The Return of Kremlin Terrorism

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Over this past weekend, we had some interesting developments in Ukraine. Not on the front, but back in Kiev. A Moscow born individual who had lived in Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine previously, took seven people hostage in a supermarket and, caused quite a bit of ruckus before police took him out. 

Russian intelligence is not what it was during the Soviet period, but in bits and pieces it’s been rebuilding its capacity. And among the many tricks that the Russians developed during the Cold War was some really good divide and conquer ideas. Despite the size of the Soviet Union, Russian leader, Soviet leaders always had a very good appreciation for just how technologically backwards and corrupt and untrained their forces were. 

And they knew if it came to a direct fight with NATO, they really only had two options. Number one was to absolutely swarm, NATO forces with superior numbers. And number two was to provide some sort of distraction back in the Western countries so that the Western attention would be divided. Now, they never really got chance to test that theory in combat. 

And God forbid they’re able to. Now, but they’re starting to rebuild some of those distraction policies. And I’m not now talking about those, Novichok poisonings we’ve seen or dragging and anchor on the seabed. Those are all really easy things to do. If we ever get into a real hot fight with the Russians, expect to see dozens of those every week. 

This is different. This is sponsoring the creation of terror cells. Across the West. We had a number of groups who were basically ideologically motivated to hate capitalism that, the Soviets would basically work to build out supply and sometimes even task. 

Now, I’m not suggesting that this specific case in Kiev was Russian instigated. I really have no idea. What I can tell you that even though Ukraine is at war and is awash with weapons, this is the first mass shooting event that we have seen in the country during the conflict, and it is going to make a few people in the Kremlin think wistfully of old tools from old days. So regardless of whether or not the Kremlin was involved, it has certainly occurred to them now that there is something to work with here. 

What they can work with kind of falls into two general categories. First, pre-war, roughly one fifth of the Ukrainian population was, ethnic Russians. And another fifth was Ukrainian ethnics. But Russian speakers, primarily, even though the Russians have caused the most damage to the pro-Russian parts of Ukraine, complete, with looting and rape camps. You’re still going to be able to find a small minority of pro-Russian groups in those areas. 

The Ukrainians would call them collaborators that might be willing to do something along these lines. And remember, it doesn’t take a lot of people. You don’t even need 1% of the population. You just need a handful of people who are broken and zealots and who are willing to kill for someone, whatever that reason happens to be. And in a place like Ukraine, where there has been shooting for so long, and where the Russian intelligence network is so deep and where there are still millions of Ukrainians and Russian ethnics of Ukrainian nationality living under Russian control, the recruitment might not be as hard as you think. 

If you go further west, you fall into the second category. We have probably past peak far right in Europe. One of the things that we have seen over the course of this war is, as a rule, Europeans becoming more and more anti-Russian because the Russians have been doing sabotage throughout their countries, in addition to now threatening their direct, military and strategic existence with the Ukraine war. 

And what would happen after that means that hard right forces, whether either in Finland or in Hungary, are broadly in retreat. I mean, this is Europe. There’s 30 countries. I don’t want to make that two blanket of a statement, but they’ve really found it difficult, to get too much traction in the current environment. And that is before Donald Trump kind of lost his mind and started berating all of his allies, including the ones on the far right. 

So in just the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen links between elected officials in places like Italy fall apart, and in places like Hungary, where Trump actually personally campaigned for the former prime minister or caretaker prime minister. Now, we’ve seen that for soundly rooted when the political appeal of these groups fails and their chances of getting power, the, the traditional way through the ballot box starts to fade, you’re going to have zealots and hardcore groups among those, factions that are going to be willing to seek other options. 

I mean, we’ve certainly seen that here in the United States. And we probably will in the months and years to come as Donald Trump basically implodes conservativism in America. And until the Republican Party can reform with more traditional conservative forces like, say, business interests, you’re going to see elements of MAGA really get ugly. That is happening in Europe, right now. 

And if you take the Russians on one side with their Intel network and take a disintegrating kaleidoscope of rightist groups in Europe, on the other, the idea that you can form these ideological based violent groups, terror groups is really not much of a stretch. The biggest difference is that the last time around, because it was communism, Moscow generated support among the hard left, whether it was environmentalists or radicals or pro-worker groups or anarchists, where this time they’re going to be doing it among the right the nationalist groups, the neo-Nazis, the biker gangs. 

It’s a different feel. About the only good news I have out of this is that it’s it’s new. These groups don’t have a history of being violent in the pattern of militant groups in the 60s or 70s. And the Russians are out of practice for this specific sort of work. It’s one thing to send an agent to Salisbury and poison a guy’s tea. It’s quite another to actively plan militant attacks in countries that, ever since 2001, have really been upping their internal security, capabilities. So this will happen. A lot of these people will be caught, the Russians will be exposed. But the volume of people that you need to stir up to start this sort of process is so low. And there are broken people in every community. 

The Russians are just going to be taking advantage of them in a way that they haven’t until now.