Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 21st of June. And the new news is that in Russian occupied territory in Crimea, in southern Ukraine, Russian authorities have suspended all fuel purchases for all civilians, whether it’s personal cars or businesses. Short version is that the Ukrainians have now deployed enough drones reliably, enough that can target things like fuel trucks, that there is no more fuel coming in. 

The Russian Navy has long since abandoned the province, and everything has to come in by rail. And those rail bridges have now been damaged or truck. And now the Ukrainians patrolling with dozens of drones at a time over the territory and basically hitting the drugs before they can get anywhere close. So we basically have whatever little fuel is left being hoarded by the military. 

And the only reason that the Kurt Strait Bridge remains operational, that’s a that’s a bridge that comes from Russia proper over straight at the Sea of Azov into Crimea, is so that civilians in Crimea can flee to Russia. It’s not that the Ukrainians are planning a final push or anything to take over the territory, but they have systematically damaged all of the infrastructure that allows the Russians to supply Crimea. 

And as big of a deal as that is, and it is, and there will be more of it in the future. It’s just the first start of a broader Ukrainian offensive. Most of these attacks are coming from places like Kherson, which are just on the other side of the Dnieper River. But there are a couple of towns further up Nikopol and Dnipro, where the Ukrainians are starting to launch attacks as well, not interrupting logistics going to Crimea, per say, but logistics going to other parts of the occupied territories. 

Keep in mind, in the early days of the war, the Russians came in from the north, the east and the south and Crimeans in the south. The stuff in the north was eventually purged. It’s the stuff in the east that is now in question and in the southeast, because we have multiple provinces, that includes Donetsk and Luhansk that are hard up on the Russian border, and that provides a lot of backstop for the Russians. 

Ukrainians can’t dislodge those further. But as you move south and along the coast by cities like Mariposa and Meteor Pol, that does not apply. They can only be supplied by road or rail, just like Crimea or by sea, just like Crimea. And the sea link has already effectively been cut, and the Ukrainians have already been going aggressively after the ports in that region. 

And so the next stop is to do basically what they’ve done to Crimea, further to the northeast and east and east and east, until they get hard up to the Russian border, or at least into the Donetsk region, where the Russians have a few more geographic advantages. Basically, what we’re looking at here is roughly two thirds of the territory that the Russians have captured since the first war, going back to 2014, is now becoming a sandbag that the Russians cannot reliably resupply. 

And while Crimea might be the literal bridge too far because it’s just too far away, you can imagine a situation where the Russians lose access to that entire southern zone, or the ability to supply it, and the Ukrainians start crossing the river, or coming across at, say, Dnipro further north, and punching through and basically excising the Russians from the entire area. 

Not suggesting it. It’ll be quick, not suggesting to be easy. There’s still lots of minefields and this is still Russia we’re talking about here. But the balance of forces in this entire region is now shift. And the question isn’t will the Russian strategic position collapse? It’s how and what will the Russians do in reaction to that? There’s still a lot of options in the table. 

There’s still a lot of ways where this can go horribly, horribly wrong. But the Russians have yet to come up with a way to counter the Ukrainian memory drones that are capable of selecting their own targets, which makes them. And now that those are being produced in the hundreds per day, the Russian position across the entire southern parts of the occupied territories is really falling apart.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, we’re doing another episode in our ongoing series on evolving drone technologies. And today we are specifically looking at the Russians. Most of the breakthroughs that we have seen that have reshaped the battlefield in the Ukraine war since March have been Ukrainian longer range, better targeting, faster assembly, mass manufacturing. Go go go go go go. 

But it’s not like the Russians have just been sitting there. Yes, yes, yes. Most of their parts are coming from the Chinese system and they’re just being assembled in Russia. But that doesn’t mean that the Russians don’t have a military industrial complex. In fact, still today, they easily have the third most powerful one in the world, legacy of the Soviet system, with a few things that have been added here and there. 

But when the Russians really shine, it’s when they take a proven technology and then apply it to a new platform and mass manufacture it. And we are now in the early stages of seeing that with what used to be called the shards. Those are the the dumb drones that they originally brought in from Iran. They now call them Garin if they’re made in Russia, Iran, and we’re now into the third and even the fourth generation. 

And the single biggest difference is that the Russians are taking the propeller off as method of propulsion and slapping on a jet engine. So the original shards travel at about 100 miles an hour, maybe 120 if they’re pretty zippy. The new ones coming out of Russia are traveling at pushing 400 miles an hour. So that’s problem number one, because there just aren’t very many interceptors that the Ukrainians have access to that can catch one of these drones. 

Usually what happens is you fire a bunch of interceptors and anything that doesn’t hit on the first pass as the penetrate turns around and chases it, that doesn’t work when your interceptor can’t catch up. And with the Garin four starting to come online now, we’re seeing more and more of these relatively cheap drones punching through air defenses because you only get one shot. 

That’s problem number one. Problem number two is as much advances as the Ukrainians have made in interception and long range strike. They still just don’t have control of their own airspace. Yes, they’ve got decent anti-aircraft capabilities. And yes, that has kept the Russians at arm’s length, where they launch glide bombs, then take 20 miles to glide down, hit their target. 

But the Ukrainians have lacked the ability so far to impose a degree of air superiority that would allow them to actually go after where the fighter jets are. So their solution has been longer range, bigger payloads go after the bases that these things launch from. That’s been working, but it’s not enough. 

And now the Russians are about to do something else. They have started putting something called an AR 60. That’s an infrared driven anti-aircraft missile on top of a Garand, and then sending that in so it doesn’t go as fast as, say, a MiG would go into a thousand miles an hour roughly. So the drones are going about half that speed, but then they launch an anti-air missile. 

So any F-16s or Griffins or Rafael’s or any other vessels, any other aircraft that the Ukrainians actually are able to get in the sky are going to start facing wave after wave of cheap, disposable drone firing a single missile. About the only good news news is that the missile itself weighs enough that that Garand cannot then also carry a warhead. 

So it’s just a one shot deal, not a two shot deal. But you throw a few dozen of those on the front every day, and it’s almost impossible for the Ukrainians to get anything up in the air, much less provide any sort of screen, much less project power into Russian territory to prevent those glide bombs from coming. 

So, yes, most of the breakthroughs, most of the changes, most of this really impressive stuff that we’ve seen in the last three months has been from Ukraine. It has been hurting Russia. It has been causing a lot of damage. But it doesn’t mean that the Russians are just lying there. They’ve basically taken steps to ensure that they can still hit nearly any target they want in Ukraine. 

They just have to send a few more of these jet powered drones after it. And there is no way that Ukrainians are anywhere close, getting any degree of control over their airspace. And as long as that happens, then if they do, the Ukrainians do manage to launch a ground assault, they’re going to be doing so under a hail of glide bombs, because they can’t really do much about it.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 12th of June, and we’re going to take a look at what’s going on in the Ukraine war, specifically on the Crimean front. Now, the Crimean peninsula is a chunk of territory that juts out into the Black Sea, about midway down the Ukrainian coast. 

Historically speaking, it’s been a strong Russian outpost and one of the few places where the Russians have been able to project naval power. 

But during Soviet times, Khrushchev, who was Ukrainian, transferred the Crimea peninsula to the Ukrainian unit of the Soviet Union, which is something that pissed off all the Russians. And the Russians have been wanting it back ever since, especially in the post-Cold War environment. Well, in 2014, in the first phase of the Ukrainian war, the Russians did manage to capture it and have been using it as a military springboard to attack southern Ukraine ever since. 

The issue for the Ukrainians is that the very definition of Ukraine is the Dnieper River, which flows down through Kyiv and enters the Black Sea of the vicinity of the Crimean Peninsula. So if you control Crimea, you can threaten that opening as well as Odessa, which is, for all practical purposes, Ukraine’s second city in its window on the world. 

So there is no version of a Russia that fails to get Crimean, has any sort of naval strength or power in the Black Sea. And for Ukraine, there is no version of Ukraine in which it doesn’t control the Crimean peninsula, or can have any sort of economic integration with the rest of the world in a meaningful way. So it really is one or the other. 

Anyway, at the moment the Russians are controlling it, but at the moment the Ukrainians new drones, which have better range and better targeting, the ability to even themselves, have been pummeling all of the logistical lines that supply the Crimean peninsula. There’s really only two sorts of routes. In one is the Crimean bridge over the strait, which has been hit enough that it can’t handle large vehicles or trains, just light traffic. 

Or you can come on land through southern Ukraine in occupied territory, hugging the coast of the Black Sea, and then go into a series of bridges that cross into the peninsula. That way, at its narrowest point, the connection is only about nine kilometers wide. 

And so, while there are a number of routes through those nine kilometers, none of them are great. With all the new drones, though, Ukraine now has the range to hit all of those bridges, and in the last few days they’ve been hitting all of them almost at the same time. And so we’ve seen sustained pressure by the Ukrainians on the entire logistical system that allows Crimea to function. And remember that now, naval drones are a big thing in the Black Sea. 

So the Russians have evacuated most of their naval forces from Crimea and can no longer reliably supply the peninsula that I see. So everything has to come by truck or by train. And now that entire backup transport system has been put under huge threat. So what we’re seeing is fuel shortages, ammo shortages and manpower shortages in Crimea and large scale the end of Crimea as a military springboard to attack southern Ukraine, because they just can’t get the gear and the material that they need. 

Now, does this mean that a Ukrainian attack on crime is imminent? No. There’s still the very real issue of this transport problem working both ways. If the Ukrainians decided to surge across. They’d first have to cross the Dnieper, get into occupied southern Ukraine, and then go to Crimea. What the Ukrainians are doing is making it so that Crimea is a strategic loss for the Russians, and a drain on the resources, rather than anything that can gain that, that they can take over themselves. 

And that seems to be working very well. I just don’t want to oversell this. Yes, the Kerch Strait, for all practical purposes, is out of commission from a military point of view. Just can’t handle the cargo. But all of these bridges north south that go from Ukraine proper into Crimea, a little different. Most of them are not going over large bodies of water that are deep. 

Some of them are like rail bed and you can’t really blow up a rail bed. Others are crossing dikes that separate some of the marshes and the saltwater lakes that dot its area so they can attack the road bed, and in doing so, put in a crater that makes it so that has to be repaired. But those repairs can take just a week or two and a real problem. 

The real issue of what the Ukrainians are after here is to try to destroy as many of the crossing points that are close to Crimea, especially in the eastern part of the isthmus, as they can to force the Russians to go further north and route around the entire area and come into the peninsula from the west, where the infrastructure is more difficult to destroy, because if they can do that, then the Russians are bringing their forces far enough north that the Ukrainians can attack them with more conventional weapons like, say, artillery. 

And anything that slows down the trucks makes it that much easier for a drone to hit it. Keep in mind we now have memory drones hunting at volume in Russian occupied territories of Ukraine where Ukrainians can get a drone into the general area and then release it, and the drone will pick its own target and fly in and hit the target. 

And jamming no longer works. And so for the first time of the war, we’re seeing the Russians large scale about abandoning their attempts to resupply Crimea. But they have to run a gantlet every single time. And if the Ukrainians put up giant pothole in the middle of the bridge, all of a sudden the 50 odd trucks that were about to cross it have to stop. 

And if you’re a drone hunter, that’s exactly the sort of environment that you want. So we’re seeing a sort of highway of death situation. If you remember Desert Storm from 92 getting set up here, where it’s probably only a matter of time, where until the Ukrainians are able to basically bottle up a series of Russian convoys in areas where they can’t really maneuver and then just wipe out the whole thing. 

You do that a few times, and the entire Russian logistical effort for the southern front crumbles. Keep in mind that two years ago, the Russians had almost run out of military supply trucks, and if not for huge shipments from China, they would have. Now we’re in a situation where the Ukrainians have set up kill zones, where they’re probably going to be able to wipe out those supply trucks faster than the Chinese can make them. 

And that is a serious volume issue that the Russians are going to have a hard time dealing with.