Russia’s months-long build up of troops along the Ukrainian border is starting Russia has followed through with its months-long threats of invasion of Now that the question of a Russian invasion of Ukraine has proven itself not to be a hypothetical, Western governments will be pushed to respond. The United States and its European allies are likely to pursue a sanctions campaign, but this is easier said than done. While it has been popular to deride Russia and its economy as a “gas station” masquerading as a country, the reality is that Russia is a significant–often the largest–exporter of several critical commodities. Russian exports directly feed and fuel (or enable the processes to do so) vast swathes of the world from South America to the Middle East and East Asia–in addition to lighting and heating European homes and supplying crude oil to US Gulf Coast refineries. For the latter scenario, Russian crude exports to the world’s largest oil producer picked up significantly in 2021 as a result of US sanctions against Venezuela, illustrating the double-edged nature of sanctions in the globalized economy.
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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
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Russia’s months-long build up of troops along the Ukrainian border is starting Russia has followed through with its months-long threats of invasion of Ukraine. The Russian military has not focused on securing the separatist republics of eastern Ukraine; rather, the Russian military under the direction of President Vladimir Putin have launched missile and air strikes across the country with an aim of crushing not only the Ukrainian military but dismantling the independent government in Kyiv in total.
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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.
In a public broadcast late February 21 (local time), Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a lengthy, moody speech about the status of relations between Russia and its neighbor, Ukraine. Putin in essence declared a formal cold war with the West, while also making clear his belief that an independent Ukraine should not exist – going so far as to erroneously claim the nation a creation of Lenin, and that he will do something about it.
Effective immediately, Putin formally recognized the two secessionist bits of Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk) that he has been supporting with special forces troops, weapons, intelligence, and air support for the past seven years. In his mind, they are now “independent countries” and “allies.”
This is the identical playbook to what Putin did in a couple of provinces of another former Soviet state – Georgia – back in the 2000s. The idea being that these Russian-created, Russian-funded, and Russian-armed statelets are “allies”; allies deserve Russian troops to “protect” them; and under Russian law such Russian deployments are empowered to attack territories adjacent to the new allies to secure allied interests. In 2008 similar Russian deployments led to a brief war which smashed the military of Georgia. Russian troops remain in Georgian territory today.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Russians have been steadily amassing multiple invasion forces on Ukraine’s borders for a couple of months now, with the most recent guesstimate of the force total approaching 200,000, the greatest concentration of focused military power the world has seen since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. On a number of occasions, the Russians have claimed to be withdrawing forces, but civilian satellite monitoring has vividly illustrated that such “removed” troops have redeployed closer to the border. In the aftermath of today’s speech, multiple unconfirmed reports already indicate that Russian troops have moved into Donetsk and Luhansk.
Russia propaganda isn’t what it once was. In Soviet times it was often subtle, working through multiple intermediaries to provide rhetorical buffers, while also trickling into the conventional wisdom. It would seem to seep in from…everywhere. Now it’s just literally making up easily-disprovable stuff up on live television, and then moving on to the next blatant lie. About the only people who give it any credence are folks who have no choice (think: Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko) or folks who have consciously blended the Russian lies into their own domestic ideological narratives (think: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, US Senator Bernie Sanders, or Fox News Host Tucker Carlson). Even Chinese state media is giving the Russians a look that communicates “Really? That’s what you’re going with?”
Russian leadership isn’t what it once was. Once it became clear in 1975 that Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev was little more than an occasionally shuffling corpse, real power shifted to the Soviet intelligence directorate, specifically KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov. This shouldn’t shock. The Soviet system existed in an information vacuum, so the people with the most power were those who actually knew what was real and what was propaganda. In time Andropov became Soviet premier, as did two of his acolytes: Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev. And then the Soviet Union ended.
About the same time the KGBers took over, the Soviet Union went broke. The late-1970s and 1980s were a time of immense economic upheaval and near collapse (which preceded worse upheaval and actual collapse). One of the many ways the late-Soviet leadership attempted to square their failing circles was to reduce government spending. On everything. But most notably on education. Mass science and technical and manufacturing education in the Soviet Union in effect ended in the early 1980s. Russia is a pale shadow of the Soviet Union, and Russia never restarted mass educational efforts. Which means the last crop of Soviet KGB agents and leaders are the sole remaining pool of talent from which today’s Russian leadership can draw. Putin is 69. The youngest people who had completed their Soviet education before the bottom fell out are now 59. The average life expectancy for Russian males is 64.
The Russian strategic position is not what it was. The Russian heartlands are great wide opens. Defending great wide opens takes more troops than any country could supply. So, as Russian czar Catherine the Great famously put it, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” Extend them until they reach a physical feature that blocks invasion. Doing such would enable Russian troops to hunker down and plug the gaps between mountain and desert and sea.
At the height of Soviet power, the Russians controlled all nine of those geographic gaps that allow entry to the Russian heartlands. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia commanded but one. Courtesy of Putin’s wars of expansion and “peacekeeping” efforts in the former Soviet space, the Russians now have forces in six. Of the remaining gateways, two lie on Ukraine’s western border: the Polish and Bessarabian Gaps.
In my mind, the question was never “will” Russia invade Ukraine and attempt to absorb it in totality, but instead “when”. The Kremlin has been threatening Kiev for a decade now. My caution to today’s Russia watchers has been that there was little occurring which suggested this season’s round of Russian angst and anger was in any way unique.
Until today. Putin’s speech does more than merely suggest that Russia is ready to go.
Sanctions – real or imagined, in-place or threatened – will not shift Putin’s stance. For Russia, control of Ukraine isn’t simply seen as a birthright, but as an issue of national survival. The Russian population suffers so completely from drug abuse, alcoholism, malnutrition, and disease that it is the world’s fastest collapsing demography (although recent statistical updates suggest China is challenging Russia for the top spot). Patrolling Russia’s current borders is laughably beyond the capacity of Russia’s current population. But forward-positioning what troops remain in those gateways? That just might work. So, the Russians will try.
About the only would-be sanction which might – might – earn a blink from the Kremlin would be if the Europeans all swore off Russian oil and natural gas. That export line-item is far and away the Russian government’s largest money-maker, accounting for a hefty majority of income. But in doing so the Europeans would be cutting off their primary energy provider, condemning themselves to the dark and cold. And so that specific threat hasn’t happened. I’d be impressed – and shocked – if it did.
I’d be equally shocked if the fall of Ukraine were the end of the story. Ukraine is not a NATO ally. The West will not send regular troops to support Ukraine. That makes Ukraine – with its 45-million-strong population – the easy target. What assistance arrives will be designed to snarl the Russians in as painful and bloody of an occupation as possible. The real show – the real war – comes after. The two most important gateways to the Russian heartland remain: the Baltic Sea coast and the portion of the Polish gap that lies in, well, Poland. Unlike Ukraine, the countries in question here – Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – are members of the NATO alliance. And of the European Union as well.
The Baltic beaches and the plains of Poland are where the future of Russia and the West, of the European Union and NATO, will ultimately be decided. It is there that Russia will succeed or die. This is far worse than it sounds. Russia’s population is in free-fall. A Russian occupation of Ukraine completed to Russia’s satisfaction will still absorb most of what’s left of Russia’s conventional military capabilities, leaving only the decidedly unconventional available for the next conflict.
Russia won’t fight its Twilight War with soldiers.
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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
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The United States Federal Reserve is preparing to raise interest rates in 2022. The question is not longer one of “if” or “when,” but how frequently and by how much. The implications will reverberate throughout American society and the economy.
It won’t just be new homebuyers scrambling to lock in low interest rates before the hike, or investors–jumping from tech stocks to crypto to GameStop to NFTs–who are likely to feel the pinch. Federal spending (and by extension, policy), investments in the manufacturing space, and global trade will all be impacted. And in the backdrop of a major global demographic shift, and countless opportunities and pitfalls abound.
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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
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Russia’s months-long build up of troops along the Ukrainian border is starting to yield tangible results… though perhaps not in the way that Moscow originally intended. Rather than successfully convincing NATO and the United States that any milque-toast defense of Kyiv would not be worth their while, Russia has instead watched as political and materiel support for its former Soviet satellite steadily increase.
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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
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Russia has maintained a threatening posture against Ukraine, including maintaining approximately 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border. The United States and the United Kingdom have taken the lead in crafting a set of financial sanctions they are threatening to levy against Russia in the case of any aggression. Moscow has said that such a move would result in a cessation of energy supplies to the Europeans–who happen to get about 30% of their oil and natural gas from Russia.
Russia’s energy leverage over the EU (and as many other states as it can connect itself to via pipelines) is significant, particularly in terms of natural gas. Global liquefied natural gas production–including the burgeoning US LNG industry–might help alleviate some of these pressures, but not all.
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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
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I’m sure a lot of you have noticed that I haven’t mentioned much at all about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. It really boils down to one factor: reinfection.
Coronavirus is fast. With the original strain out of Wuhan, as well as the Alpha variant, you would be exposed, then 2-5 days later you’d develop symptoms, then you’d be ill for another 2-20 days, then you would recover. Your exposure would grant you a degree of resistance that could last anywhere from four months to over a year. After that period of time, you could be reinfected.
The same general process followed with Delta variant which was the world’s dominant strain for most of 2021, but with Delta the reinfection window shrank down to as little as two months. One of the leading reasons I am so pro-vaccine is not simply that the vaccines are safe and prevent death and most hospitalizations, but the resistance they grant you lasts longer than if you suffered through the virus itself. With the original strain, vaccine-granted resistance was so strong that in most cases would the virus would be killed as soon as it entered your body. Against Delta, vaccine-granted resistance typically lasted over six months.
The United States has one of the world’s healthiest demographic structures, but COVID has killed a million of us. If there is a way to prevent the virus from damaging America’s demographic strengths, it has been the vaccines. Cheap. Effective. Available.
Or you could choose to be unvaccinated, and in doing so get sick over and over and over and over again. That’s why I started harping on the vaccines in June of 2021. Delta had been around for over six months and we had a strong idea of just how easy it was for the unvaccinated to suffer repeat infections. But things have changed.
Now we have Omicron. It has only had a name for two months. It hasn’t been around long enough for a meaningful number of people to catch Omicron, recover from Omicron, and potentially get Omicron again. Its reinfection profile is a critical unknown.
Every time we get a new variant, we get a new reinfection profile, and so the goalposts move. At present, with Omicron, it is simply too soon to know where those goalposts have moved to. And so for now, I don’t have much to forecast about Omicron’s mid-to-long-term impact.
That’s the first big point. The second has to do with the vaccines themselves.
All the vaccines in use today were designed for the original Wuhan strain. But that strain is now extinct. The Delta variant emerged in India in late 2020, and in about six months spread so aggressively that it wiped out both the original strain and the Alpha variant. Globally.
Now, evolved from Delta, we have Omicron, a variant even more communicable. It will probably wipe out Delta in the United States sometime in March (which is also when we will probably have some of our first answers about Omicron’s re-infection profile).
Original strain to Delta to Omicron – we are now two viral generations removed from the original strain we based the vaccines on. The vaccines – especially with boosters – are still highly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths, but the days of completely preventing symptoms, much less sterilizing immunity, are long in the past.
In that I am perhaps Exhibit A. I’m vaxxed. I’m boosted. I probably recovering from Omicron right now. I say “perhaps” and “probably” because it took four days to get tested and I have been warned that processing the test could take eight more. I’m hardly the only American who has noticed a problem here.
Omicron is the most communicable pathogen currently in circulation and it has overwhelmed…everything. The week of January 17 something like 15 million Americans missed work either due to suffering Omicron directly, or because they were caring for someone who had Omicron. That’s the second-biggest impact to the workforce from a health-related issue ever – topped only by the national lockdown of March and April 2020 itself.
Our systems are overwhelmed. Not because of lockdowns – very few places are trying that again – but because of sickness. Omicron’s high rate of transmissibility means that it is probably infecting over a million people a day, and last week it killed nearly as many Americans as Delta did at its peak. Is Omicron less lethal? Definitely, but it is so much more communicable the death tallies rival.
Bottom line? We need to update our vaccine formulas. Yes, getting vaxxed and boosted with what is on hand is still by far the best way to prevent deaths and hospitalizations. But we can do better. One of the beautiful things about the new mRNA technology is that techs can update the formula in a matter of days, and alter production runs within a couple of months. The firms that manufacture the mRNA formulas – Pfizer and Moderna – suggest that by April we can be churning out updated formulas that use Omicron as the baseline (as opposed to the original Wuhan version). If past proves prologue, we could get back to the heady days of May 2021 when we had a platinum-standard vaccine formula that provided something very close to sterilizing immunity. That’d be awesome.
It won’t last of course. America’s anti-vax community will remain millions strong, ensuring an ample supply of walking petri dishes Omicron can use to breed the next generation of coronavirus. But armed with a vaccine based on Omicron rather than Wuhan, we’d only be a single generation behind rather than three. That’s still a win. And a big one at that.
For the rest of the world, the news is less great. We are now a full year after the release of the original mRNA vaccines. At this point roughly half of the human population has been fully inoculated. Shifting gears to a new formula can put shots in most American arms before summer’s end, but retooling vaccine manufacturing around the world will take longer. Best case scenario? Global inoculation with the new formula will not complete before mid-2023.
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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
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Russian-led forces entered Kazakhstan today, under the guise of a Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) peacekeeping mission. The former Soviet state and significant oil producer has seen several days of sustained public protests turned violent after raising the price of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cannisters, a key local transportation fuel. Although the government reversed its decision to halt fuel subsidies, the move triggered widening protests outside the initial cluster in the resource-rich Mangystau region eventually reaching the largest city, Almaty. Several cabinet officials resigned as protests grew in scope and intensity; many Kazakhs are frustrated by the economic challenges of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, entrenched social inequality, and endemic corruption of the Kazakh state. After protestors stormed the Almaty airport January 5 and set fire to city administration building, Kazakh president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev allowed CSTO forces into the country to help quell unrest. Details are increasingly difficult to come by amidst an internet and media blackout, but security forces have already claimed to have killed dozens of protestors.
The challenges facing Tokayev are legion, and easily discerned. What is a little less obvious are the opportunities now present for Moscow. Instability in former Soviet areas is always a delicate balancing act for Russia; protestor grievances in Kazakhstan likely mirror many of those not only in Russia, but throughout states on its periphery. Unrest is typically met with cracked skulls. But Kazakhstan’s oil and gas wealth has afforded it more economic independence from Moscow than many of the other Central Asian states. Having Kazakhstan on the ropes and in need of aid–including an open invitation for Russian soldiers that are unlikely to leave after protestors go home–is right where Russia likes its neighbors to be.
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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
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Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel was wildly successful at maintaining a German–and European–status quo nearly two decades. While her tenure will almost assuredly be remembered as the Golden Age of a unified, post-war Germany, the deeper structural issues Merkel failed to address risk undermining the stability and success she sought to preserve.
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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.
All anyone can talk about in Europe these days is Russia. Russia is constricting natural gas flows to Europe in order to drive energy prices higher and extract geopolitical concessions. Russia is using irregular state tools — think cyber — to manipulate European politics and exacerbate the COVID epidemic by planting misinformation about vaccines. Russia is threatening war in Ukraine, up to moving over one hundred thousand troops to the Ukrainian border region, and tapping the global mercenary community to recruit thousands of fighters to throw at Kiev. Russia is demanding the right to fundamentally rewrite the security policies of not only Ukraine, but Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania, Turkey and Germany in exchange for a de-escalation in Ukraine.
I’m down on paper and video saying that Russia’s impending doom (more on that in a minute) will force it to take a more aggressive security posture, specifically on Ukraine. Today much of Russia’s border regions are indefensible. There are few geographic barriers to block potential invasion, forcing the Russians with their dwindling numbers to attempt to defend massive stretches of territory. What barriers the Russians do have — Crimea and the Caucasus come to mind — are only because of the sort of strategic adventurism that Putin is now threatening to Ukraine as a whole. There is a method to the madness. To paraphrase Catherine the Great, Russia can expand, or Russia can die.
But a few things have changed since I laid out my position in The Accidental Superpower back in 2014 and sketched out the general outlines of the hypothetical Twilight War in The Absent Superpower in 2017.
First big change: Ukrainian politics and identity.
Back in the 2000s, Ukraine could be very charitably called “messy.” It was an oligarch playground, sharply divided into three competing regions. The biggest region in the east was populated by either Ukrainians who spoke Russian as their first language, or actual Russians who due to the quirks of history happened to live on the Ukrainian side of the dotted line on the map. Ukraine has always been home to the greatest concentration and number of ethnic Russians outside of Russia’s borders. And these groups — both the ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking Ukrainians — were unapologetically pro-Moscow.
It was the mix of this pro-Russian sentiment with the Kremlin’s view that large-scale political violence is often useful, that set us onto the path to where we are today. In early 2014 then-Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych — one of those pro-Russian Ukrainians — dealt with pro-Western “Euromaidan” protesters by using Ukrainian special forces to shoot up a couple thousand people. He was driven out of office and ultimately out of country and now he is living in exile in, you guessed it, Russia.
Yanukovych’s actions against his own people — actions publicly supported by none other than Vladimir Putin — started Ukraine down the road to something I had once dismissed out of hand: political consolidation and the formation of a strong Ukrainian identity. Putin didn’t — hasn’t — figured that out. Later Russian actions — starving the Ukrainians of fuel, annexing Crimea, invading the southeastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas War — only deepened the Ukrainian political consolidation that Yanukovych inadvertently started.
Far from capitalizing on strong and legitimate pro-Russian sentiment, Russia’s policies towards Ukraine these past seven years have turned even the most pro-Moscow Russian citizens of Ukraine into Ukrainian nationalists.
In 2010, Ukraine was not a country. It was simply a buffer territory between Russia and the European Union with no real identity, and it would have been ridiculous to admit such a non-entity into either the EU or NATO. Today Ukraine is a country, and the idea of EU or NATO membership isn’t nearly so crazy. And that evolution is all because of Putin’s ongoing miscalculations.
Second big point: military reality.
Back in 2014 when the Russians launched the Donbas War, Putin boasted that should he choose, Russian forces could easily invade Ukraine. He noted Russian troops could be in Kiev in under a month.
It may have been a brag, but it most definitely was neither a bluff nor an exaggeration. The Russian military may be a pale shadow of its Soviet forebearer, but it is far better than the war machine which ground to humiliation in Chechnya in the 1990s. Ukraine’s military in comparison? Phbbbbt. Wracked by corruption, enervated by a lack of motivation, armed with nothing more than the pre-1992 equipment that the Russians chose to leave behind when the Soviet Union fell? There’s a reason Yanukovych used the special forces to suppress the Euromaidan protestors. The military wasn’t even up to that job. Fighting a hundred thousand or so Russian troops? That’s funny.
Since 2014, some things have gotten better. Western assistance has helped professionalize the forces. The Russian invasion has charged Ukrainian commanders some high tuition at the school of Real-Life War. Strengthening national identity has improved force cohesion. But the biggest shift is in weaponry.
Arming a country the size of Ukraine with sufficient military equipment to fight the Russians solider-to-solider would be a Heraclean effort. So that’s not what the United States has done. The Americans have provided the Ukrainians with Javelin anti-tank missiles. Javelins are man-portable and shoulder-launched, weighing in at under 50 pounds. They shoot high and plunge down, striking tanks on the top where armor is weakest. And above all, they are sooooo eeeasy to operate. If you can make it to level 3 on Candy Crush, you can use a Javelin.
Considering any drive to Kiev will be a tank operation, giving Javelins to the Ukrainians is like giving water to firefighters. It’s the perfect tool for the job. The Javelins made their wartime debut on the front lines in Donbas only in November 2021…about when the Kremlin started getting all screechy and demanding wholesale changes to European security alignments. Coincidence? I think not.
Now don’t get carried away. I’ve little doubt that Javelins would be enough should the Russians get truly serious. Any Russian invasion force would massively outnumber and outgun the defenders. But that’s not the point. Unlike in the 2000s or in the Donbas War, the Ukrainians can now slip a knife through the chinks in the Russians’ armor and make them bleed. A lot. And unlike in the 2000s, the Ukrainians now have a national identity to rally around and fight for. The Ukrainians now have the means and motive. It’s up to the Russians to decide if they’d like to provide the opportunity.
If war comes, the Russians could still reach Kiev. But it would likely take three months instead of one. The Russians could still conquer all of Ukraine. But it would likely take over year rather than less than three months. The toll on the invaders would be high and most of all the war would only be the beginning. After “victory” the Russians would have to occupy a country of 45 million people.
Which brings us to the final bit of this story: demographics.
Russia’s had a rough time of…everything. The purges of Lenin and Stalin. The World Wars. The post-Soviet collapse. Horrific mismanagement under Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Yeltsin. Sometimes in endless waves, sometimes in searing moments, the Russian birthrate has taken hit after hit after hit to the point that the Russian ethnicity itself is no longer in danger of dying out, it is dying out. And for this particular moment in time, there just aren’t many teens today to fill out the ranks of the Russian military tomorrow.
The implications of that fact are legion.
Least importantly, if somewhat amusingly, is the Russians are now flat-out falsifying their demographic data so the situation does not look so…doomed. Check out the bottom two age categories in the above graphic; the section for children 10 and under. A few years ago the Russians started inflating this data. Best guess is there are probably one-quarter to one-third fewer children in Russian than this data suggests. That’s roughly a four million child exaggeration.
Most importantly are the implications for a potential Russian-Ukrainian War. Any Russian solider lost anywhere cannot be replaced. If Putin commits to an invasion of Ukraine, Russia will win. But the cost will not be minor. The war and occupation will be expensive and bloody and most importantly for the world writ large, it will expend what’s left of the Russian youth.
Will Putin order an attack? Dunno. There was a demographic and strategic moment a few years ago when the Russians could have conquered Ukraine easily. That moment is gone and will not return. But the strategic argument that a Russia that cannot consolidate its borders is one that dies faster remains.
Perhaps the biggest change in recent years is this: the United States now has an interest in a Russian assault because it would be Russia’s last war.
Demographics have told us for 30 years that the United States will not only outlive Russia, but do so easily. The question has always been how to manage Russia’s decline with an eye towards avoiding gross destruction. A Russian-Ukrainian war would keep the bulk of the Russian army bottled up in an occupation that would be equal parts desperate and narcissistic and protracted until such time that Russia’s terminal demography transforms that army into a powerless husk. And all that would transpire on a patch of territory in which the United States has minimal strategic interests.
That’s rough for the Ukrainians, but from the American point of view, it is difficult to imagine a better, more thorough, and above all safer way for Russia to commit suicide.
If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.
The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.
