There’s a lot going on in Ukraine right now, so let’s do a quick update on the military and diplomatic developments.
On the military front, Ukraine’s ability to jam Russian glide bombs is improving, which has been a critical tactic for Russian success in the war so far. Ukrainian forces are targeting Russian supply routes in an attempt to bottleneck logistics. So far, these efforts seem to have stalled the Russians and opened a window for Ukrainian counterattacks.
Things on the diplomatic front are somehow fuzzier than on the frontlines. Trump’s Truth Social post (shown in the video) aligns with Russian disinformation and goes to show how Russian propaganda has been adapted to appeal to Trump personally. Trump’s inconsistent views/takes/posts make it impossible to predict his future stance on Ukraine.
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Hey everybody Peter Zeihan here. Coming from Colorado, a lot of you been asking with good reason, for updating what’s going on in Ukraine. And, let’s split into what I know, and then just what else? What I know is what’s going on in the front, which is weird, because usually that’s the hard part. The Ukrainians ability to jam the glides systems for something called glide bomb has really gotten good.
Now, if you go back about a year, year and a half ago, one of the things I was really worried about is that the, Russians were dropping these mass sieve, in some cases over 1000 kilogram bombs, with glide kits on them. Glide kits, like what the United States has been using with our JDM system since the first Gulf War back in the early 1990s, which was giving them a range of 20, 30 miles beyond the point that they drop the weapon in the MiG, the drops, it just veers off and, you know, it’s safe.
And then you get a blast radius that sometimes it’s like a third of a mile, just absolutely demolishes any sort of fixed, fortification and stuns the hell out of the defenders. And then the Russians would come in with one of their meat assaults. And in doing this, they were able to take over the fortress city of, the Deepika, last year and were closing on per cross this year. And if they’d seized Picross and they’re just a few miles away, that would have basically broken the Ukrainian line in the Donbas. It’s the middle of a series of fortifications, and it’s a logistics hub. So if with Picross, they can go north and south up the line with up across, they have to go back a few dozen miles to get to another line, to transport things up and back and forth.
For the Ukrainians. They will try to keep this war as a war of movement because they have fewer troops and better troops, whereas the Russians are more, a stagnant fighter. And so they can engage in more points, just not as well. So if the ability of the Ukrainians to move had been inhibited, it would have been a real problem.
The jamming seems to have made the tactic that the Russians were using for the last year less and less effective. But that’s kind of piece one. Piece two is the Ukrainians have, using not necessarily new technology, just applying a little bit differently determined another, strategy for mucking up with the Russians logistics, not just going after things like fuel supplies or ammo dumps and things like that, but they look for an important intersection that the Russians have, and they take out a couple vehicles there.
And then a couple of days later, they take out a few more, and a couple days later, a few more. And eventually you get this, carcass field of vehicles that the Russians are forced to send out things like tow trucks, and then you hit the tow trucks. And so you just get this ever mounting line of vehicle debris that forces the Russians to detour ever further around.
Once they go through the fields, they might. You have to deal with the mud season that is Ukraine is so famous for in the fall and in the spring, and in the other seasons eventually gets so choked they have to use the transport options all together. These two things together have basically stalled the attack on cross and even the Russian counterattacks on Kursk and the case of a cross have even allowed the Ukrainians counter-attack a little bit.
Not saying that the danger is past, but it’s a it’s a different kind of fight now. So that’s that’s the military look at the moment, diplomatically, everything’s all over the place. Let me show you this little thing from Truth Social. That’s Donald Trump’s personal version of social media. This is what he posted last week about Zelensky.
When Zelensky said that Trump was living in a Russian disinformation bubble, which you. Yes. And it’s proven by this, document here. Everything it’s highlighted in red is something that is an oldie but goodie from Russian propaganda going back the last three years. These are the points of Russian propaganda have been hit, man. Month after month after month, after month.
The yellow ones. Those are things that were new, when Trump was reelected or elected the second time. Probably a better way to phrase that, the Russians changed the tenor of a lot of their propaganda to appeal to Trump personally. Basically, they took Trump’s lies and they made some of those integrate with their own. And these yellow parts of some of the newer propaganda.
But what really had the Russians salivating when this Truth social post comes out, or the bits I’ve circled? Because these are Trump’s words, these are not things that were plucked wholesale from Russian disinformation. Instead, they’re places where the Trump has the Trump. They’re places where Trump has taken, Russian disinformation and put it in his own words.
Whenever Trump uses quotes or all caps, that’s him channeling himself. You buy guns anyway. And so the Russians see this, and they’re just giddy because getting getting a foreign leader, any sort of foreign policymaker to use Russian disinformation is always a win. But when the foreign policy maker is using the updated stuff and put it in their own words, that that’s kind of a gold standard for espionage, basically getting the other side to do things your way for you, but them thinking it’s all their idea.
So when this came out, I was kind of like, what the hell is going on? It’s like, I know that Donald Trump has gutted the upper echelons of the Defense Department and the CIA and the FBI, and he’s appointed someone who’s a Russian agent to basically be his premier intelligence filter. But the idea that he would just be so out of it as to just wholesale garble down and then regurgitate back Russian propaganda, had me really worried.
And then on, a week later on Thursday, Donald Trump, when he was, when somebody asked him about what he said was specifically, Zelenskyy being a dictator, he says, did I do that? I don’t think I said that. He just kind of moves on. So the number one thing to remember about Trump is a track record means nothing.
Consistency means nothing. Whatever comes out of his or goes through his head comes out his mouth. There is no consistency. He changes his mind all the time. I don’t mean to say that this is a good thing, but it means that no matter what you think about what Trump is or what he says, it’ll change tomorrow. The Ukraine war to this point has been one of the most dynamic conflicts in history.
I never expected the Ukrainians to do so well. I never expected the Russians to do so bad. I never expected the Europeans, to get involved. I never expected the American hands to get involved. This war has been one surprise after another. And that’s before you consider that the technology of the conflict is evolving so quickly as we move from the industrial age into the digital age and the rise of drones, and probably in the not too distant future, AI systems courtesy of Donald Trump.
The diplomatic side of the Ukraine war is now just as dynamic. And so everybody, no matter whose side you’re on, buckle up.
It’s about to get a lot rockier and a lot weirder.
