YouSaid · the spoken record

Maia Sandu

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64
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2026-01-12
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2026-01-12
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1
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  1. “Consume any Russian gas with the exception of the Transnistrian region, which is a different story. Again, in 2021, we were 100% dependent on Russian gas. We are going to finish in the next few weeks a big project which connects us with the electricity grid of Romania, of the EU. Some 10, 15 years ago, more than 50% of our experts would go to Russia. Today only 4% of our experts go to Russia. Some 10 years ago, 50% of the Moldovan diaspora would go to work in Russia, the remittances were 50% of the remittances were also coming from Russia. Today, this number is very small, it's probably less than 100,000 people, and the remittances even before the war accounted for 11% of the total remittances. Now this is even smaller, and I'm talking about”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Just one month later, they just caught the gas supply. They told us before that we will continue with the contract. And at that time, although they didn't have any other alternatives, and for two months, they supplied us just 30% of our needs. And this was in the fall, so the winter was coming, and this was 2021 at the fall of 2021 when the energy prices and the gas price started to grow significantly. And this is the blackmail that I experienced myself while being in this office. And I know that this has happened before. And then if you look at the trade relations, every time Russia doesn't like something about the policies of the Moldovan government, they would impose some bans on Moldovan experts, despite the fact that we have a free trade regime. And many things like that. But I have to say that we've learned our lesson and things have changed significantly. Today, Moldova does not”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Haven't met him, so I would not, I can't claim that I know something that other people don't know, but we can judge him and his regime based on their actions. And we have the experience of Moldova. Of course, we have a long experience and it's not a good one. But when we got to power, when the new parliament was elected back in 2021, we sent our messages to Russia and we said we want to have a normal relationship at this central relationship. We believe in Moldova's EU integration path and we're going to work hard for that, but we do want to have good trade relations with Russia. We have a number of Russian-speaking population, Moldova. We respect their rights. We want to build a country where everybody feels safe and respected and so on.”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The Ukrainian language, and so on, then of course you get this reaction from people, but it's more than that. It's about what treasure means and what treasure meant even before. It's not about freedom. It's not about dignity. It's not about the human rights. It's everything that's the opposition of that. That's why we want to be part of Europe and that's why the parents now choosing for their kids to learn English and French and German and Spanish or Italian because they can choose today. They can choose for their kids to study Russian or another foreign language. But it's about what Russia is bringing to Moldova and we have a pretty bad experience.”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Of course, it's not bad to speak Russian and to understand better what Russia wants and not only you can read the great Russian writers. I mean, if you want to read in original, but I also speak English and nobody imposed it on me. And it was a totally different story with the Russian language because it was not the problem that we had to learn Russian. The problem was that they were trying to make us not speak our native language. And I am proud of us, I mean, of our nation because despite the fact that in the last 200 years, we've been on the Russians for almost 150, I'm not wrong, we managed to preserve the Romanian language. You know, when you impose it and when you're trying to kill the Romanian language,”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Of course, it's very different. I mean, the history of this country and in general, the history you can imagine what they were teaching us during the Soviet times, the fact that even our language was called Moldovan, not Romanian, even though it is Romanian, there are no differences between what people speak in Mukresht or what people speak here. It was a heavy propaganda. I do remember a lot of talks on TV about US and the West getting ready to attack us. So yes, my childhood was, I mean, I did have this fear and it was not just me, it was even my parents or other people, they would believe that the war can happen because this is what they would tell us. It's a totally different situation today. I mean, our kids... Can read whatever they want, and of course, we have a different history textbooks and different.”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “If we have a referendum, I would vote for the unification with Romania. Look at what's happening around Moldova today. Look at what's happening in the world. It is getting more and more difficult for a small country like Moldova to survive as a democracy, as a sovereign country, and of course to But as the president of Moldova, I do understand looking at the polls that there is not a majority of people today who would support the unification of Moldova with Romania. But there is a majority of people who support the EU integration, and this is what we are pursuing, because this is a more realistic objective. does help us, again, to survive as a democracy.”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Many people, like, if you judge by the number of people who joined the movement, we had this international square, we had hundreds of thousands of people who would come. So you could sense that there was support for the unification with Romania. But then there was...”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Goes the fight at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s was about the national values. I was born in a village and because of that I could speak Romanian at home and in the school but in Chisinau and in many other places people had hard times speaking their native language because of course there was a very aggressive propaganda and not only propaganda to replace the native the Romanian language with Russian. At the end of the 80s when the regime was not as strong as before we had this national movement which brought us to the independence and of course there were discussions of the reunification with Romania because Moldova was part of Romania before but then We, of course, we can't say we don't know how many people would have supported the unification with Romania because we didn't have a referenda.”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “She would not talk. She would just be upset that she had to waste her time. But of course, the promotion, I mean, the career promotion and everything depended on how the political party would see you and But what I could see when I was a child was that even though my parents were working hard, we were as poor as those who were not working hard, and especially since I was born in a village, there was the collective farm. And then I could see that almost half of the village or even more. They would just go in the field and take whatever they wanted. And of course, this was illegal, but almost no one got punished. and we would not do that because my parents would tell me that this is still in you cannot do that so you could you could fill it that you know some people are working hard some are not but we are all of us equally poor”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, they were political in a sense that everybody had to be political, but that was not real politics. This was Communist Party, and everybody had to go, my mom was a teacher, she had to go every Monday to a meeting and you didn't have to be a member of the political party, of the Communist Party, but you had to go to propaganda meeting, which would take several hours, and instead of spending time with us and children.”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And which again was caught, it partially collapsed in Russia, but even for those enterprises which did not collapse, you could not have the same cooperation. So I actually moved to the transition period. I don't know what can I say. Of course, when you're a child everything is nice, despite the fact that at some point you do understand that your parents are working very hard.”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “very tough. On one hand we had to build a state from scratch. We didn't have the institutional memory of what it was to run a country and a state. On the other hand the transition from the planned economy to the market economy proved to be extremely difficult Moldova was a small economy but it was fully integrated into the Soviet Union economy so then overnight everything collapsed and then of course overnight the energy resources became very expensive while the Moldovan tomatoes and grapes and agriculture because this is what mostly Moldova was producing you know was tip as before and then part of Moldova's industry was based on the military industry of US”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, we don't like to be presented as a form of Soviet Union republic, but I have to admit it that I was born in the Soviet Union and I was 19 when the Soviet Union finally dissolved failed. But of course, my childhood was influenced by the regime that I lived in and I didn't know what was different life because you just knew what they would show you on TV. So I was very happy with the rest of the people when we finally regained our independence and then the borders have opened. But the next period proved to be extremely difficult for the country and for the people. I was a student at the university in Chisinau and it was economically extremely difficult and the Moldovan transition period was very”

    2026-01-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 170. President of Moldova, Maia Sandu: Holding the Line Between Democracy and Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source