Today we’re diving into some operational updates from the Ukraine War. First and foremost, daytime temps this winter have rarely dropped below freezing; when they do, it has not been for long enough periods for the ground to freeze. So that means local forces will be rolling around in the pig-sty for at least a few more months.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, the only viable way to stop the Russians is to start killing more of them…and if they can’t get their tanks mobile, that won’t be happening any time soon. These muddy conditions enabled the Russians to throw wave after wave of troops at targets (like in the Battle of Bakhmut) until they could win and move on.

This is, and always has been, Russia’s war to lose. Come May (or whenever the ground decides to firm up), we will see large-scale offensives from both sides that start to shift the tides of this war.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the San Diego waterfront. I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to give you a quick update on what’s going on in Ukraine. The most important factor is that the weather continues to be warm. Actually, today, the 7th of February is the first day in a month that it’s actually going to be below freezing in Kyiv during the day. It’s going to be chilly for the next few days, but not enough to freeze the ground. And then back by the time we’re into mid-next week, it will be above freezing again. So it is still muddy. As long as it’s muddy, the Ukrainians cannot maneuver, especially with tanks out in the fields. And that’s a real problem.

Any conflict with the Russians was always going to be heavy on numbers and the Ukrainians simply don’t have the population in order to face down the Russians man for man. So they need to inflict massively out of whack casualty ratios on the folks that are fighting. And I’m not talking 2 – 3 to 1 like we’ve seen so far. Like 8 – 10 to 1 is really kind of the minimum if they are going to walk away from this. The Russians see this war as a battle for their existential survival, their right. They’re not going to stop. And so the only way for Ukraine to emerge victorious is to kill so many Russian soldiers so quickly that the Russian front collapses and the military system within the Russian Federation requires years to recover. We are nowhere close to that. And the only way that the Ukrainians can pull that off is if they can outmaneuver the Russians. And that requires fields that are not mud.

This has allowed the Russians to play to their strengths and just throw body after body after body into a few battles, most notably the battle of Bakhmut, which until now the main effort has been led by the Wagner Group for internal political reasons. But honestly, the internal political reasons don’t matter. As long as the Ukrainians can’t maneuver and as long as the Russians have superior numbers, it’s just an issue of throwing wave after wave of humans at them until the weather changes to a degree where the logistics shifts to a degree that the battles can move elsewhere. That’s unlikely to happen until May. Now, Wagner has been using almost exclusively convicts in their human wave tactics. And as to the number of people that have been lost, the estimates are in the process of being revised by everyone, because everyone is, you know, always changing these sort of things during a war. They’re starting to use more radio intercepts to guess how many Russians have been killed. The problem is, if you go with just visual confirmation, you’re going to wildly undercount because it doesn’t count people who are injured who then were taken away from the front and then die because the Russians’ triage system and medical system is beyond atrocious. And so probably for every person that is visually killed, there’s another half to a person that then wandered away and died. Anyway, we now know that the minimum deaths in the war so far on the Russian side is 120,000, and the estimates for Russian deaths in the battle of Bakhmut specifically are somewhere between ten and 40,000, just for one little strategically insignificant town.

Anyway, for the next couple of months, this is just where we are. It’s probably too late in the season at this point to hope for a really hard freeze. So we’re going to have to wait for things to dry out in May before the Ukrainians might be able to move. By the time we get to May, the Russians will really move a lot more troops into the front. They started the war with somewhere between 100 and 150,000. Today they probably have about 250,000. And with the second mobilization already deep underway, we’re probably going to be around 6 to 700,000 by the time we get to May and June. Now, they will be badly led and they will be badly equipped and will be badly supplied and they will have poor morale and they’ll be badly trained. And you know what you call troops like that, Russian. There is nothing about the conflict to this point that is atypical in Russian history. They rarely win on quality. They almost always went on numbers. And we’re almost to the point where we’re going to see just how well these new infusions of NATO equipment help the Ukrainians on the front line and just how many massive waves and assaults the Russians can sustain at the same time. And this is going to put the battle in a bit of a pickle for the Ukrainians because they’re going to be facing two or three major assaults from the Russians at different points of contact. And if they allow themselves to get bogged down, deflecting each and every one of those, they’re going to lose. They need to free this up into a war of movement and allow their tanks and artillery and the rockets to do an offensive in a place where the Russians either can’t resist or can’t maneuver or to counter them.

So by the time we get to May, we are going to be in a very fluid strategic environment, most likely with the Ukrainians just kind of backing off, putting the minimum forces they can in this or that front just to slow the Russians down. While they try to do lightning strikes and blitzkrieg style assault on some other point in the front in order to try to get behind the Russian formations, cut them off from logistical supply and then just dice them up. It’s a risky strategy, but considering the numbers of people and the volume of equipment that Ukrainians control, that’s really the only game in town at this point.

This is still, always has been Russia’s war to lose. And we’re getting close to the point where we’re going to see a strategic logjam break one way or another. And it’s just about three months away.

Okay. That’s it for me. Until next time.

Perhaps the scariest takeaway from the Ukraine War is that it’s just beginning. To fully understand what is at stake here, we must look at Russia’s motivators and the possible outcomes.

Russia is looking to reclaim enough land for them to reach the geographical strong points that were once part of the Soviet Union. Beyond that, Russia is essentially fighting for its existence. So the only viable option for them is…winning…at whatever cost. That is a terrifying reality.

If the Ukrainians hold Russia off, we’ll see a long, drawn-out war over disputed land until Russia makes enough progress to launch another large-scale assault. For Ukraine to prevail, they would have to destroy sufficient Russian industrial and logistical capacity WITHIN RUSSIA to render another assault impossible.

If the Russians get past Ukraine, they won’t stop there. Poland and Romania will be next, but the Russians know that facing off with NATO isn’t going to end well. And that’s when the nuclear question comes up.

Regardless of how this plays out, we know Russia doesn’t give in lightly. What we’ve seen so far is just a warm-up and the real war is only now starting.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Join me on Feb. 17th for the webinar – Global Outlook: One Year into the Ukraine War.

We’ll dive into the global impacts the war has had on supply chains, agriculture, and much more. After my presentation we’ll have a Q&A portion to answer all those burning questions.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey everybody. Hello from Colorado. I thought today would be a great day to underline for everyone what’s at stake with the Ukraine war and why the war to this point really is just the very beginning of what’s going to be a long, protracted conflict that is going to stretch well beyond Ukraine’s borders. Alright. With that in your back pocket, let’s launch in.

This is a map of the Russian space, and that green area is the Russian wheat belt. That is the part of Russia that is worth having where the weather is not so awful. It’s still awful…That you can’t grow crops can’t grow much. You get one crop of relatively low quality wheat because the growing season is very short. Summers are very hot and dry and windy and winters are very cold and dry and windy. If you move to the right, you’re in Tundra and Taiga. That’s the blue. If you go to the left, you’re in the desert. So north to tundra, south to desert.

But what really drives the Russians to drink is the beige territory. Territories that even by Russian standards are useless. But they’re flat and they’re open and you can totally run a mongol horde through those. So what the Russians have always done is reached out past the green, tried to expand, get buffer space, get past that beige, that area that’s useless, and reach a series of geographic barriers where you can’t run a Panzer division through it and then forward position. They’re relatively slow moving, relatively low tech forces in the access points between during the Soviet period, the Russians controlled all of those access points. It was the safest that the Russians have ever been, and then they lost it all. And what they’ve been trying to do under Putin and Yeltsin both has been to re-expand back to those footprints so that they can plug the gaps, plug the places where the invaders would come, get static footprints, lots of troops right on the border where you can’t avoid them, you can’t outmaneuver them.

And this has been what they’ve been trying to do. This is the Kazakh intervention in the Karabakh war and the Georgian war and the Donbas war and the Crimean War. This is what it’s all been about. Ukraine, unfortunately for the Ukrainians, is not one of these access points. It’s on the way to the two most important ones in Romania and Poland.

So this war was always going to happen and this was never going to be the end of it. The Russians have launched eight military expansions since 1992. This is the ninth and it wasn’t going to be the last one. Eventually they would come for Poland and they would come for Romania. But we now know that the Russians are militarily incompetent at fighting a conventional war. So we know if they succeed in Ukraine and they reach the Polish border, they know that there will be a 1000 to 1 casualty ratio if they face off against NATO forces. So we know that when they do eventually come, if they make it past Ukraine, they will use every tool that they have. And that includes nukes. The Russians feel that they are fighting for their existential existence and because of the demographic collapse they are. If they fail to capture Warsaw and northeastern Romania in the vaults, they will shrivel in an open zone wracked by internal disruptions and interfered with from outside powers. And over the next decade or three, they will cease to exist as a functional country. Winning here is their only option, and since its death or winning every possible tool that they have will come into play. And that includes the nuclear question when it becomes their only option. If the Russians win in Ukraine, we will have a nuclear exchange.

But if you’re Ukrainian, obviously you have a different view on how this should go. What we’re looking at here is an old industrial map of industrial assets in the former Soviet system box there indicates approximately the Ukrainian borders. And you’ll notice that there’s a whole cluster of these little industrial circles just beyond Ukrainian space. We know if the Russians win in Ukraine, where they come in.

But think about what it means if the Ukrainians win, if they succeed in ejecting Russian forces from their entire territory, the Russians aren’t going to stop. Remember, this is for them an existential fight for their survival. They will continue doing cross-border raids until they feel they have an advantage. They can make another try of it. So the only way that Ukrainians can win and then live in peace afterwards is to disrupt the logistics that prevent industrial plant in those circles from contributing to a war effort on the Ukrainian border zone. And that means the Ukrainians have to cross the border into Russia proper. Whether they do this with planes and missiles or artillery and rockets or general army that will determined by the facts on the ground when this finally happens. But we’re talking about deep strikes in excess of 100 to 200 miles into the Russian space to deliberately destroy industrial plants and especially connecting infrastructure.

So we know now that if the Russians win, we’re going to have a nuclear crisis. And if the Ukrainians win, it’s the beginning of a long slog that will take years to resolve one way or the other until either Ukraine loses the capacity to function or Russia loses the capacity to function. Russia’s never backed down from a war without a series of mass casualty events that were so severe that they’ve lost the ability to maintain a military position at all. They fight until they can’t, especially now considering what is at stake.

This is going to get a lot more intense before it gets resolved. And 2022 was honestly just the warm up in the skirmishes. Fighting in 2023 is going to be a lot more severe because the Ukrainians are finally getting some real heavy equipment and tanks and the Russians are doing a second mobilization and they’re going to have three quarters of a million troops in Ukraine by the end of May.

The real war is only now starting.

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union attempted to crush the Ukrainians in a genocide known to history as the Holodomor. 

Key to the strategy was deliberate efforts to destroy agricultural production to ensure famine. In all, 4 million Ukrainians perished. Today’s Russia is about to switch gears in the ongoing military conflict and attempt a second Holodomor. 

Here’s how we should expect the next chapter to begin…

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey, everyone. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Calgary on the Bow River, just outside of downtown. Today, I wanted to talk very briefly about what’s going on with Ukraine and the path of the war, not necessarily from a military point of view, but from an economic and strategic point of view. 

One of the key things to remember about the war right now is that the Ukrainians are wildly outmanned. The Russians have a population of roughly 140 million, and it has no problem throwing bodies and nearly limitless numbers into the war effort. Right now, we have had a first stage mobilization of about 300,000. There’s another stage of at least 500,000 coming probably within a few days, which means that by the time we get to May and June, the Russians will have a minimum of another half a million men in the field. And it’s not clear that the Ukrainians have enough bullets to take them all out. In this sort of conflict where the Ukrainians simply can’t trade a body for a body. It’s more than training, it’s more than morale, it’s more than equipment. It’s about speed, it’s about mobility. So as important as rockets and missiles and jets and tanks are and they are all critical to Ukrainian survival here, ultimately what the Ukrainians really need is the ability to move when the Russians can’t.

Now, in this, they’ve won at least half the battle. Russian forces historically and currently can really only resupply by rail. That is how the Russian system has always worked. They don’t have a Russian road network, so they have to move things by train. And when the Kerch Bridge was taken out last year, the Russians lost their primary method of supplying to the southern front. They’ve had to make do with trucks. But the Ukrainians have been attacking the truck fleet, the tactical support truck fleet of the military ever since the very beginning of the conflict. The Russians began the war with 3000 military support trucks. They’re probably down to only about 500 now. And so they’ve been going back to Russia and confiscating things like vans and city buses in order to ferry troops and even artillery shells around the front. And I got to say, when a city bus loaded with artillery shells hits a bump, things get a little exciting. But that’s not enough for the Ukrainians. They have to inflict casualties on the Russians in excess, minimum excess of 5 to 1. And we’re just not there yet. If the pace continues, if this 3 to 1, 4 to 1 ratio, that we’re seeing of Ukrainian fatalities versus Russian fatalities continues. The Ukrainians will lose in time. They have to turn this into a war of movement. And in that, the weather has really not been very cooperative. You can split the seasons in Ukraine to basically four chunks. You got your summer when the ground is hard and dry, you’ve got the winter when it’s hard and frozen. And then in the spring and the autumn, you have what are called mud seasons where it’s just not cold enough to freeze the ground, but it’s wet enough that everybody gets stuck. So if you’re on foot, you get stuck in mud. If you’re in a vehicle, all that mud turns your treads into just mush. And that is exactly the scenario the Russians found themselves in in the first part of the war. This is the primary reason that the assault on Kyiv failed and the primary reason that the Russians ended up abandoning their entire position in the northern part of the country. Their troops, their army, their tanks were limited to just being on the road. And that made it very easy for infantry to pick them out with things like javelins.

In this sort of situation, what do you do? Well, you wait for it to be winter and then you attack when the ground is hard and you use your superior air mobility to cut Russian logistic lines. I’ve been expecting to push south, not necessarily to reach the sea, but simply to get all of the roads within artillery range so that the Ukrainians can cut the supply line once and for all. That has not happened because it has been freakishly warm in Ukraine for several weeks now. Now here in Calgary, it has not been above freezing for over a month and so the river is frozen for the most part.

But in Kyiv, it hasn’t gotten below freezing during the day for over a month. And in that sort of situation, they’re experiencing a wildly, unexpectedly, unprecedentedly extended mud season. Now, this could change in ten days, although the extended forecast doesn’t suggest it. And we could get a hard freeze before the end of January, in which case February, which is normally part of the frozen season, could still see a lot of dynamism out of the Ukrainians. But that is not in the cards at the moment. 

And that means it’s time to start thinking about what the next stage of the Russian assault happens to look like. At the moment, the Russians are waiting for spring so they can throw those extra half a million men and just come at the Ukrainians from multiple angles. And if they do enough with enough, then it really doesn’t matter if the Ukrainians are mobile, they’ll be overwhelmed and that could be the end of the war right there. So right now, the Russians are just biding their time. They know they lack the logistical support to do any sort of broad scale, multifaceted, complicated assault right now. So they’re just throwing some bodies at a few places. If you’ve seen Bakhmut in the news, that’s exactly what’s happening there. But mostly the Russians are kind of sitting on their hands and waiting, but they are doing what they can to destroy morale and destroy the Ukrainian economy and kill as many Ukrainian civilians as possible. They’re using drones. They’re using fighter launched missiles. They’re using cruise missiles. And they’ve started to use ballistic missiles to target specifically Ukrainian physical infrastructure, most notably electricity generating plants.

They’re thinking is if they knock the electricity off in the depths of winter, you will, number one, kill a lot of civilians. Number two, you will demoralize the soldiers because if they see that their families back home are losing power, they’ve got to wonder why they’re on the front line if the front lines aren’t very dynamic. It’s an utterly despicable and inhumane strategy, but that doesn’t mean it’s stupid. And right now, the Ukrainians are suffering over and over and over again from these assaults. But once we get to spring, the Russians are going to change targets, not strategies, but targets. In addition to pushing for a broad based assault on multiple axes. They will then shift their targeting from electricity infrastructure to something else, because in the summer, taking out the power doesn’t have the same impact that you do it on the winter. Ukraine is just not that hot, that it needs mass electricity, electricity for air conditioning. I mean, this isn’t Alabama or Texas. In the winter, you have to have it for heating. But in the summer, it’s not so important.

So at that point, expect the Russians to change their targeting from electricity infrastructure to something a lot more insidious. Agricultural infrastructure targeting the factories that make the parts that repair the tractors, targeting the tractors themselves, targeting cold chain systems, targeting grain silos, targeting ports.

Right now, the Ukrainians have a series of deals that have been brokered by the U.N. with the Russians for getting grain out of their ports. It’s mostly been corn because it’s denser, both in terms of weight and in terms of economics than wheat. Wheat exports have fallen to almost nothing. But if the Russians start targeting their ability to produce and transport grain at all over the summer, then any country that is dependent on what has historically been the world’s fourth largest corn exporter and fifth largest wheat exporter is going to have a really, really tough year.

We should probably expect to see targets shifting in May and into June, and there’ll be obvious the impact that this is having by the time we get to September and October. And then the countries that would normally import from Ukraine come October, November, December are going to realize it’s just not there. Most of those countries are in Africa, some are in South Asia, and the one I am by far the most worried about is Egypt.

Egypt is poor. They import over half the grains they need to survive, mostly wheat. The wheat is already offline. And so we should expect to see significant upheaval, economic, humanitarian, political, across the Arab world and into South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa, all later, in the second half of 2023. And at this point, there’s just not a lot that anyone can do about it.

Fertilizer supplies are already constrained, and the Black Sea is probably going to become a no go zone once the Russians start targeting the ports altogether. I don’t have a cheery note to end this one on. This is just pretty dark. I’ll see you guys later.

It’s important to reflect from time to time, not only on where we have been right but where we have been wrong. With that, here is a repost from a newsletter originally published on December 29, 2021. 

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.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY