Russia’s Ukraine War Lessons Are Hitting the Gulf

Qatar and Persian Gulf Region on a Map | Photo licensed by Envato Elements

Russia is taking what they’ve learned on the battlefield in the Ukraine War and sharing that with Iran. This is not a new strategy for the Russians, but it is already spelling trouble for the US.

Iran’s Shahed deployment and targeting are improving, thanks to tactics like launching swarms of drones with varying flight paths. These strategies are rapidly exhausting missile defenses in the Persian Gulf.

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Transcript

Okay. Today we’re going to talk about drone targeting specifically in the context of Iran. And there Shaheed. So last week we learned, you know, shocked anyone who’s been paying attention that the Russians have been providing the Iranians with targeting information since the beginning of the war. The Russians have been providing all of America’s foes with targeting information, going back to the early days of the war on terror. 

That’s not a surprise. But what’s come out in the last 24 hours, roughly, is the degree to which the Russians are sharing their war lessons that they’ve learned at the expense of the Ukrainians in the Ukraine war. So the weapons system in play is an Iranian shaheed. It’s a really stupid drone where you have a small Nand chip that’s a slow memory chip that doesn’t necessarily require power to hold on to its memory. 

You program in a preset parameter preset flight route and it flies from A to B following the course you’ve identified. And then if it’s a really advanced shithead and most of them are at it, then can execute a very limited decision tree. Like is this a car or is that a boat? Is that a tree or do I want to hit and it’ll try to hit one of those things. 

Otherwise it just kind of angles down and crashes into something. Well, what the Russians have learned is that if they take their heads and fly them in groups in batches, that, not only ensures that one of them will get through air defense, it makes it actually harder for the air defense to pick out an individual target. So oftentimes you have to fire more interceptors than you would if they just came at you one at a time. 

The additional thing that the Russians are sharing is kind of a weave strategy, because you can preprogram in the route. What you do is you preprogram in a slightly different route for each head. So they kind of weave in and out of formation up, down, left, right, whatever it happens to be. That makes it much harder for air defense to kind of get a lock. 

And you have to use even more interceptors. And we now know that that specific strategy that they developed for dealing with Ukrainians has now been applied to Iranian showerheads that are being used against American and allied targets in the Persian Gulf. The issue here, of course, is pretty straightforward and short term. The western Gulf is running out of interceptors, and anything that forces the defenders to use more and more of them while the shitheads just keep coming, means that the time where they actually run out of Anti-drone weaponry is coming upon us very, very quickly, perhaps as little as a week or two. 

We don’t know the specific number because the Western Gulf is are consider the number of interceptors they have used and the number they have left to be national security secrets. So it’s kind of a just a guessing game. But there were only about 2000 of them total at the beginning of the war. Or it’s been going on for two weeks. 

And we know that the Iranians have fired at least 2000 shitheads at this point, probably closer to 3000. And they just keep coming. So we’re very close to the point where the Western Gulf is going to run out of defensive firepower and courtesy of the Russians, they’re going to have pretty good targeting information. Just come on in and hit whatever they want.

The U.S. Helps India and Russia Helps Iran

An oil tanker in the ocean sailing

There have been two major developments involving India, Russia, and the Iran war being conflated. These are two separate issues altogether.

The first involves Trump granting India a temporary waiver to import Russian oil. This was done to prevent a severe energy or economic shock in India. This is a pragmatic move, rather than a pro-Russia policy shift. The second revolves around Russia helping Iran with targeting information. This is a longstanding Russian strategy of undermining the U.S. globally.

Although some U.S. policies toward India appear to be improving, a major shift is unlikely unless and until some of the Russian sympathizers in the current administration are removed.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming from a snowy Colorado, finally got a big storm. Oh. Anyway, today we’re going to talk about something that a lot of people are conflating that deals with Iran and the oil trade and Russia and India and sanctions and terrorism, blah, blah, blah. A lot of people are tying this all together with a nice big bow. 

It’s not quite that neat. So the two big things, number one, the Trump administration has granted India, a series of waivers, right now, courtesy of the Trump administration. We have sanctions on a few Russian oil companies and, Donald Trump managed to cut a deal with the Indians, about how six weeks ago, I think it’s been now, where the Indians would stop, importing Russian crude. 

I definitely had my doubts about that at the beginning, but it seems like it’s actually sticking because, there’s now this waiver, the issue is that the Indians had been grabbing oil in excess of a million barrels a day. Really? Since the Ukraine war got going, and it was one of the big financial lifelines. 

And now that the Trump administration has put sanctions on Russian companies, they have slowed, not stopped, but slowed. But now, with the Persian Gulf being closed for I believe we are in day ten now, the Indians only other source of crude was from the Persian Gulf, and that has functionally gone to zero. So in order to keep the Indians on board, the Trump administration has granted this waiver, allowing the Indians to bring in, temporarily, at least for a month. 

Russian crude. That’s piece one. Piece two is we’ve had a number of leaks from the international community, especially from the American intelligence services and also from Congress, that the Russians are actively assisting the Iranian government with, targeting of American troops. Which is definitely true. The people that are deeply anti-Trump are, conflating the two saying that, Trump is basically Putin’s, sex toy. 

And so therefore, Trump has been looking for any opportunity to, cut the Russians a deal and absolutely anything. While there may be a little bit of truth behind the thrust of that, linking these two events is not correct. Let’s start with the Indians. If you’re going to split the Indians off from the Russians, if you’re going to have a better relationship between American India, causing an economic depression is not a good way to do that. 

So once the United States started the war in Iran and the Persian Gulf got shut off, your choices were either to try to somehow force India to have, an energy induced depression and then still be pro-American, which would have been a very, very tall order or issue these temporary waivers. So the temporary waivers make a lot of sense. 

I’m not a big fan of the Russians having any market, but if you took the Russians out of the equation at the same time you took the Persian Gulf out the equation, you’re talking like 25 million barrels a day of global oil production that has nowhere to go and can’t get anywhere. And that would have been disastrous if it was all focused on India. 

If you want to focus on China, it’s different conversation, different video. Okay. So that makes sense. The second one, the Russians have maintained links to basically any group that has ever targeted the United States, whether that is various derivatives, Al-Qaeda, Iran, or more specifically, the group in Iran that is calling most of the security shots, which is the IRGC. 

And of course, they’re continuing to provide targeting information just like they did for the 20 years of the war on terror. Anything that keeps the Americans bottled down anywhere else in the world gives the Russians the free rein to do whatever they want in their neighborhood. That is a time honored Russian tradition, going back all the way to the czars. 

So of course, of course, of course they’re doing this, which puts, the Trump administration and Donald Trump personally and kind of an awkward spot. The information is coming from so many sources, international domestic, military intelligence, congressional that, there’s a lot of texture and detail to the accusation. Specific cases have been noted. So of course it’s true. 

And that puts Trump in that position because he is basically giving Putin the benefit of the doubt in everything regarding global affairs and the Ukraine war, and specifically. And now we have his most recent, crown jewel in his foreign policy, Iran, that has been actively undermined by the Kremlin and Putin personally. Does this mean that we’re about to see Donald Trump turn over a new leaf? 

That’s a lot more realistic when it comes to the Russians? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Remember, that surrounding him, you’ve got Wyckoff, who was maybe the dumbest person Western civilization, who was the prime interface between Putin and Trump. And all he does is regurgitate Putin’s propaganda in Trump’s presence. 

Number two, you’ve got the vice president, JD Vance, who is a not so closeted white supremacist who thinks that the Russians are the great hope for the white race. And third, you’ve got, the director of national security or national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who basically has stood against the United States on any meaningful foreign policy position for the last 15 years and has been very, very pro-Russian from the very, very beginning. 

The key thing about Tulsi Gabbard is that she controls the daily presidential brief that the intelligence community puts together for the president. So I would be shocked if details about what the Russians are doing even made it into the document in the first place. So this basically has to grind on. We’ve already had a half a dozen Republican senators, and a number of Republican House members go public in the last 72 hours screaming at Trump to finally, finally, finally fix this and get rid of people like Tulsi Gabbard and Steve Woodcock and actually have a foreign policy that is worthy of the United States. 

But as we all know, Trump, really doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. And he’s really not even concerned about the midterm elections because, he’s already a lame duck. And even when he controlled both the Senate and the House, he’s really never bothered going to Congress for anything. So why would he care what Congress looks like? 

Anyway, things are slipping. Bit by bit in the right direction for more realistic foreign policy versus the Russians. And things are kudos to Donald Trump slipping in the right direction for more productive relations with the Indians, as well. I was very doubtful that the Indians would abide by any sort of ban of Russian products. But yet here we are, and the market is proving it. 

Russian Urals crude sold on the Indian market has actually now risen above the Brant benchmark. That is kind of the global standard. And the only way that would be happening is if we had a sudden surge in purchases because of the waiver. And that’s exactly what’s going down. So a lot of moving pieces here, and I’m not trying to convince anyone that we’re about to have a dramatic change in foreign policy. 

That would be more realistic. But we do finally have multiple vectors moving in the same direction at the same time. You will not see a meaningful change in policy, however, until Wyckoff and, Gabbard are gone. I don’t see that as imminent. But then again, Kristi Noem finally got let go after six months of horrible mismanagement at DHS. 

And again, the Republicans in Congress are not so quietly celebrating, in media. So, you know, there is hope here. Let’s just not get overexcited until we actually see the backsides of some of these people who functionally work for the Russians.

Ukraine Goes on the Offensive

A ukraine soldiers patch/flag on their uniform

Starlink cut service to Russian forces along the front line, leaving these troops largely isolated. Ukraine has taken advantage of the situation by launching localized offensives and reclaiming a nice chunk of land.

The Ukrainians remain outnumbered. However, since Russian units are scattered, isolated, and unable to communicate, they are left vulnerable. So, organized Ukrainian offensives are finding success…for now.

The Russians will likely adapt, or the Ukrainians will come face-to-face with entrenched units and minefields, but Ukraine has regained the offensive momentum for the time being.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 18th of February, and the news is a significant change in the battlefield in Ukraine. We did a video talking about how Starlink had been unofficially siding with the Russians in many ways until they got caught out and basically accused of several dozen counts of second degree murder. 

And so they have cut off, connections to their Starlink receivers throughout the front region, this time emphasizing the Russian side of the operation. And what we’ve discovered in the last 96 hours is that the Russian forces in the area were completely dependent upon Starlink for communication among themselves, and that communication is functionally stopped. Now, keep in mind that drones today are either first person drones that can be jammed or on a, tether, a fiber optic tether that has a limited range. 

And so the best way to jam is to have an electronic warfare unit in Ukraine needs to become the best in the world. That by far, far better than the United States. Which means that normal types of radio communications simply don’t work if you’re relatively close to the front. And now the Russians have been cut off completely. 

And even though the Ukrainians are outmanned and outgunned, they have gone on the offensive and captured about 50mi² over the course of the last several days. I doubt it’ll last. It’s only a matter of time before the Russians come up with backup plans, or the Ukrainians hit those massive minefields that stopped their assaults a couple of years ago. 

But it does allow, in the short term at least, the Ukrainians could, to completely liquidate Russian positions while on the offensive. Normally, you only attack and location if you enjoy about a 3 to 1 ratio. In vantage in troop numbers. The Ukrainians are doing it with far less than that, sometimes even being outnumbered. But because they’re able to isolate the Russian forces in detail, they’re able to completely wipe them out. 

Keep in mind that over the course of the last year, we’ve seen the Russian tactics change considerably. So instead of big massed assaults, assaulting, Russian positions, they sneak in 2 or 3 at a time and pepper the area through until a few of them survive. And then reinforcements can come in. That means you’ve got lots, dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of little spots where there’s two, three, 4 or 5, ten Russians holding the position and against a coordinated Ukrainian attack that still enjoys drones and communications. 

They don’t have much of a chance at all. So I doubt this will last very long. But for the moment, the Ukrainians are pushing forward in a way that they haven’t been able to for a couple of years, and their critics said was never possible again. But here we are.

Electronic Warfare Innovations and Exports

Laptop with green coding and a server

Let’s talk about the current state of electronic warfare in the Ukraine War and how Iran is fitting into all this.

Drones are all the rage. You’ve got fancy autonomous systems, short-range with remote pilots, and fiber-optic tethered. The next logical step to countering drones is to beef up jamming capabilities; Ukraine has done just that. However, the Russians have taken this logic one step further. They’ve created a tool called the Kalinka. The Kalinka is a mobile detection system that listens for signals. This gives them an early warning for drone strikes and other signal-based attacks.

Electronic warfare innovations are spreading quickly, and this tech is already appearing in other regions. For instance, Iran used the Russian Kalinka tech to locate Starlink users during the protests, allowing them to shut down comms and suppress dissent.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado, I hope everybody who is east of the Rockies is enjoying the cold front because, Canada worst. Anyway, today we’re talking about what’s going on in Ukraine and Russia and Iran from a technical point of view, specifically electronic warfare. Drones basically fall into three general categories. Number one, you got autonomous ones that can make decisions on their own. Those are incredibly rare and incredibly difficult to maintain because the chips themselves are unstable when there’s vibration or heat or cold or humidity or anything. So really, aside from a few here and there that are very expensive, not a lot of play. The second are those that you fly first person, and for that you have to have a connection to them somehow so that the telemetry can come back and forth and you can control them. 

Now, the United States does that with things like Reapers through satellite connections. The Ukrainians primarily do it on a shorter range, and the Russians also on a shorter range, typically no more than, 20km. And the problem with that is they can be jammed. And so both the Ukrainians and the Russians have gotten very, very good at here. 

I mean, I would argue that right now, today, Ukraine’s jammers are by far the best in the world, probably an order of magnitude better than America’s. Once you consider in cost. And then the third type is to do, fiber drones, which have a thin fiber optic cable that they drag behind. Now, these don’t have nearly as much range as a rule, but they can’t be jammed because there’s a hard line. 

And these, as a rule, are five kilometers or less. Although there are now some models where the fiber optic cable is light enough. You can go more than ten. Anyway, so those are kind of what’s going on there. But there’s another aspect to countering drones or any sort of electronic battle platform, that doesn’t involve jamming, but it’s still electronic warfare. 

And in this, the Russians have definitely, cracked the code on a new tech that is really interesting and has a lot of applications. So they call it the clinker. It’s basically a electronic warfare detection system that is mounted onto a truck or an armored vehicle. You basically drive around, find a place to park, and then you just listen and you pick up signals whether this is a cell phone or a drone connection or more importantly, in recent terms, as we’ve discovered, a, Starlink terminal. 

So one of the things that the Ukrainians have been doing is taking mobile Starlink terminals and putting them on things like drones, and then they go out into the Black Sea and blow up something that’s Russian. And the Russians don’t like that. But if you’re having a constant link in from a Starlink terminal and you can detect that, then the Russians finally have a way of knowing that it’s coming. 

I’m not saying it works perfectly. The range is only about 15km, and one of the CBP drones, they’re pretty quick. It’s not a lot of time to react, and it doesn’t jam the connection. It just detects it. So the Ukrainians have learned to turn things on and off every couple of minutes so that the Clinkers can’t, link up. 

But one of the things you have to keep in mind is that we’re in a fundamentally new type of warfare here, and when drones first appeared on the battlefield in a meaningful way that was not American. It wasn’t in Ukraine. It was in Armenia. We had a war back in 2020 between Armenia and Azerbaijan. And the as a region has had, Turkish drones that they basically used to completely obliterate the entire armed forces of Armenia in the disputed territories and would go on a crowbar. 

The Armenians weren’t ready for it. And so what we’re now starting to see is Ukrainian and Russian technology coming into other theaters and just completely wiping the board. So, for example, in the last couple of weeks, we have we’ve had those big protests in Iran, and people were wondering how the Iranians were able to shut down communication so effectively. 

Well, it now looks like the Russians gave the Iranians a few clinkers, and they basically just drove them around town, identified where all of Starlink’s were kicked in the door, shut the people involved, or brought them in for beating or imprisonment or whatever it happened to be. And lo and behold, the, situation from the Iranian point of view was diffused. 

So we now have a technology that has very, very strong implications for use in a civilian management system. We’re going to be seeing more and more things like this of technologies from a hot zone where they’re iterating every day and every week suddenly pop up in a theater that you wouldn’t expect, where it completely outwits maneuvers outclasses the preexisting systems. Iran is just a taste of what is to come on a global basis.

The New Ukraine Proxy War

Russia is rapidly depleting its stock of prewar vehicles and losing soldiers faster than population growth can replace them, thrusting it closer and closer to military exhaustion.

Ukraine has its own set of problems, but at least it has stronger nationalism and a growing European military-industrial base behind it. As Europe steps up as the primary aid provider for Ukraine, we’re entering a new era of proxy wars. We have Europe backing Ukraine and China backing Russia.

This is reshaping global military technology. Europe vis-à-vis Ukraine is now leading drone and counter-drone innovation. China is advancing alongside Russia. And guess who is getting left in the dust…

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Transcript

Hey, all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado early in the new year. We’ve had a lot of information drop out of the Russian Ministry of Defense. Ukrainians. A lot of folks on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine that study the war. And we’ve seen a few interesting patterns emerge in just the last four months that I think it’s worth spending a little time talking about. 

The short version is we’re, to a degree, seen a deindustrialization of the war effort, specifically on the Russian side of the equation. The Russians started this conflict with a massive advantage in armored vehicles and tanks, something like 20,000 or so that they had left over from the Soviet period. The Ukrainians had a lot left over as well, but not even a quarter. 

The amount probably closer to a 10th, actually, by most measures. But the Russians go through equipment like they go through men. They run it hard, and they put it into situations that are perhaps not the best. And their doctrine isn’t very good. And everything gets shot up. And that’s before you consider the climactic and, geographic situation in Ukraine, where for large, portions of the year, the area is just really muddy. 

And if you put a tank into mud, it doesn’t move very well. And it’s really easy prey for a drone. And so bit by bit over the war, vehicles have become less important and drones have become more important. But for the Russians, who actually have to bring equipment to the front, vehicles are always going to be more important for them than it is for the Ukrainians. 

Well, it seems that they’ve run out, pretty much all of their pre-war battle tanks are now gone and their ability to replenish them, it is something like 2 to 3% of what they had before. They’re only able to make a few tanks a month. In addition, things like APCs and armored vehicles, they’ve pretty much run out of. 

And now they’re even running out of civilian vehicles and things like golf carts to the point that we’re actually seeing horse charges starting to pop up on the front again. Because horses are available and cars are not, this is really led to a change in Russian tactics, obviously, because if you don’t have the equipment to move your men, you have to move your men differently. 

And so some of the new strategies that we’re seeing on the front is instead of sending a thousand men or 100 men or ten men, it’s sending 2 or 3 men to try to infiltrate a zone. And you do that with 2 to 3000 men over the course of a month. And eventually, hopefully, you have enough people that have infiltrated the zone that they can make it untenable for the Ukrainians to maintain their positions. 

Can this work? Yeah. And it’s probably was used, in places like Cuba and areas, in the Donbas. But the pace is incredibly slow. And the casualties are incredibly high. And more importantly, you have a much higher percentage of casualties that turn into actual fatalities. So best guess is that at this point in the conflict, the Russians have lost between 1 million and 1.4 million men, with somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 of those being dead. 

And the casualty rates have increased from the 750 to 1000 people per day in calendar year 2024, to probably something closer to 1500 to 1600 people by the time we get to the new years of 2025, 2026. I said about I think it’s two years ago now, that if the Russians keep losing men at the rate they are, they’re not going to be able to mount a military force of any size in 6 to 8 years, which, when I said that would have put us at somewhere around 2030, it now appears that that date has been moved forward because the Russians are suffering casualties faster than Russian boys can be born. 

On the Ukrainian side, the situation isn’t exactly great either. Keep in mind that any battle in which the Ukrainians do not inflict at least a 4 to 1 casualty ratio is a battle that probably, in the long run, the Russians have won just because there’s so many more Russians. But the Russians are now getting to a situation where they are running out of people who are not ethnically Russian. 

All of the various ethnicities that make up the Russian Federation, that are not that ethnically Russian, they’re basically running them dry. And the Chechens are almost tapped out at this point, which is something I never thought I would see. Ukraine doesn’t have that kind of problem. Everyone pretty much who’s fighting in the Ukrainian side of the war is Ukrainian. 

So there’s a much stronger nationalism factor going in. And we are seeing the, weapons systems, in the military industrial complexes of the Europeans spinning up, in order to continue providing arms for, the Ukrainians. Keep in mind that the Ukrainians have given, excuse me, keep in mind that the Europeans have given the Ukrainians significantly more military aid, than the United States has. 

And and we’re almost a factor of three more economic aid. So if the Trump administration changes its minds on a few things, obviously, that will affect the war effort one way or another. But the bottom line is that the European military complex is becoming more capable of supporting the war. As the Russian military complex is becoming less capable. 

So we really are seeing this turn into a proper proxy war with the Europeans on one side and the Chinese on the other side. Most of the hardware that is coming into the Russian system now is originated in Chinese factories. And we’re getting this weird little proxy fight between two countries that are two regions that haven’t really been involved in a direct geopolitical conflict. 

That has a lot of impacts in a lot of ways. Number one, the Europeans are much more amenable to talking to the Trump administration about trade sanctions on the Chinese, because their leaderships are now recognizing that they’re in a direct head to head with Beijing. But it’s also leading to a reorganization of how global military technology works. 

The United States, by stepping back, has seen its pace of technological innovation slow considerably because you have a technical revolution happening in Ukraine that the United States, for the most part, is not participating in. But the Europeans are rearming at a pace that is forcing these sorts of changes into their everyday structure, how that will play out in the years ahead. 

Way too soon to tell. But the United States is no longer clearly at the forefront of either drone technology or drone jamming technology. Those are European concerns. Mostly Ukrainian and the Chinese are now getting it on the back side of this, moving from first person drones to something else, things that are getting incrementally more sophisticated. 

How this will play out. So many of the rules of war have changed in the last 24 months. It’s really hard to tell. But the one country that seems to be going out of its way now to not keep pace is the United States.

Sub-Sea Drone Strike on Russian Sub

A submarine rising out of the water

Ukraine claims to have damaged or destroyed a Russian Kilo-class submarine while in the port of Novorossiysk using a subsea drone.

If confirmed, Russia’s last major naval base would be vulnerable to air, surface, and now subsea attacks…not a great look. Russia’s Black Sea naval operations would likely collapse within a year.

But let’s not overstate the power of the subsea drones. While they may be effective for anti-port applications like this one, they won’t be replacing traditional naval warfare tools like torpedoes anytime soon.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Quick one today. The news is that in the last couple of weeks, the Ukrainian government has announced that they have used a new type of drone, a subsea drone, to attack and destroy a Russian submarine, a kilo class in the Russian port of Novorossiysk. the reason I’ve waited so long to comment on this is because the details were vague. 

The Russians have denied that the Russians deny everything and the Ukrainians haven’t provided a lot of evidence. We do have satellite photos now that indicate there was damage on the inside of the port. Whether or not a submarine was hit or sunk is unclear. I would note that if you put a reasonably sized bomb on the outside of a submarine, that submarine is not going to go underwater. 

Or if it does go under water, it will never come back up again. So it doesn’t take much damage to take one of these out for the long term. And the Russians no longer have the capacity to refit them, because that equipment is in Crimea, and Crimea is under regular air drone assault. So if this kilo class sub was even mildly damaged, it’s it’s out. 

A couple things to keep in mind, however. Number one, on the Ukrainian side. The fact that a sea attack happened in November is extraordinarily bad for the Russians. It was one thing when they lost the ability to base their navy out of the Crimea. So they moved back to overseas because it was out of range of air attacks. Then air attacks started, happened regularly earlier this year. Now we not just have a sea attack, but a sub sea attack. 

There are any number of ways that that might have happened. Maybe there was a mothership involved. Maybe it was smuggled into Russia proper, and then the thing was dropped in the water and sent on. But the bottom line is, is that the targeting suite of these drones is very limited. And if it goes underwater, it’s not receiving signals from anyone else unless it’s on a tether. 

And if it’s on a fiber optic tether, you’d have to have another ship nearby, which it’s really stretches the imagination to think that the Russians would be that unaware of things going on in their own immediate waters. Which means that if this is true, what happened was that the sub was at dock when it happened. We do see damage to the dock. 

We do see damage to the booms. And if this is a fundamentally new weapon from the Ukrainians, they’re calling it a sub sea baby. The sea baby is there. Surface drones, then overseas has become completely untenable for any sort of Russian naval or maritime activity. Remember that this is the Russians largest port in the area. It’s their primary oil export point. 

It’s already been hit a couple of times, and it is now the headquarters for the Black Sea Fleet, which means they’ll have to move down the coast to a place called Tusa, which doesn’t have nearly the, cap capability. So we really are talking about the functional end of the entire Russian Sea Fleet within the next 12 months, if this is true. 

Second, other side of the equation, I wouldn’t get too excited about subsea drones, because we don’t have meaningful guidance or decision trees on naval drones at this point. This is much less useful than a modern day torpedo. It would have to be dropped off relatively close to where it’s going. It can’t track an active signature. It can only go to a preprogramed fixed point. 

That doesn’t mean it’s a nothing burger, because anything that can get around detection is something that Ukrainians or really anyone who’s involved in a naval conflict is going to want. But it is not an at sea weapon. It is an anti port weapon. So that is of significance. But in modern naval warfare, it is certainly not a game changer in its current form.

Ukraine War Peace Talks

A mural of a ukraine flag with a peace sign in it

Ukraine and Russia peace talks are proceeding furiously, but going nowhere, mostly because the Trump administration is trying to make this a rush job and has neglected all the important details.

Steve Witkoff has been the lead on these negotiations, but with no foreign policy experience, we’re getting the kind of results you would expect. The pattern looks something like this: Witkoff meets with Ukraine or Russia, he’s force-fed propaganda, he regurgitates that back to the White House, a fantastic new deal (aka a one-sided propaganda piece) is written up, the other side rejects it, and the pattern repeats itself.

We’re seeing deals being drafted that completely ignore the redlines established by either side, so it’s quite clear that these peace talks aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon.

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Transcript

Hey all Peter Zeihan here coming from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about the status of the peace talks with Ukraine and the Russians to end the Ukraine war. We’ve we’ve had really two big problems with any meaningful negotiations so far. Number one, Donald Trump really wants a peace deal, but he really doesn’t care at all about the details. 

So whatever the peace deal of the moment is, it’s on his desk. He’s like, this is wonderful. This is the best deal ever. Let’s do this. And when countries push back, he screams at them and starts to threaten them. Until this point, the country that he’s been screaming at and threatening has usually been Ukraine. And that is because of the second problem, and that is the US chief negotiator, who’s a guy by the name of Steve Wyckoff, would cough, is a real estate mogul from New York, old buddies of Donald Trump. 

And he has said on a number of occasions in a number of venues that he knows nothing about negotiation and nothing about foreign affairs, and he’s proud of that. He has no intention to ever learn anything. So I and others have always thought that Wyckoff was just rabidly pro-Russian because he doesn’t meet with Ukraine. He’s never met with Zelensky, who’s the Ukrainian president. 

Just goes to Moscow, sits down, tilts his head back, and the Russians pour a few gallons of Russian propaganda into him. He comes back to the white House, vomits it forth. Trump says, oh, this is wonderful peace idea. Let’s do this. And when the Ukrainians refuse to agree to demands in from the Russians to basically withdraw their troops and shut down their army and never seek a defensive alliance, the Ukrainians say no. And then Trump goes off the handle. That’s basically been the pattern for this year to this point. 

What changed in the last week is that Steve Wyckoff met with Zelensky for the first time, and guess what happened? He tilted his head back, and Zelensky poured a few gallons of Ukrainian propaganda down his throat. Witcoff came to the white House and vomit it forward. All of a sudden we have a Ukrainian peace plan that ignores all of the Russian demands. Specifically, would allow for an article five style security guarantee with the United States. One of the things that the Russians have refused to even negotiate on is Ukraine ever joining NATO, because they don’t want the other countries, most notably the United States, to get involved in the conflict? 

Remember that for the Russians, it’s not just about Ukraine. It’s about pushing their Western periphery back to an area that they find more defensible, so that that periphery actually matches geography, so that they can use mountains and seas to defend themselves. That means not just conquering all of Ukraine, but also all of Finland and Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania and Moldova and big chunks of Poland and Romania as well. 

So anything that involves foreign troops, the Russians will generally reject. But Trump, having not done the homework, think that’s just means NATO. So the new plan by the Ukrainians is for a NATO style guarantee to not be with the alliance, but be with the United States and Germany and Poland and France and basically every NATO countries signed a bilateral deal instead. 

And Trump, this is the last deal in front of us. Like this is a wonderful idea. And so this is the peace plan. It is still a stupid peace plan. It’s just meets one side’s point as opposed to the other side’s point. What that means for me is I am now gone from thinking that would cause is just rabidly pro-Russian to realizing the word cost is just really fucking stupid and Trump can’t tell. 

So why would an alliance of the structure with Ukraine be as horrible of an idea as every plan that’s come forward to this point? That’s been from the Russian point of view? Well, remember, for the Russians, Ukraine is not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of the story. And so if we are now directly involved in the third Ukraine war, because that was what the next one would be, then the Russians would use all the weapons systems that they have available, including their nukes and their intercontinental ballistic missiles, because all of a sudden they are in a multi theater war. 

And that means that this deal in its current form, pretty much guarantees in exchange, it’s going to sound horrible. But for the United States, the best outcome of these talks is something that fails and continues with NATO and the United States supporting Ukraine and helping them build up an independent defense capacity so they can stand up to the Russians on their own. 

And that means ongoing weapons transfers and ongoing assistance. The alternative is to leave the Ukrainians out to dry, in which case the Russians don’t stop at Ukraine and come right into NATO countries, or to put American troops on the ground to defend the Ukrainians against the next Russian assault, in which case we get that exchange. So this deal is just as bad as everything that has come before. 

What I do find really interesting is we actually have some talk on the specifics, not just in the white House in Congress, but because a bilateral security alliance requires Senate approval and ratification. And we’re already starting that process now, I don’t think that this will happen. I don’t think this should happen. But, you know, Steve, what comes next stop is in Moscow. 

So I’m sure he’s going to change his mind again and come up with a new plan that will go before Trump, and then he will change his mind again and we’ll get back to this cycle. But the real thing that has changed in just the last few days is now an understanding that the details don’t matter to this administration at all. 

And unless and until we get, at a minimum, a new chief negotiator for Ukraine, this is just the cycle that we’re in. A lot of screaming and no real change.

The Russian Breakdown

Russian soldiers in formation

Should the war in Ukraine result in a Russian loss, what will the future hold for Russia?

Well, we know the road ahead for the Russians is going to be a rough one, but that doesn’t mean the country will collapse from within immediately. The military and internal security services hold too much power, and since the heavily propagandized, aging, ethnic Russians account for 70% of the population, an internal uprising isn’t of concern.

The real threat to Russia comes from the outside. Neighboring countries or those with an interest in seeing Russia remain destabilized could take advantage of its weaker borders and limited economic and strategic capacity.

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Transcript

Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to take a question from the Patreon page, a bit of a what if, if the Russians lose the war in Ukraine or what does that mean for national stability within Russia proper? Are we looking at an immediate disintegration or what? Great question. 

Now, there are a lot of examples in Russian history of where the center has broken. And a loss in Ukraine doesn’t necessarily mean that the Kremlin loses power, but there’s really two big pillars of power in Russia. One is the military and the other one is the internal security services. And the important thing to remember about Russia is, unlike a country like Iran, where the country is actually half non Persian, and so the military is primarily responsible for occupying itself in order to keep all the minorities, under control in Russia. 

That’s not the case in Russia, even if, the Russian census data is completely fabricated, which it probably is, we probably have at least 70% of the Russian population actually being ethnic Russian. So among those populations with the possibility of Saint Petersburg, where there might be an economic push for independence, most of the Russians are going to stay put. They’ve been conditioned. They’ve eaten nothing but propaganda for quite some time. And most importantly, most of the young people are gone. Not only is the birthrate in Russia been dropping since before World War two, it plummeted under Khrushchev. Fell even more to Gorbachev and particularly nosedived in the 1990s. You add in a million casualties in the Ukraine war, in another million people under age 30 fleeing. And there really isn’t that youth generation that generally generates, revolutionary activity. And the Russian population will be concerned about losing what little they have left. So the chances of them being really rebellious are pretty low. The other 30%, of course, is a different question. You’ve got a number of minorities, mostly Turkic, of some flavor or Bashkors, Tatars, Chechens, English. This is where things would get really interesting. So, the military’s primary goal is to be on the borders in the Russian sphere and prevent any sort of invasion. And in a post Ukraine scenario where the Russians lost their borders are very, very, very long. And so they really won’t be available for any sort of domestic suppression of rebellion that will fall to the intelligence services, which are just as strong now as they were three years ago. 

So you can have an open rebellion in places like Tatarstan or Bashkortostan and the Russian government remains relatively capable of dealing with those. Now, they can’t deal with it everywhere, as we saw in the Soviet system, when the internal services were much stronger than they are today. If you’ve got two dozen places going into some degree of rebellion at the same time, then you’re kind of screwed. 

But when those two dozen places went into rebellion at the same time last time around, they were Kazakhs and Uzbek and Georgians and Latvians and Estonians and Armenians, and as a Rajani, none of them were ethnic Russians. And when the Soviet system fell, 14 of the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union were not majority Russian, and they are now independent states. 

What was left with rump Russia is much smaller, much more difficult to defend, but is actually more ethnically homogenous. So the Russian state, the Kremlin, would have a much better chance of suppressing internal dissent. 

Now, this is all pretty much a starvation diet because they post Ukraine. Russia loses a lot of its income. Its security situation is much worse. 

Its financial position is considerably worse, and there would probably be pressure on it from the entire western and southwestern periphery, because once Ukraine wins, you’re going to have any number of European countries that include, but are not limited to two Finland, the Baltics, Poland and Romania, who are going to be pushing at the Russians to try to make sure they stay off balance. 

The Turks will probably get on that to the EU’s backs down south will probably get into that. And based on the circumstances in East Asia, Japan or China could get in that as well. So I wouldn’t say that a post Ukraine. Russia is long for this world, but it’s not probably going to fall from within without a lot of help. Russia is in a relatively slow motion decline. It’ll probably still be there regardless of what happens in the Ukraine war by 2040. But once you fast forward past 2050, that’s when the demographic shift really starts to shift. And most of those Turkic minorities have strong birthrates. You combine that with what happened in the war, in gutting the younger generation and very, very, very low birth rates and high death rates among the Russian population. 

By the time you get to 2060, you’re in a very different environment and then you can start thinking about an internal disintegration, but it’s going to be from the outside first. And, the end of all of this really does depend on what happens to Ukraine. Because if Ukraine falls, then the Russians have a more secure external border. 

It’ll buy them 20, 30 years. That’s not a rounding error. That’s why they’re doing it in the first place. But we are still looking at the end of the Federation before the end of the century. That’s pretty much just a question, whether it’s front loaded or not. 

Uh Oh for Space

NASA photo of the ISS

The Russians had an oopsie with the launch pad at their main heavy-lift launch site following the launch of their Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft heading for the ISS. The unintended destruction of this launch pad cripples Russia’s space capabilities.

However, it’s not just Russia that will feel the heat from this. With the ISS slated for retirement within five years, the lack of Russian participation puts the future of the ISS…up in the air (excuse the pun). NASA isn’t ready to step in, and private sector plans for independent stations all require the ISS functional and in place.

With the Russians unable to maintain a modern satellite network, coupled with their international isolation on the ground, what’s stopping them from sabotaging low-Earth orbit? It wouldn’t take much for them to trigger a Kessler Syndrome event. Not a great look for the future of space.

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Transcript

Hello from chilly Colorado. It’s like four degrees here today. Peter Zeihan here, today. Well, last week during Thanksgiving, something blew up in the former Soviet Union. And it wasn’t in Ukraine. And it wasn’t in Russia. It was in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is the second largest of the former Soviet republics, kind of nestled under south central Russia. 

What blew up was at the cosmodrome, which is where the Russians centered their space program during the Cold War, because you want your launch spot as close to the equator as possible. So the spin of the Earth helps you launch things. Anyway, the Kazakh Cosmodrome has been where everything has been happening, for the i.s.s., that really matters. 

Most of the heavy lift is there. The U.S. does launch things first with a shuttle and now with, SpaceX’s Dragon capsules. But it’s the Soyuz that come out of Russia that really have the really heavy lift. Anyway, when they did a launch, the launch pad blew up and repairs are going to take a minimum of months, maybe years. 

And this may be the beginning of the end of the ISS. That’s the International Space Station. Now, the ES was put up there as part of an American, Russian, post-Cold War, hey, we’re all friends now program back in the 1990s and has been the core of manned exploration ever since. However, it’s getting old and it was going to be retired within five years. 

But now, without the heavy launch capacity, at least in the short term, probably longer. It’s unclear whether the Russians are going to continue to participate in the program at all. 

It’s not the 1980s anymore. With Ukraine war three years ago, the Russians have become persona non grata in pretty much every aspect of international cooperation, even Eurovision, with the exception of the space program, because from the American point of view, without the Russians involved, it’s a question whether there would be a space program if all the certainly the ES itself is now in jeopardy, which means we have two problems. 

First of all, without heavy lift capacity, it is questionable whether the ES can persist and there isn’t a replacement program in place right now. NASA has no no plans to put up a replacement system. And there’s a lot of science and a lot of work being done at the ES that really can’t be done anywhere else. 

The plan is for private companies to go up and have their own satellite systems. It is unclear if anyone is ready for that, and everyone’s plans revolve around starting attached to the I.s.s. and then when the ISS is commissioned, moving off on their own, that plan may no longer be viable. And if we’re entering a period where there is no manned operations in space and things like satellite repair become really difficult, especially for the bigger ones, that’s problem. 

One problem, too, is the Russians. The Russians of late have had a very. If I can’t have it, no one can have it, approach to really everything. Because the Soviet Union used to be a superpower. Until the Ukraine invasion, Russia was a major power. And now Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the United States and all the Europeans have basically shut the Russians out of everything they can. 

They just don’t matter in international forums to the degree that they used to. And they certainly don’t have the cash to splash around to buy friends like they used to. So where does that leave them? Well, if the ISS fails and they can no longer have heavy space launch, then all of a sudden the Russians don’t have much need for satellites. 

We did a video, a couple weeks back. We’ll share that on this one, where we talked about something called a Kessler syndrome. Basically, there are thousands, soon to be tens of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, and very few of them are Russian. The Russians can’t maintain what they have. So you got some old Cold War relics up. 

There are a few things that have been launched since then, but for the most part, this is Starlink and to a lesser degree, American telecommunications. it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think of how the Russians could disrupt that, because though they don’t have heavy space lift, anymore, they do still have space left. 

They have their own cosmodrome in Russia proper, can’t get the huge volumes and the weights up, but it can certainly say go up and blow up a few satellites. And if you do that and you cause the, the shotgun effect of high velocity debris, Mach 25 it doesn’t require taking out too many satellites to cut a cascade reaction that basically makes low Earth orbit unusable for several years. 

And the Russians are now in a position we’re considering that doing it on purpose, is probably crossing their radar now, because if they can’t use space in a meaningful way anymore and everyone else has taken their toys and go on home, then the Russians really don’t see the negative of making space unusable. 

Ukraine Targets the CPC in Recent Drone Strikes

Image of a drone firing missiles

Over the weekend, Ukraine expanded its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure to include facilities tied to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), as well as the shadow fleet of tankers that Russia uses to bypass Western sanctions. All told, roughly 2.5 million barrels a day of Russian and Kazakh oil exports are now in mortal danger.

The Baltic Sea is the next-best route for the shadow fleet, and if any European powers decide to help Ukraine…that could be shut down quickly as well. That would leave the Pacific (out of Vladivostok) as the only viable route for the shadow fleet.

Sure, the world is currently in an oil oversupply, but if both the Black AND Baltic routes went down, the global system would be pushed to the limit.

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Transcript

Hey. Coming to you from Colorado. We got snow. Finally. A couple things happened over the last few days and the Thanksgiving holidays. We’re going to start with Ukraine. All energy related. So, the Ukrainians obviously have been using heavier weapons and, bigger drones and rocket drones and naval drones to attack Russian energy assets across the length and width of all of western Russia. 

They’ve now done a couple of things that are not necessarily unprecedented, but added together are going to really challenge what’s going on in global energy markets. The first is the port of Novorossiysk. Now Novosibirsk is a major naval base and has been a major Russian loading facility for crude for some time. And over the weekend, the Ukrainians hit it again with some naval drones. 

But most notably, they hit something called a loading booey, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an offshore Bui that a tanker comes in, docks with, and then loads up with crude. But this time the, Bui doesn’t belong to the Russian government. It belongs to a group called the CPC, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which is a consortium of international companies that operates the Tengiz super field on the northeastern coast of the Caspian Sea. 

Tengiz Chevron was the original company that founded. This dates back to the Soviet periods. It was the first real foreign direct investment by Western companies, in the former Soviet Union. And eventually, Chevron became the functional operator, along with some Kazakh and some Russian companies. Anyway, CPC is responsible for about 75 to 80% of the total exports of Kazakh oil. 

But because the pipeline has to go through Russia, because the Russians were just dicks when all of this was being negotiated, the Russians throw a lot of crude in the pipeline as well, and sometimes even crowd out Kazakh crude. So the Ukrainians see it as a viable target. So, Tengiz, is a big deal. The CPC consortium is a big deal, but overseas is really where it’s at, because that’s not just an export point for Kazakh crude, but a lot of Russian crude as well. 

Now it’s under regular direct attack as specifically CPC, aspects. So you’re talking about, just from CPC, roughly 1.4 million barrels a day is under a degree of threat, and then another million barrels a day of purely Russian crude. So if the Ukrainians can keep this up and it is kind of the next target in the crosshairs, that is a significant reduction in potential flows. 

That’s part one. Part two is the Ukrainians deliberately, again, using naval drones, went after a pair of shadow fleet vessels in the Black Sea that were coming in from Istanbul. They were empty at the time, which is probably the only reason that the Europeans haven’t screamed bloody murder, because if you actually had an oil spill in the Black Sea, all of it has to flow through downtown Istanbul on the way to the Mediterranean. 

It would be a mess. But we now have the Ukrainians actively, deliberately targeting the shadow fleet, which basically means that the between targeting overseas on the front end in the Shadow fleet, on the back end, the entire Black Sea is now a no go zone, for the Shadow fleet tankers and for Russian oil experts in general. 

And we’re going to lose somewhere between 2 and 3 million barrels a day of flow just from that. That is a big deal in of of itself. But it also brings up the next stage of this Russian shadow fleet. Tankers only depart from three locations near, Saint Petersburg, on the Baltic, near and over a sea on the black, andnear Vladivostok, on the, the Pacific coast. 

One of those is now functionally shut off. The next one to go is going to be the Baltic. And the question will be whether the Ukrainians do that themselves. It is further away it would be harder to do, or whether the Europeans assist, because every tanker that flows out of the Saint Petersburg region has to go through EU and NATO members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, Poland and Denmark, as well as Norway and Germany. 

So, you know, if there’s any one of those countries that decides to assist the Ukrainians in any meaningful way, whether it’s time on target information, intelligence, information targeting, going after themselves, allowing the Ukrainians to fly through the airspace or dock at their ports, whatever it happens to be, then you’re talking about roughly two thirds to three quarters of Russian oil exports from a pre war point of view being gone. 

And we’re now in a position where we can talk about what that’s going to look like in just a few months. Now the global energy supply is at the moment in oversupply. So losing one to maybe even 3 million barrels a day of Russian crude is not something that’s going to break anybody. Except for Russia, of course. 

But once you start talking about the black and the Baltic being off at the same time, we’re already up against the upper limit there of how much flow you could probably remove from global systems without everybody, like having a CS. You combine that with more and more targeting of the shadow fleet itself so that there just aren’t tankers available. 

And then we get into some really interesting positions. It looks like calendar year 2026 is going to start off with a bang, and I am here for it.