Ukraine a year and a half ago and we got off the bus and the first thing we heard was an air raid siren. Well, we've been in Ukraine now for six or seven hours and we haven't heard a single siren, which must be quite nice for the people of Odessa not to have to make that calculation. I think, you know, talking to Julius and Kim earlier,

People don't really pay attention to sirens as we noticed last time. Wherever they are, particularly in the east where they're hearing the sirens all the time. But also it's still quite nice I think for families not to make that calculation. So, so far so good. I mean one thing that really strikes me about Ukraine is from the outside. If you've never been to Ukraine it seems that the war starts at the border and it really doesn't.

The war starts for the most part in the east of the country. And I'm just thinking back to a visit Kim and I made last summer where we went from Konstantinivka, which is about three or four miles, was then about three or four miles from the front line. And you're just hearing this constant explosions. I mean, barely two seconds pass without you hearing an explosion in the distance.

so it wasn't particularly dangerous for us but you could imagine what the soldiers on the front line were going through under that constant barrage and bombardment and then that evening you're in Dnipro at a sort of a fast trendy bar with lots of young people dancing and drinking cocktails and having fun and for me that's always been one of the big disconnects in Ukraine and I think there's two ways of looking at it you can say that that's terrible that only some people are suffering and other people are not but equally

I think part of what Ukraine has tried to do since the war began is protect the normality and the simple joys and the kind of the regular bits of life that they can. And maybe this is one of the reasons as well they're not sending the very young people to war yet. They're trying to protect a generation from the war in the hope that

the war will finish before they become harmed and scarred by it significantly. Yeah, no, it's really interesting how the act of going to an opera is an act of normalcy and an act of defiant normalcy. You know, we went to the opera a few years ago and it was still where you'd hear some Russian being spoken and the opera was...

Ukrainian opera actually. Tonight was a Puccini opera. The last time it was a Ukrainian opera. And you could detect this shift from what Odessa used to be to what Odessa is becoming, which is a Ukrainian speaking Odessa. The opera is now translated, the Italian opera is translated into Ukrainian. We are getting a lot of yakuyus, not pasibas. There's Norma Catherine, the great statue outside. It's changed.

Okay, we gather that the curfew is not until 12, so we've got a few more drinks to have, maybe a little bit of food. Are we going to try some fish later on? I think Odessa is famous for its fish, isn't it? But there'll be plenty more to come in the days to come.

Here is that clip from our miniseries on Trump's insurrection. And these senators are being kind of ushered out through a very narrow corridor. And one of them says we were 20 feet away from the rioters. If the rioters had just looked the other way and seen that a whole bunch of senators were coming out, who knows what would have happened? Who knows what could have happened to Mike Pence? And I think it is important to point out that Donald Trump was getting these reports and did not care.

The Senate has been evacuated at 2:18 PM. Nancy Pelosi is also pulled out of her chair by the Capitol Police and taken off the podium and taken to a safe location at Fort McNair in Southwest Washington. She originally tried to stay. She didn't want to leave the building, but because of security, she had to get out of there.

One of the Democratic members of the Congress at this point, as they realize that the rioters are starting to breach their area, one of the members, Democratic members of the Congress, yells down to the Republicans, this is because of you. And the members are getting texts. This is how they know that things are bad, because they're getting texts from their family saying, what are you doing there? Why haven't you left? Are you safe?

But they haven't got a television. They're not watching it. They're trying to get on with the business of the day. I mean, it's surreal. I keep thinking how surreal it was that inside the chambers, they're trying to do business as usual and feet away, the rioters are there saying that they want to have some of these people hung and that they want to overturn the election result. So then a few minutes after that, the House floor is evacuated.

literally in front of the rioters. The police manage again to secure a very narrow passageway through the rioters to get them out. And one member afterwards says, I could look in the eyes of those officers and I saw the fear. They knew that the officers were outnumbered. To hear more, search The Rest Is Politics US wherever you get your podcasts.