Since their independence in 1991, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan are caught at the crossroads of competing geopolitical stakeholders and post-imperial reverberations. While there is abundant research on strategic power struggles in the region, little is known about how local communities engage with geopolitics. Through extensive, multi-sited ethnography, my work tackles the nexus of macro-scale power politics and the micro-scale of everyday life at two sites that are intricately and intensely entangled with geopolitical dynamics: the 7Km Market in Odesa, and the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek. Located in two historically related, yet vastly different former Soviet republics, I show how past configurations of labor, gender, and space have shaped contemporary infrastructures of global trade. Built from double-stacked shipping containers, the two markets have become key nodes in a transnational network linking goods from Turkey, China, Korea, and beyond with consumers across Eurasia. Yet, their global interconnections render cross-border traders highly vulnerable to changing border regimes, mobility restrictions, and foreign policy shifts. My research examines how these actors navigate geopolitical and geo-economic shifts, revealing the entanglement of localized livelihood strategies with broader global power dynamics. To conceptualize these intersections, I introduce the notion of ‘lived geopolitics.’ This concept challenges conventional state-centric, top-down approaches to geopolitics and critiques its confinement to discourse—focused on language, symbols, and narratives—by foregrounding the lived experiences and agency of those directly impacted by power politics. Through ethnographic engagement, my work sheds light on how individuals experience, interpret, and navigate uneven political timespaces, emphasizing the multidirectional, everyday entanglements between people, markets, and global systems. By analyzing post-Soviet markets as historically rooted, spatially contingent relational networks of global significance, I reframe geopolitics within the framework of social anthropology, offering a deeper understanding of its lived dimensions.