FBXL Social

>be me
>geopolitics gore enjoyer
>discover Transnistria
>what the fuck is this DLC country
>thin strip of land between Moldova and Ukraine
>flag looks like someone found a Soviet PNG in a cursed folder called final_final_REAL_use_this_one.png
>hammer and sickle still there
>not even ironically
>they are doing Soviet nostalgia with the commitment of a divorced dad who still wears his high school football jacket
>USSR collapsed in 1991
>Transnistria apparently hit “remind me later” on the update popup

>start reading more
>it gets worse
>not recognized by basically anyone
>except other breakaway geopolitics cryptids
>Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Artsakh before the save file got deleted
>international legitimacy of a Minecraft server

>capital is Tiraspol
>looks like if a mid-tier Soviet regional capital was preserved in amber by a museum curator with clinical depression
>statues of Lenin everywhere
>street names still doing communist cosplay
>official vibe: “What if the USSR was a liminal space?”

>think it’s just a weird frozen conflict museum
>nope
>it’s also basically a corpo-state
>economy dominated by Sheriff
>not the police
>not a guy with a hat and revolver
>a massive conglomerate
>supermarkets, gas stations, telecoms, media, football club, probably your grandmother if you check the paperwork
>founded by former security-service guys
>because of course
>every post-Soviet rabbit hole eventually arrives at “former KGB man controls bizarre regional monopoly”
>football team somehow beat Real Madrid in 2021
>imagine getting clapped by the official FC of Post-Soviet Costco Oblast
>imagine if Walmart, Gazprom, RT and the KGB had a baby and raised it inside a Soviet bus station
>that’s Transnistrian capitalism

>mfw communist aesthetic
>mfw oligarchic monopoly economy
>mfw red star on the flag but everything is owned by one giga-conglomerate
>“workers of the world unite”
>under one vertically integrated holding company

>best part
>local tax haven shenanigans
>Transnistrian companies often register in Moldova for trade access
>but don’t exactly behave like they’re thrilled about paying Moldovan taxes
>absolute galaxy-brain arrangement
>“we are Moldovan when exporting, independent when taxing, Soviet when branding, capitalist when invoicing, Russian when geopolitically convenient”
>statehood.exe has encountered a legal paradox

>try explaining this to a normal person
>“so is it Moldova?”
>yes
>“so Moldova controls it?”
>no
>“so is it Russian?”
>kind of
>“so Russia owns it?”
>not exactly
>“so who runs it?”
>a breakaway government and a giant ex-security-service corpo-octopus
>“why?”
>because the Soviet Union exploded and nobody cleaned up all the geopolitical shrapnel

>then 2022 happens
>Ukraine war kicks off next door
>Moldova applies for EU membership
>Transnistria sitting between them like a cursed save file from 1992
>suddenly this frozen conflict isn’t just frozen
>it’s frozen inside a room where someone just plugged in three space heaters and a toaster
>every geopolitical analyst on earth periodically waking up in a cold sweat like
>“WAIT, WHAT ABOUT THE WEIRD SOVIET DLC REGION?”
>Moldova wants Europe
>Ukraine suddenly very interested in not having a mystery Soviet rectangle on its western border
>Russia has “peacekeepers” in Transnistria
>Transnistria wants to continue being a Soviet-themed oligarchic customs loophole
>Brussels opens accession documents
>Moscow opens vodka
>Tiraspol opens another Sheriff gas station

>Transnistria is genuinely the weirdest political entity in Europe
>not because it is powerful
>because it feels procedurally generated
>like Paradox Interactive let an intern design a microstate after eating expired pelmeni
>ideology: Soviet nostalgia
>economy: monopoly capitalism
>foreign policy: Russian hostage note
>tax policy: Moldovan paperwork glitch
>national identity: “please don’t ask too many questions”
>military situation: Chekhov’s ammo depot
>tourism slogan: “come see what happens when history forgets to despawn an NPC”

>visit Transnistrian supermarket
>everything is Sheriff-branded
>buy bread from Sheriff
>buy gas from Sheriff
>watch Sheriff TV
>use Sheriff telecom
>cheer for FC Sheriff
>pay in arcade tokens for a Soviet-themed geopolitics museum with card issued by Sheriff Bank
>walk outside
>Lenin statue gazes over the square
>he died warning about capitalist monopolies
>now he stands guard over one with cowboy branding

>beautiful
>absolutely beautiful
>the USSR died
>but its weirdest larval form survived as a strip mall with a flag
>Transnistria is not a country
>it is a geopolitical haunted house
>it is a customs loophole wearing a ushanka
>it is what happens when the Cold War ends but one county clerk refuses to process the paperwork
>it is the world’s first Soviet cyberpunk company town without the cyberpunk
>just concrete, cigarettes, border guards, and unresolved constitutional questions

>10/10
>would get detained by three different unrecognized ministries again

RT: https://shitpost.cloud/objects/70af451d-0d6e-4e14-9ad3-ca642399dc93

you forgot the massive ammo dump there if anyone decides to try and touch it, the world gets to see an explosion the size of nagasaki again.

Gonna be fun times when Odessa is finally returned to the RF and there's a contiguous border again

it'll be amusing.

In the quintessential Slav way

@Hoss@shitpost.cloud bro. This is like mechahilter AI

A landlocked Ukraine is the only possible peaceful Ukraine.

Niggers who cannot contain their geopolitical chimpouts get partitioned. Same as it ever was.

@Hoss pretty sure exactly this is the plot of Escape from Tarkov

This was an excellent breakdown! Good work!

/pol/ creates a country one post at a time

@Hoss also thank you this post was 10x better after a fat bong rip and it was pretty damn good before

What an amazing rabbit hole it was to go down. Kojima himself couldn't have imagined something like Transnistria.

a dismembered one where "ukrops" live within a slightly extended polak border again to be agrarian slaves. whether the polaks get back at the purges the galicians and later their mutated spawn did is beyond me and not my problem.

"Not my circus, not my monkeys"

I read this entire thing in Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke's voice. It was🤌🏻

did you write this yourself? bravo.

Not exactly, lmao. I spliced the funniest parts together from a few dozen different gens

A lot of those former Soviets became corporate empires. I think I recall Kyrgyzstan being one. Just, you know, without the Soviet LARP.

@Hoss
cc: @GreatFediPosts

So it's a theme park 🤔

Soviet Disneyland but it has border control and a military.

Transnistrian postage stamps are cheap collectibles, if youre into that sort of thing. Would recommend 👍🏻

Their plastic coins are nifty, never seen anything quite like it.

Would buy some for a home poker set

@Hoss @nike >only the 1 and 5 have the correct number of sides
they aren't very good at math are they

I've never been so suddenly bothered by a detail I didn't even notice until it was pointed out.

@Hoss
Stuff like this is why I'm excited for the collapse of the American empire.

We will see oligarchs and maybe even some grumpy colonels establishing their own fiefdoms.

@Hoss you should kill yourself for writing this in reddit

@Hoss @nike poker chips

@Hoss AI?

Tweaked and spliced together from a bunch of outputs, but yeah

@gav @Hoss you should just kys you fukken nigger

Yeah but Sheriff is an especially hilarious example to me because an ex-KGB glowie smashed together Walmart, Comcast, Buc-ee's, CNN, Gazprom, Manchester United and a bunch of other random oligarchic business interests into one massive conglomerate hydra and then draped the whole thing in GTA gas station-esque branding.

Yeah that does have a certain .. flair ..

>it is what happens when the Cold War ends but one county clerk refuses to process the paperwork

And later realizes "actually, this frozen conflict is the perfect vehicle for tax avoidance". I gotta respect the game, honestly. Truly the (ambiguously) sovereign citizen of weird unrecognized statelets.

@Hoss >national identity: “please don’t ask too many questions”
Evenly split between Russians, Moldovans and Ukrainians. Funnily enough during the independence war Russian volunteers (including a certain Igor Girkin) fought alongside ukro nationalists from UNA-UNSO against mainland Moldovans.

It's a pretty fascinating geopolitical oddity.

Should I visit there before my child is born?

You're not allowed to join NATO if you are in a war or border dispute - so historically, Russia has kept Transnistria in perpetual frozen border dispute mode in order to keep Moldova out.

But now that NATO rules are becoming less relevant, Russia is probably going to try to conquer enough of Ukraine that they can make it part of a contiguous Russian territory.

Depends, as of right now Transnistria is still being "left on read" with regards to official recognition from Russia. That doesn't exactly signal confidence that they're going to be able to capture enough territory to fold it into the federation proper.

@Hoss @cjd i think they wouod do thst but widdle it down with open borders for two or 3 decades, its just not worth the fight, but it would be funny if romania reunified over trying annexing it

You think it will ever plappen? Or will it be nothingeverhappenstoOdessa.jpeg?

I bet the coffee there tastes like sewer water and keeps you awake for 48 hours.

Ngl if the comrades' coffee slaps that hard I'll choke it down.

Gotta get through your 15 hour shift at the Sherrif frozen pelmeni factory somehow comerade

So this is the country from Papers Please?

What a great morning read *lights Lenin Menthols Sherif brand cigarettes. *sips Marcos people's blend Sherif brand coffee.

I always recognize I got a banger Hosspost cooking when I start absentmindedly entertaining myself prompting the clanker and realize I've regenerated the output 36 times over the past hour while laughing my ass off.

>unironically the best thing I've read in a week.

This poast was sponsored by Sheriff

I would unironically take sponsorship payments in sanctions-dodging crypto transactions from the ex-glowie who controls Sheriff if he approached me with an offer to shill for him. That'd be amazing.

We all would

Now do this with the city of london, corpo and medieval times.

I'm currently workshopping a future post about Cyprus because it's another super funny geopolitical shitpost topic.

Back of the mind list then

cyprus an already small island antion, is currently split into turk half and grek half. and can never reunited to greece ucz hte turks are fags and we should genocide htem all.

Cyprus is equal parts tourist destination, tax haven, frozen conflict, financial crisis graveyard, and millennia-spanning historical record of conquest from every civilization in the region that ever figured out boats, it's a beautiful subject for a clanker-assisted geopolitics greentext shitpost.

alright, long as you agree that we should genocide the turks.

Of course

i was capable of holding off the ottomans as cyprus in vidja so tthat they didn't do it irl is just pathetic.

>Loord I hope they let me join 'em

Americans want to swap Trump brand for Sherriff Brand.

>that was quick

Its literally the American way. No joke 😁
Robber baron corporate town but soviet style.

@Hoss @PodunkPotato @madcuzbad Won't be surprised if our sanctions dodgers now constitute at least a half of its GDP. Even fucking Yandex is registered there.

That's a nigger preacher from Chicago who wanted to join the White revolution he saw coming, Finn. Niggified, but not Trumpian.

Is this a recorded oral remark from Justice Clarence Thomas?

Full remarks when they arrested his wife.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHyN9mYD66c

Posted 14 hours ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4mxBUNJFKU

@Hoss
>football team somehow beat Real Madrid in 2021
>imagine getting clapped by the official FC of Post-Soviet Costco Oblast

Reminder that in 1982, Loma Negra, an Argentinian concrete company, had its private football team play a friendly match against the Soviet Union national team, and won 1-0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AerFIHrca_o

@ElDeadKennedy Argie commie-stomping lore.

@Hoss @ElDeadKennedy Loma Negra=Black Mesa

It might be a bit nicer if it doesn't happen in the Balkan way. Just my two cents.

Russia is at least going to want taxes, but they don’t mind companies having nostalgia for the USSR. only thousands will die.

There is so much gold in this post, its value eclipses Transnistria's GDP.

There really should be a Soviet theme park. Just grey buildings with Cyrillic writing and military equipment parked haphazardly everywhere.

They better sell adidas at the gift shop

And Bakelite AKs

Authentic AdDiass knockoff, Da​?¿

>Adidas has three stripes, we have four!

And long lines for crappy food, just like normal theme parks.

Heavy borscht and then roller coasters 🤮

Unbeetable combo. (groan)

Four stripes? Comrade, you speak of capitalist decadence.

Greece has gay marriage now, which might be a deal breaker for Cyprus.

Is there a good place to go drink some sheriff vodka there?

Of course. One of the many diverse Sheriff People's bars.

I hope i can get a couple rounds before i get disappeared soviet style

@Hoss >transnistrian football team has niggers

@GapYoukai @Hoss transnigrian