The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 07, 2025


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #15 ｜ Maidan and Its Aftermath

Topics
Maidan uprising and Ukrainian politics
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Euro Maidan Putin Luhansk Vladimir Zelensky Viktor Yanukovych Without Crimea Firas Maudad Gaddafi Donbass
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1267 The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1269

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

134.38

Word count

1,481

Sentence count

87

Harmful content

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the final episode of our series on the Ukraine series, we continue with a summary of the history of the country and its relationship with Russia. This time, we focus on Ukraine itself, and the reasons why it is the most important country in the world for Russia.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host Firas Moadad and I think this is
00:00:12.120 the last episode that we will do on the Ukraine series. As you know, this is live, so please
00:00:20.040 leave any comments, any suggestions, as you will during the show, and I will try to address them
00:00:27.500 as soon as I can. In the previous episode, we started with a bit of a summary of the 1990s
00:00:34.160 in Russia, explaining the rise of Putin. We saw how the Russians were incredibly cooperative with
00:00:42.060 the United States when it came to the invasion of Afghanistan, allowing the U.S. to go through 0.77
00:00:47.880 their territory to resupply their forces in Afghanistan. We went through the invasion of
00:00:52.800 Iraq and how that sort of showed a big humiliation for Soviet-made military equipment. And then we
00:00:59.920 explained the expansion of NATO. First, they expanded into Central Europe and then they expanded on the
00:01:05.640 Baltic Sea and on the Black Sea, basically trapping Russia's navy and taking away Russia's ability to
00:01:14.160 reach safe waters that would be operational throughout the winter. We mentioned the missile
00:01:22.880 defense issue, how that really scared the daylight out of the Russians, the idea of placing missile
00:01:28.040 defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland that would basically alter the strategic balance of
00:01:34.020 power and remove Russia's nuclear deterrence or weaken Russia's nuclear deterrence. We mentioned
00:01:41.160 Putin's speech in 2007, where he said that continuing expansionism of NATO is going to have consequences.
00:01:48.920 This was followed by the Georgia War of 2008, where essentially Tbilisi became in a militarily
00:01:57.320 untenable position. We mentioned the 2011 betrayal in Libya, where the Russians supported intervention in
00:02:04.040 Libya to protect civilians. But then that was used as a pretext for full regime change and the murder of
00:02:11.320 Gaddafi. So now it's time to talk about Ukraine itself. It's the most important state for Russia
00:02:22.600 for a couple of reasons. One of them, as I had mentioned before, is because of Crimea, the peninsula that
00:02:28.040 you see here, which is where the Russian Black Sea fleet is based. Without Crimea, the Russians can't
00:02:35.320 project power into the Black Sea. And they are in an enormously weakened geopolitical position. And this is
00:02:43.880 a map of the languages of Ukraine. And in red, you see Russian speakers. In orange, you see a hybrid of
00:02:52.440 Russian and Ukrainian. And in yellow, you see just Ukrainian. And these are the regions that are closest
00:03:00.120 to Poland. Remember that the Ukrainian language, if you're a Ukrainian speaker and you spend two or three 0.70
00:03:06.920 months in Poland, you have become a fluent speaker of Polish. So in reality, most of Ukraine spoke Russian.
00:03:15.320 The native language of the current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is in fact Russian, not
00:03:21.320 Ukrainian, because he comes from this area right about here. And that area is very much Russian speaking.
00:03:30.120 But then there's a little bit more context that is necessary to explain the importance of Ukraine to Russia.
00:03:39.240 And I'm going to go a little bit into a map showing the Ukrainian economy. This is in Russian. I don't understand
00:03:46.680 all of it, frankly. But you see that this area here, Donetsk, the Donbass region. So that's Donetsk and Luhansk, the
00:03:57.240 provinces that sided with Russia after 2014. You see that there's a massive concentration of industry and resources there.
00:04:06.600 And that's not because of Ukraine itself. That's because of the Soviet Union. So when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union,
00:04:15.160 this territory was seen as very safe in the rear of the Russian frontline, which you have to remember,
00:04:23.160 extended all the way to beyond Berlin and included Poland and included all of the countries behind the Iron Curtain.
00:04:31.000 So Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the Balkans united under Yugoslavia,
00:04:40.760 Bulgaria, Romania, these were all part of the Russian sphere of influence. So this seemed to the Russians 0.56
00:04:46.680 as an extremely safe bit of real estate with enormous natural resources that they could develop
00:04:55.880 industry in. And that industry would have immediate access to the sea, through the Sea of Azov that you
00:05:03.800 see here, and be defended by Crimea. And so the economic heartland of Ukraine and the real source of
00:05:13.240 heavy industries in Ukraine, steel, other kinds of metals, coal, energy, etc.,
00:05:20.200 was very much this area. And it's fully a Russian speaking area. And we go into Ukraine becoming a
00:05:28.920 democracy and having this series of elections. And in 2004, the Ukrainian government was overthrown
00:05:37.800 because of protests trying to drag it closer to Russia. In 2010, a pro-Russian candidate wins the
00:05:44.280 election, wins the parliamentary elections in 2012. And that's the lead up to Maidan,
00:05:52.840 or Euro Maidan, which is where we stopped our previous episode on Ukraine. You can find it on the
00:06:00.040 Lotus Eaters website. So this is the context. You have a country that is deeply divided.
00:06:05.640 The most valuable part of it is here, Luhansk and Donetsk. This is where industry is really
00:06:13.080 concentrated. You have this big area in the middle, especially to the west of Kyiv, which is not
00:06:19.320 particularly well developed. You have an incredibly strategic port in Odessa, which is a majority Russian
00:06:25.320 speaking city. And then you have industry close to the Polish border, which again, quite heavily developed
00:06:32.840 by the Soviets because Ukraine was fully a part of the Soviet Union. And it's in this division where
00:06:42.040 we sort of carry on. Over the years from the first Orange Revolution in 2004 until the 2014 Euromaidan
00:06:51.960 Revolution, political life in Ukraine was divided along the question of who should Ukraine side with?
00:07:00.520 And with a population that is 30-40% native Russian speaking, majority fluent in Russian,
00:07:11.000 the answer wasn't obvious because of orthodoxy. The church in Ukraine was part of the Russian Orthodox
00:07:17.880 Church. They obviously wanted to side with Russia for religious reasons. But there was this siren call
00:07:24.680 of the EU promising success and prosperity. And you end up in this situation where
00:07:34.200 all of political life is divided over who should we side with. These are people with deep ties to Poland
00:07:42.280 in the west of the country, because that part of the country is also Catholic. They saw Poland becoming more 1.00
00:07:49.160 prosperous as it joined the European Union. They wanted a piece of that. But then the other side of the country was
00:07:55.560 very Russian, Orthodox, wanted to stick with the Russians, and this middle was divided.
00:08:00.280 And in fair and square elections, the Russian favoring side won, but they only won by very slim majorities of
00:08:11.560 2%, 1%, 3%. So it was never decisive. And that was always a huge part of the issue for them that, okay,
00:08:21.080 who do we want to side with? And you could see that Ukraine was really falling behind everybody else
00:08:32.760 because it didn't have access to the EU. And because this was one of the most corrupt countries in Europe,
00:08:43.400 even more so than Russia, you have to remember. So if you look at GDP per capita,
00:08:50.440 for Poland, Russia and Ukraine, you see that there was the Russian decline that we spoke about in the
00:08:58.600 first episode covering this. You see Poland overshooting as it liberalized and joined the European Union.
00:09:05.800 And you see Russia improving with the rise of Putin especially, whereas you see Ukraine stagnating.
00:09:14.200 And for the Ukrainians, the reason for the stagnation was blamed on two factors.
00:09:20.040 The corruption and the Ukrainian oligarchs who were really legendary in how much they looted the 1.00
00:09:26.600 country. I think Ukraine competes only with Moldova in terms of how corrupt the country was,
00:09:33.000 and still is, and still is, I would argue. And that really put a damp on their growth prospects.
00:09:39.560 And this was used consistently to push for closer relations with the EU as the only answer
00:09:49.560 that could be given that could be given to solve the problem. And then you have the Maidan uprising.
00:09:58.040 The Maidan uprising was a big wave of protests against the sitting pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
00:10:09.080 And the cause for that was from 2010 until the uprising began in 2013,
00:10:18.040 there were constant discussions on whether or not Ukraine should have a much deeper economic
00:10:26.200 relationship with the European Union. From the Russian perspective, there were a couple of problems
00:10:31.480 with that. The Russians were in some kind of customs union with Ukraine where trade was not really
00:10:40.520 interrupted. And if you looked at a map of the two countries today on Google Maps, you could see that
00:10:45.880 the roads between Russia and Ukraine are all there. It's fully integrated, much in the same way that
00:10:51.880 the Netherlands and Belgium are fully integrated into each other. If you enjoyed this piece of premium
00:10:56.920 content from the Lotus Eaters, head to our website where you can find more.