Hey, everybody! Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado, where it’s 70 degrees and snowy because mountains. Today, we’re doing a quick update on what’s going on in Ukraine, specifically on the Eastern front, where the Russians are beginning to use a couple of new tactics at a large scale. They definitely fall into the category of war crimes, but so many things that the Russians do these days are. Just to remind everyone, there are over 10,000 documented war crimes committed by the Russians in the conflict so far.

We hit that number well over a year ago. And that’s kind of the number where I stopped paying attention because it’s clear that’s just war crimes for war crimes’ sake at this point. Anyway, these two new ones kind of fall into that category as well. The first one is the use of their new glide bombs, Fab 1500, Fab 1005, 2000.

Basically, weapons that have a metric ton or more of explosive power and sending multiples of them into specific pieces of civilian infrastructure like water treatment plants and electricity-generating facilities with the intent of simply reducing urban populations beyond the ability to have industrial-level technologies. If the Russians keep this up, and they certainly have the weaponry to do it, they will be able to make large, large sections of Ukraine uninhabitable for the population densities that are there now.

The populations around Kharkiv, which is the third-largest city in the country, are the ones most at risk. And where it’s where the Russians have kind of started this shift to just complete obliteration of civilian infrastructure. The second one is something called a double tap. And it’s basically you send your missiles into an area where, you know, there’s a civilian population, and then you wait 30 to 90 minutes and you send another wave of missiles to the same location.

So the first is designed to destroy civilian infrastructure and kill people, and the second is designed to target the repair crews and the emergency services personnel and the aid workers. The idea is, if you can destroy enough of the human capital that allows Ukraine to recover from attacks, then their ability to fight the war might evaporate.

Clearly, these are some pretty nasty attacks. The double taps are something that was inspired by Islamic Jihad and Hamas in years gone by. For those of you who are Middle East buffs, you will remember that there were a lot of suicide bombs that matched this double tap strategy back in the early 2000s. Not much to say about these, except that it’s really hard to fight back against them.

Really? You need to have air superiority and extraordinary air defense and anti-missile coverage if you’re going to prevent these sorts of attacks. And the Russians have proven that they can do these attacks at scale. So the degree to which Ukraine would need external support in order to resist these sorts of assaults is high.

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. today we’re to talk about the reserves that the Russians are activating to keep fighting the war. at the end of March in Japanese province, the Ukrainians massacred a group of Russian forces that were part of the 76th Guards Air, assault Group. Now, the 76 has been fighting in the war for a while. 

they’ve been defeated a few times, but they’re generally considered some of the better Russian troops. they were part of the, the military formations before the war generally had the best equipment because they were some of the best troops. Well, when they came up against, Ukrainian forces this most recent time, they were fighting in t 55 tanks, which were tanks that were built right at the beginning of the Cold War back in the 50s. 

So these things have been considered by Russian standards, outdated by over a half a century. And yet here they are, being used by the elite forces. they don’t move as fast. They don’t shoot as far their armor’s thin compared to modern tanks. but most importantly, they require four people to operate instead of three. so, you know, much more manpower intensive for much less bang for the buck. 

the fact that these things are in use at all is a bit of an issue for the Russians. So, at the beginning of the war, the Russians had 12,000 tanks, of which about 2000 were in active service. the presence of the T 55 is in the hands of elite groups means that those original 20 tanks are now all, incapacitated or more likely, just flat out destroyed. 

Now, the Russians have very, very deep reserves. There’s another 10,000 to go. But as you dive into the reserves, you’re getting into older and older tanks. or that’s what it would logically seem, actually, they’re starting with the oldest ones first. The issue is that the T 50 fives had no optics. They predate optics. And so when you want to bring a new tank into service, you can throw some cheap optics and actually get it through the refurbishment process fairly quickly, where if you have a newer tanks, it’s 72 or something newer. 

Those had optics, but it’s been 30 years that they’ve been in storage, and so all the seals have gone and the wiring is bad. And so you need to replace something that was already there, as opposed to slap something aftermarket on it on the first place. that requires more advanced equipment, a lot of which the Russians don’t have anymore. 

And so the 270 twos and newer tanks take a lot more effort to refurbish. So the Russians are starting with the old, old, old tanks. but the bottom line here is that the entire pre-war tank, reserve is gone. And now everything that they put on is something that they’re having to update. the same goes true for soldiers, based on whose numbers you’re believing. 

That’s somewhere between 550,000 and 750,000 Russians have been killed or incapacitated by the conflict so far. Well, that is the entire pre-war army. And the Russians are having to put new people, recently drafted people into the field with minimal training. and this is now meaning that there is a problem with inflows. now, the Russians have not had a problem doing kind of a silent draft where anywhere between 15 and 45,000 people are, unofficially drafted every month. 

the Russians have flows of people to spare. but the source is not bottomless. At the beginning of the war, the Russians had about 8 million men in their 20s. Well, if you’ve killed roughly 600,000 or killed in capacity and 600,000 and another million of fled, you’re now down to about 6.5 million left. So if you look at the number of tanks that they’ve got in reserve, you look at the number of men in the 20s that they’ve got left. 

They can keep up this piece. They’ve been going for the last two years for probably another 5 to 8 years. And when that happens, they’re out of a gear. And they’re out of men. So that’s how long roughly the Russians have that they continue this war and any follow on wars. so we really are looking at the twilight of the Russian system here. 

But it also means that since there’s no longer resources that can be shuffled from other places in the Russian Federation, the Russians are now dependent upon this throughput for refurbishment, for training, for equipment coming from other countries in order to just to fight the war in the first place. So the situation in Ukraine for the Ukrainians isn’t great, but the Russians have now run out of stuff to reposition and they’re dependent upon that throughput. 

And that means economic and political factors, both in Russia and abroad, now massively affect the pipeline that allows Russia to keep men and equipment. And the front in the first place. So we need to watch the Russian space and the adjacent countries much more closely now than we have, because there’s no longer any depth to what the Russians can do. 

As soon as they get something, they throw it into the front, because if they don’t, the front gets empty. So it may feel that the Russians in the last month or so have had a bit of momentum. And they have, but they haven’t been able to capitalize on the breaking of the other Deka front. And in fact, the front has become static again. 

And so the Russians are doing attacks, like with the 76, to try to try to find a weak point, and the troops are just getting cut up and they just can’t maintain this pace forever. But we’re still looking at another 5 to 8 years. Okay, that’s it for me. Take care. 

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from a snowy Colorado morning. There are two recent things that have gone down in the maritime theater in Ukraine that I think are worth stitching together. The first is that around midnight of March 4th, the fifth, a patrol vessel, Russian patrol vessel. The name escapes me was sunk by a bunch of waves, water, drones, basically.

The reason this matters is it happened a lot further away from the places where most of the drones have hit Russian water assets in the past. The Ukrainians really don’t have much of a coastline anymore. It’s really just far western Ukraine on the west side of the Crimean peninsula. And so when vessels are used to there, the they become in range of these UAV swarms that Ukraine have been launching with greater frequency.

But that’s not where this patrol ship was. It was on the far eastern side of Ukraine near the Kerch Strait Bridge. So that’s about 300 miles from any potential launch point. And that meant that the waves had to cruise by pretty much every naval asset the Russians had in order to get them to where they needed to go.

So either they’re getting quieter or there’s a lot of more holes all along the Russian detection perimeter or both. Also, it’s in the vicinity of the bridge. So if you want to say that this is a shaping operation in order to strike the bridge directly, you know, that’s a reasonable concern. The other thing that’s unique is this is a relatively new vessel.

Patrol ships are pretty small but designed for anti-insurgency, clearly not doing that job very well. And if there is a type of vessel that’s going to be decent at shooting down drones, it’s going to be something like this that’s relatively small in the first place so it can shoot down into the water. And apparently none of that worked.

The thing sank. The second vessel to go down, went down a couple weeks ago, I believe it was February 1415, and it was a landing ship. Now, landing ships are used to deliver military cargo to areas that don’t necessarily have excellent port facilities. The idea is you can just kind of pull up to the shore, drop off everything you need, and then take off again.

The reason that these are really important in any sort of operation is because it means you’re not beholden to civilian or military infrastructure. You don’t have to wait for a port slot to be available. And if you’re at a port slot, obviously the enemy knows where you are. Also, you know, you’re not talking about things like cranes being required.

You can just roll right off. The Russians brought a half a dozen of these into the Black Sea just before the war. This is one of the reasons why the folks in the military community were pretty sure the war was going to happen this time. And the Russians began with about a half a dozen in theater. So 12 total.

Now, this was the fifth one that was sunk. It was called the Scissor Hulk kind of politics for pronunciation. Anyway, well, when the seas are went down, they basically down to 50%. And with that, that means the Russians are dependent on either civilian transports, which do not do well in a war zone at all, or a single thread of supply coming across the Kerch Strait Bridge that is now no longer being transported by rail for the most part, mostly by truck.

You take these two together, the Russians are losing the ability to reinforce Crimea by the water and the Ukrainians are demonstrated that they’re able to strike targets in the vicinity of the bridge, which would inhibit the Russian ability to supply by land. And if Crimea loses the ability to supply them, this war changes very quickly, regardless of what happens with the Ukrainian army and the U.S. Congress.

Now, there’s obviously lots, lots, lots more going on there. And the fog of war remains, as ever in place. But it does seem that the Ukrainians have adapted to the lower flows of equipment from the United States by getting more creative with their military tactics and going after vulnerable targets, in this case, naval assets that no one before the war would have ever thought were the vulnerable side of the Russian war machine.

So we’re probably going to see more and more of this going on, because while the Ukrainians are having a hard time getting Howitzers, they’re having no problem getting jet skis. And basically they modified jet skis and things like them in order to make these maritime drones. So the pressure on the naval aspect of the Russian assault, as all of a sudden kind of surprisingly emerged as a critical component in the near term.

As for what’s going on on land, that is largely a function of the U.S. Congress, and we will address that in the next video.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from outside of Nederland, Colorado. The news today is that the Ukrainians have taken some long range drones excuse me, and throw them in some Russian targets, some of which are over 1000 miles from the border. The ones that matter the most is a refining complex in the city of Nazi Novgorod, which is a couple of hundred miles east of Moscow that sits on a major pipeline nexus.

They haven’t damaged the pipeline system and you’re not going to probably not going to do that in any meaningful way for drones because they could be repaired so quickly. And so they went after some of the refineries. Now, if you’re looking for a Hollywood style explosion, you’re never going to see that in a refinery. There’s a lot of standoff distance and the stuff that’s flammable is usually not adjacent to other stuff that is flammable.

That doesn’t mean you can’t do a significant amount of damage. And in this case, it looks like they were going after some of the fractionation columns and at least a couple of the storage tanks, fuel storage tanks. At least one hit was significant to the point that it caused a major fire, that at the point that I’m recording this, at the point that I’m recording this about 8 hours after the attack is still burning.

Something to keep in mind, Russia is a big ass place. And as the Germans discovered during World War Two, they have to move things further and further and further from the western periphery in order to protect it from air assaults. But in the age of drones, this doesn’t matter nearly as much because these things have ranges in the hundreds of miles, which means that everything in European Russia, which is where 75, 80% of the Russian population live and most of the physical infrastructure is is potentially in range.

So while the Ukrainians can’t shut the country down, they can cause enough interruptions to the processing capacity that and maybe even pumping stations that make it difficult for the Russians turn export income. And the impact of that could be far more than what the West has done with sanctions on the Russians so far. We’ve seen this with a few port facilities in recent weeks, and now the Ukrainians are demonstrating the capacity to strike deeper and deeper and deeper into Russia.

And they have now almost been able to reach Tatarstan, which is the most important access point that the Russians have, because it sits on the infrastructure that connects European Russia to all of Siberia. And if for whatever reason, there’s meaningful damage there, you’re talking about something like a third of Russian oil exports go off line overnight. So that is what’s to watch for in the days ahead.

Stay tuned.