The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Russians Continue Stirring the Romanian Pot || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Romania just held its second attempt at the first round of presidential elections, after the initial round was invalidated due to Russian interference. Looks like the Romanians are having some major déjà vu.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-russians-continue-stirring-the-romanian-pot

Hey, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Chicago. And before I go and get some pizza, because, duh, we're going to take a break from American politics and economics for the moment. And we're going to talk about a country that doesn't come up very often, and that is Romania. Now, Romania just had their second run, second attempt, of the first round of the presidential elections. The first round a few months ago was canceled. We'll link a video to that piece here.

after basically the Russians massively intervened to the point that it was just stupidly obvious. And it appears on the surface like that has now happened again. The Romanians do a two-round system where everybody gets to run the first round and then they were to have a runoff for the second round. Now, last time around, the guy in play was a guy by the name of Georgioscu, who was kind of a nobody. He had been a minor cabinet minister back in the 1990s and that was it. And then he vanished from the political scene, barely held down a real job,

then all of a sudden, wow! back on the political scene and came in first in the presidential election. The Russians basically made up 20 million fake accounts in a country that doesn't have 20 million accounts on social media and canvassed the country for him. This time around, the guy's name is Simeon, and something similar has happened. Simeon is even more of a nobody. He was never in government before, has never had a real job. He was a professional protester. So imagine AOC in the United States if she hadn't had that job of being a bartender and she just went straight into the presidential election and did well. That's basically this guy. Anyway, he actually, he sued the government a couple

years ago for accusing him of being a Russian agent. And in the court case, they actually proved that he was a Russian agent. So the fact that he's even allowed to run, you know, Romania, who knows? Who knows what's going to happen with the specifics, whether or not the Romanians are going to try to do this a third time? I have no idea. But why the hell are the Russians so focused on Romania. Well, it's a geographic thing. There are two pieces of geography that define this part of the world. The first is the Eurasian step, just this broad, wide open, about the same size as the United States is in total that's flat and it's open and it's arid and you just can't get much economic activity about it. And that is, in essence, Belarus, Russia, or Western Russia and

Ukraine. And so the Russians being from the Eurasian step, the only way they've ever figured out that they can be securities to conquer all of it, and eventually get to zones where you can't just run across the Great Wide Open and punch them in the face, get to a place where there's a geographic barrier. And that barrier is the second of those geographic items, and that's the Carpathian Mountains, which starts in the northwest at roughly the gates of Vienna, and then wraps along the Slovak Polish border, curving south through the eastern parts of Hungary and the western parts of Moldova and Ukraine and eventually ending up in Romania. Romania is where the southern anchor of where these two great features of the space come together. And so what the Russians have

been after, what the Russians have always been after is once they conquer the step to anchor in the gap between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea where the Eurasian step ends. And so if and when the Russians succeed in conquering Ukraine, they're just going to turn their sights further west and go for the line of countries that basically make the entire periphery of the Eurasian steppe. So getting to Finland and the Baltic states right up against the Baltic Sea, getting through Poland up to Vistula, that's the river that separates the Eurasian step from the northern European plain, and then getting up into Romania and Moldova in order to plug the gap access from the southwest. That's what the goal has been, that's what it's always been,

and they're using politics as a way to soften up opposition of which Romania is part of this. Romania is actually the state in the region where they've had the least success, if you can believe that. So Hungary is ruled by a neo-authoritarian by the name of Victor Orban, who has been blanketly pro-Russian for the last several years to the point he's actually using his position as president of Romania to sabotage NATO and EU operations from the inside. Next door, you've got Robert Fico in Slovakia, who's trying to become Slovakia's Orban, but the democratic traditions in Slovakia are a lot stronger than they are in Hungary, and so far it's very back and forth. You've got Bulgaria, where about a quarter of the

parliament is so tightly in Russians' pocket. They don't even have to be directed. They do what the Russians want before the Russians even say. And then you've got Serbia, which, Serbia is kind of a mess, but it's Slavic and it has been pro-Russian really for the better part of the last 200 years. All that's left is Romania. And if Romania falls, then not only would the Russians have no problem pushing into the Carpathians, there's a very distinct possibility. They might be able to push all the way to the gates of Vienna. And that would obviously get a lot of attention from a lot of places. So this is an election and a place that most of you have probably never heard of that matters hugely. Because if Romania falls, the entire southeast quadrant of the EU and NATO falls with it,

splitting Turkey and Greece off on their own. And we are in a fundamentally different game.