Greetings from Colorado. I just got off a plane, got back home for the weekend. It’s 22nd November, and the news regards a missile attack that the Russians launched against Ukraine earlier this week.

As you probably remember from a video a couple of days ago, the United States government has given the Ukrainians authority to use their weapons systems on Russian territory. Specifically, in the Kursk province, the Ukrainians have already started to use them to target command and control nodes and a few depots. They’re certainly going to be going after things like rail logistics in the not-too-distant future.

This is something where a lot of Russian politicos have been saying that this is a red line that will trigger nuclear war.

And that was obviously crap because that’s the wrong message coming from the wrong people. The Russians have yet to engage in the sort of meaningful conversation about the war that would allow the return of some sort of deterrence doctrine.

Anyway, in order to try to press their case that there would be consequences, the Russians launched a weapon from down near the Caspian Sea—well, further away than it needed to be to hit someplace in Ukraine.

At first, everybody thought it was an ICBM. That’s an intercontinental ballistic missile. And the only reason those exist is to have nuclear warheads on them. The idea was that it was supposed to be a threat to the United States.

Turns out it was not an ICBM, not an intercontinental ballistic missile. It was a new type of weapon called an “Organic,” which is an intermediate-range weapon.

Now, intermediate-range weapons in Europe—well, between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Europeans—they were banned under a 1988 treaty called the Intermediate Range Forces Treaty, the INF.

The idea, and this was at the end of the Cold War when Reagan was in charge, was if we remove the shorter-range missiles that could be used in the European theater, then we move off of hair-trigger alert. We could start negotiating some sort of post-Cold War pact, which would eventually culminate in things like strategic arms limitations that would take all of the city-flatteners out of the equation.

Well, about 15 years ago, the Russians started violating the terms of that treaty and started developing weapons systems like the Organic, which now have hit the battlefield.

It’s not so much that this is a warning to the United States because the United States isn’t a target of intermediate-range forces—it’s too far away. This is about the Europeans.

And the question in Russian foreign policy and strategic policy has always been divide and conquer. They don’t like NATO because it allows everyone to band together, and it brings the United States and the Canadians into the party. They want a system where it’s every man for themselves. From a military point of view in the European space, that makes the Russians the most powerful player.

So the whole point of developing an intermediate-range missile and now launching it at Ukraine is a demonstration to the Europeans that we are back to the Cold War in terms of the Russians’ capacity to nuke before anyone can do anything.

Or at least that was the intent. It is definitely not working.

The British and the French have already allowed their weapons systems—most notably the Storm Shadow and the Scalp missile systems—to be used by the Ukrainians to target the Russians directly.

In addition, in Germany, we have a chancellor who’s on his way out, Olaf Scholz, who has been very hesitant to allow German weapons to be used. He is most likely going to lead his party, the Social Democrats, into a trouncing in elections that will happen within 2 or 3 months.

At that point, the new incoming chancellor of the opposition party, the Christian Democrats, has already said the first thing he’s going to do is call Putin, threaten him, and then free the German equivalent system—which is called a Taurus—for use by the Ukrainians.

Third, we have Finland and Sweden commenting about the sabotage by Russian and Chinese interests of internet cables and telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea. They’re already talking about activating Article Five, which is the mutual defense clause of the NATO treaty.

So the Russians are misreading the situation. They’re misreading how the Europeans are standing. They’re misreading what the European nerve is.

The question is whether or not the Europeans can stick to it.

We’re now in this weird situation where the Europeans are doing a lot more for Ukrainian defense than the Americans because they know, at the end of the day—now, with or without the Trump administration—that they’re the ones who are going to have to live with whatever the security situation evolves into.

So we’re seeing a lot more interest in all of them to step up.

My personal favorite is an eight-party commission that involves all of the Scandinavian countries, all of the Baltic countries, Poland, and Germany, to start investing in defense industry manufacturing in Ukraine proper, so that the Ukrainians have a better chance of standing on their own.

Will it be enough? We’ll see. But what we know for sure is that the Russian effort has had absolutely the opposite effect.

Hello, everybody. It’s Peter Zeihan coming to you from a foggy Colorado. It is the 22nd of September. In the news over the last 4 or 5 days, the Ukrainians have managed to blow up a handful of major arm depots within Russian territory, some of them a couple hundred miles from the border. The three places in question are cross-border, Tow Rope Pets, and two corvettes.

Yeah, pretty sure that’s right. Anyway, one of these explosions was big enough that it was detected by seismic monitoring stations a thousand miles away, which is cool—kind of creepy. Kiloton-range explosion. We’ve got four things going on here, all of which are pretty significant, and when you put them together, it suggests a change in the tempo of the war.

The first thing to understand is that the Russians don’t move and store ammo like normal people. They don’t use forklifts, crates, or pallets; they just have things in boxes moved by hand. So, when something goes wrong—and things often do—it’s very volatile. That’s definitely what happened at all three of these facilities.

The second development is that the Ukrainians have brought a new weapon system into play. The technical term is “drone missile,” which is a bit shy of a cruise missile. The name of this system is a letter, and I’m not going to apologize for mispronouncing it because the Ukrainians chose that name specifically because it’s difficult for the Russians to pronounce—so I’m in the clear. The NSA, anyway. Its range isn’t nearly as good as some of the drones the Ukrainians have been fielding over the course of the summer.

Some of these drones have hit targets a thousand miles from the front, but these probably have a range of no more than 300 miles. However, because it’s a missile instead of a drone, it flies much faster, is much harder to intercept, and can carry a much heavier payload. The bigger Ukrainian drones can carry warheads about 75 pounds, with most of them carrying a third of that. But these new missiles likely have warheads 2 to 5 times as large. I say “likely” because they’re new, and last week was the first time we saw them in action. That said, they’re being used in large numbers—specifically in the attack on Tow Rope Pets, which involved at least 100 of these missiles. This is not just a case of 1 or 2 missiles being launched; entire fleets are now in play. For their debut, that’s pretty impressive from a manufacturing point of view, leaving aside logistics and military planning.

The third issue is that Russia, when it moves cargo more than the final mile, usually relies on rail. Russian territory is vast, and the value of agricultural land in Russia is low. Precipitation is fickle, and the summer season is short, so the amount of income Russian land can generate for the state per square mile is very low. Of the major agricultural zones in the world, Russia’s is by far the lowest in terms of income generated.

This means the Russians can’t afford a normal transport method like having a road network that individual farmers can always access. They simply don’t have the income necessary to build or maintain such a network, so they need something more cost-effective—hence, rail. About 90% of what moves in Russia, whether it’s barrels of oil, bushels of grain, or stacks of ammo canisters, moves by rail. It’s only in the final mile that cargo is moved by hand or maybe by civilian car if it’s a military asset. This system has lots of vulnerabilities, but it’s hard to target trains because rail networks are difficult to disrupt long-term. If a rail line gets blown up, you just lay new track.

In the recent attack, it appears that a train was present, unloading ammo at the time, and it was hit, causing the entire depot to explode. I must emphasize that I’m using local Russian reporting, so take it with a grain of salt. But usually, the Russians don’t celebrate their own trains and ammo dumps getting blown up. “Celebrate” is the wrong word, but you get the point. Unless this was an amazing coincidence, it suggests the Ukrainians have found a way to track Russian rail movements in real-time.

There’s reason to think this is true because a few weeks ago, the Ukrainians attacked Russia to the north and took over large portions of the Kursk province, including a rail depot at a place called Susa. If this allowed the Ukrainians to tap into or hack the Russian rail network, they could now know the schedules and locations of Russian locomotives and what they’re carrying. If they’re carrying ammo and heading to a warehouse full of more ammo, well, that’s a target-rich environment for the Ukrainians. So, we should expect more of these kinds of attacks.

Which brings us to the fourth and final issue: a potential change in targeting. If the Ukrainians do have better intel on the rail system and now have these faster, more lethal, mass-produced missile drones, the logical next step is to target Russia’s power generation and distribution systems. Unlike in the U.S., where half of our cargo by ton-mile is moved by truck, rail is critical in Russia, and two-thirds of Russia’s locomotives are electric. If Ukraine can disrupt the electricity system, the entire Russian transport system could fall apart.

We may already be seeing early stages of this. We know the Ukrainians have used drones to attack power centers in Crimea, though it felt like a test run—there weren’t many drones involved. But if they now have better intel on rail systems and weapons to hit ammo and transport networks, we’ll likely see much more activity within 150 miles of Ukraine’s borders to the north, northeast, and east.

We’ve seen Russian counteroffensives in places like Kursk peter out in the last 72 hours, as well as in the Donbas, where Russian forces were on the verge of capturing a Ukrainian rail network at Borowski. The Russians had been making steady progress toward this goal for months, ever since they captured the fortress city of Avdiivka. They got within 5 or 6 miles of Borowski, and if they had taken it, Ukraine’s ability to move forces along the front would’ve been crippled. But the assault stopped, likely due to the kind of attacks I’ve just described.

This is bad for Russia in the short, mid, and long term. It affects their ability to reach the front, let alone supply it. Remember, the Russian military doesn’t operate on quality—it’s all about throwing huge numbers of troops and shells at the enemy and incrementally advancing. You can’t do that without a robust rail network, and the Ukrainians may have just found a way to strike at its heart.

Hey, everyone. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado on a somewhat gloomy Saturday. This is the Geneva Basin behind me, and I am standing on the crest of Geneva Mountain. Today, we’re going to catch you up on everything that’s going on in Ukraine. We’ve got four big developments that have evolved over the last couple of weeks. The first one we’ve already discussed quite a bit.

And that is the Ukrainian offensive through their northern border into Russia proper, into the Kursk province, where they’ve triggered a war of movement with the Russians. From everything we can tell, the Ukrainians are taking heavy casualties, but the Russians are taking just absolutely astronomical casualties because the Ukrainians have destroyed the bridges across the river.

So, the Russian forces that are south of the river and north of the Ukrainian border are just getting chopped up without any support, and the Ukrainians are apparently having a pretty good time of it. They’ve also brought a lot of their longer-range missiles, mortars, and drones very, very close to the border itself and are launching them at targets up to 100 miles within Russia proper, gutting the logistics, infrastructure, and everything in the southern and western parts of Kursk province. Basically, the entirety of the northern front of the Ukraine war has now been relocated into Russian territory. This is a significant change in battlefield realities, and if the Ukrainians can keep this up, they’ll be able to cut the infrastructure between Kursk city and Belgorod city, which is how all Russian forces have been supplied for the northern front.

So, this is very significant and has the potential to become much more so in the days and weeks to come. The second big development is that the Ukrainians have successfully sunk Russia’s last rail ferry. Now, for those of you who haven’t been watching for a while, the primary means that the Russians have been using to supply their forces in the Crimean Peninsula, in the south of Ukraine, has been the Kerch Strait Bridge.

But after a series of attacks on it over the last two years, the cargo function of the bridge has basically been shut off. They can ship personnel in, but no cargo, so no fuel. So, they’ve been using rail ferries to go from the Black Sea coast of Russia into Crimea in occupied territory. Well, the Ukrainians a few months ago started targeting the rail ferries, and this last week, the final one was hit while it was at dock in port.

It sank in its berth. So even if the Russians had the equipment and personnel to clear it—which it’s unclear that they do—they’re talking about an operation that would probably take a minimum of a couple of months. And even if they cleared it, they have no more rail ferries, and no one will sell them any.

So, this has basically destroyed the capacity of the Russians to ship fuel to the Crimean front. The third thing involves the city of Prohodytsk—probably mispronouncing that. Anyway, that is a city further inland, closer to the Russian border, and it’s a major fuel depot. There are 74 of those giant tanks that you see outside of refineries all over the area.

So far, the fire that the Ukrainians triggered with this attack has been so intense that it has completely destroyed a third of the tanks, and it’s spreading to the rest. Once again, even if the Russians had the equipment and personnel necessary to fight the fire—which they don’t—it’s, I don’t want to call it out of control, but the Russians are barely holding the line. The Ukrainians have not let up; they’ve launched at least a couple more attacks since then. There’s a very real possibility that this entire depot, by far the biggest and most relevant one to the Prohodytsk front, is not going to be there a couple of weeks from now.

So, not only is fuel delivery now out of the equation, but fuel storage and forward positioning also seem to be going offline permanently as well. That would normally open up a huge opportunity for the Ukrainians to press the Crimean front because the Russian soldiers in Crimea are kicking for reinforcements, more ammunition, and supplies.

But that brings us to the fourth problem, which is absolutely not going the Ukrainians’ way, and that is the Russian assault on the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk—emphasis on the “krovsk.” That is in the Donbas, actually not too far from one of the regional capitals. Basically, what’s going on here is that the Russians have decided that they have to take this city at any cost, and they’ve been launching literally dozens of assaults against Ukrainian forces every single day for the last month.

And as the Russians are scrambling to move forces north into Kursk or south towards Crimea, they have not pulled anything out of the Pokrovsk front. Now that they can’t get fuel to Crimea, there is an argument to be made that the Russians might not even bother trying to send reinforcements to Crimea in the short term. Instead, they’ll send everything to Pokrovsk because if Pokrovsk falls, it’s a major problem for the Ukrainians. It’s a real nexus where several supply lines come together.

If it is taken out, it’s not that the Ukrainians can’t supply the front in the Donbas, but instead of having a single point where they can concentrate their forces and build for a pushback, they’ll have to do it from several different points that require a lot of rerouting.

That won’t be nearly as effective and will be much easier for the Russians to disrupt. The Ukrainians have always been trying to make this area work, while the Russians have always tried to put more pressure on it. One of the reasons why the Ukrainians have managed to secure this area so far is that there are no minefields up there, so they’re free to maneuver.

But if Pokrovsk falls, the Ukrainians are going to be running around just trying to hold the front at several different places, making the reinforcement problem even worse. So, there are a lot of decisive things going on here. Kursk is in play, Crimea is in play. If the Ukrainians can find some reserves to free up, those are now, of course, going to be contested.

We’re probably going to see more changes in the front line in the next few months than we have seen in the last couple of years. Very, very dynamic situation, very unclear. I think that’s one aspect to keep in mind here because we have three different factors at play.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Back from my backpacking trip. I’m back in Colorado, and today we are going to talk about the most recent evolutions in the Ukraine war, which are wildly significant. Let’s deal with this from the least important to the most. First of all, going into Russia itself—nobody invades Russia on a whim.

I mean, part of the problem that the Russians have always had expanding from Moscow is that there is no logical place to stop this within a thousand miles of them. So they expand, conquer some minorities, occupy them, try to crucify them, turn them into cannon fodder, and throw them at the next line of minorities.

And they continue this process over and over and over and over and over, until they eventually reach a geographic barrier that they can actually hunker down behind, which is typically like the Baltics, the Carpathians, and the Black Sea. It works until it doesn’t. What we’re seeing with Russia right now is that the demographic decline among the Russian ethnicity is so high that within a few years, they’re going to have problems occupying their own populations.

Anyway, anyone who wants to attack Russia has to do that in reverse. And even if you make it all the way to Moscow, that’s not all of the Russian Federation territory. You basically have to go until Russia is broken. And by Russia, I mean the population. We have the possibility of seeing that in the next 10 or 20 years, but we’re not there yet.

The incursion that the Ukrainians have made into Russia proper isn’t all that impressive from a territorial point of view. Basically, in the last two weeks, the Ukrainians have invaded Russia proper. They’ve taken over about 1,000 km² in the province of Kursk. The question is why? And what is next? Well, the Ukrainian plan seems to be to take a pretty sizable bite out of the territory.

They have already destroyed the three permanent bridges that are over the River Cem, which is an East-West river that cuts through Kursk Province. By doing that, they’ve made it very difficult for the Russians to reinforce the territories around where this incursion has been. We know that the Ukrainians are currently expanding on at least four different axes: northwest, northeast, north, and east.

In doing so, they’re basically looking to swallow, at least temporarily, about half the province—about 6,000 mi². To give you an idea of scale, the Donbas in the southeast, where most of the fighting has been concentrated for the last year and a half, and the Ukraine war combined, is about 20,000 mi². So, you’re talking about an area about a third of that territory.

The 1,000 square kilometers that the Ukrainians have captured so far is greater than the entirety of what the Russian army has achieved in the Donbas in the last 18 months. So, from a Russian point of view, this is a small amount of territory. From a Ukraine war point of view, it’s a huge amount of territory. And because those bridges are now out, the Russians can only resupply with pontoons.

Unlike hard bridges that require some pretty heavy weaponry to take out, pontoons can be taken out by much shorter-range things like artillery. And they are. So, the Russian ability to fight back has been relatively limited. The question is, how far can this be pushed? Why is it happening? Let’s start with the why. I have always identified the city of Belgorod as one of the cities that the Ukrainians have to neutralize if they’re ever going to win this war because it’s the tip of the spear for Russian forces. This is where, in the northern theater, all of their armies and all of their artillery are concentrated because it’s at the end of the logistical lines. It’s a big rail and road hub. Well, if the Ukrainians are capable of basically taking the southern half of Kursk Province, they take out most of the infrastructure that feeds into Belgorod.

So, it neutralizes a city of a million people without actually going in and conquering a city of a million people, which I’ve got to say is pretty clever if they can pull it off. And with the bridges now out of the equation, I’d say there’s an even chance that they’re going to be able to pull that off. However, this is the end of their deployable reserves.

The Russian strategy is basically to launch a lot of artillery assaults, send in a huge number of barely trained—if trained at all—conscripts to soak up ammo and pin Ukrainian defenders in place, and then follow up with more and more and more artillery. It’s a very slow, grinding process, but because the Russians have manpower superiority, it’s one that has been broadly effective, at least in keeping the Ukrainians from doing things like this.

It took the Ukrainians scraping up the last of their reserve units, along with some advanced units that were training with NATO for future operations. I don’t think they’ve got a very deep bench beyond this. But they have succeeded in doing what they’ve always wanted to do in this war, which is to trigger a war of movement in Kursk, in Russian territory, ironically, in a way that they haven’t been able to do on their own territory.

The counteroffensive that we’ve seen from Ukraine in the war so far in the Donbas and near Crimea has basically been hamstrung by Russian defensive lines. You’ve got multi-layered lines of tank emplacements, artillery emplacements, and most importantly, minefields, so that when the Ukrainians move into these areas and have to start to clear the mines, the Russians are able to call in artillery barrages, and the Ukrainians ultimately have to decamp for other locations where they’re not going to die.

That doesn’t apply in Kursk. Those defensive lines are in Belgorod, but you don’t have them in Kursk. So, the Ukrainians have been able to basically locate a battlefield that plays to their strengths rather than the Russian strengths. And they’re kicking some serious ass. The problem is they probably don’t have enough men to fully take advantage of it.

But neither do the Russians have the men necessary to eject the Ukrainians. For the last two and a half years, the Russians have spent most of their logistical efforts in building a pipeline of men and material. Basically, they scrape together whatever men they can forcibly draft from the population, put guns in their hands, and throw them to the front.

To do this in a way that does not trigger a political crisis, they can only do it so fast and only in so many places. They prefer to go to those occupied minority populations where they think the young men are disposable. And in fact, if they die, that’s actually a plus from the Russian point of view because it means they can’t rebel against Russian rule. But they’ve basically dragged all the people they can of the appropriate age group out of those zones.

And now the cupboard is getting dry.

The pipeline isn’t simply running low in terms of forces but in leadership. Putin has basically used every military commander that he has already that’s even remotely competent. And so, he’s just assigned one of his former bodyguards to run the operation in Kursk.

And you can imagine how well that’s going.

The Russians also now have 10,000 Ukrainians, including the Ukrainian support echelons, running around in Kursk. As a rule, the Russians have never attacked an area where they don’t enjoy at least a 3 to 1 manpower superiority. They prefer 7 to 1, and they don’t have the forces to put there.

So, their options are to either partially abandon the Donbas offensive or dig deep into the Russian population. What we’ve seen them do in the last two weeks is basically mobilize every military force they have left in the country, which is not a lot, and include the Pacific, the Baltic, and the Arctic theaters of what little security personnel remain and throw them into Kursk, in many cases untrained.

They’ve even raided the security forces around the cosmodrome in the Far East. And I’ve got to tell you, if your security force was designed to keep a launch pad safe, it’s probably not very good in the face of an Abrams barrel. There’s nothing left. They haven’t been able to find the 30,000 to 70,000 troops that they need in order to retake Kursk.

With the bridges gone, they can only approach from the east.

So, the Ukrainians are having a bit of a heyday at the moment, running around in Kursk, dealing with lightly armed and wildly untrained troops that don’t even have the benefit of large-scale artillery support. I don’t mean to suggest for a second that the Ukrainians are not taking casualties themselves. It’s an active war zone. I don’t have good data. I would be shocked if, in an offensive operation of this scale, they’re not taking heavy losses, especially in their armor. But the fact remains that the Ukrainians have found a way, relatively on the cheap, to play to their strengths, neutralize Belgorod, and change the narrative of the war.

Anyway, all of this collectively pales in significance to the real shift that we’ve identified as a result of the Kursk operation.

Nukes haven’t flown.

Throughout this war, the Russians have at every stage identified a series of red lines, saying that if you cross this line, we’re going to nuke Washington and Warsaw and Berlin and Paris and London and the rest.

And at every stage, it’s turned out to be a bluff. Well, now the Ukrainians have crossed the international border in force. They have castrated the Russian military in the area. There’s very little standing in the way of them taking even more territory. And they’re about to castrate a city of a million people that used to serve as the primary launching point.

And the Russians haven’t launched. One of the big concerns in the Western capitals ever since this war started is—well, they call it escalation management. The idea is we know that the Russians are a major power, but most importantly, we know that the Russians are a major nuclear power. And at some point, the Russians very well may kick off some nukes because they feel threatened.

Well, now we have an incursion that has crossed the international border, and the Russians are broken in the area. And yet, the nukes are still capped. Whether this is because the Russians are unwilling or unable is a discussion we can have, and that is a legitimate discussion to have. But the fact remains that even now, the Russians are showing an inability or an unwillingness to go to that level, and that tells me that the conservatism in Western capitals about challenging the Russians is about to evaporate.

Because if the Ukrainians can do this without that sort of counter-reaction, then pretty much every Russian threat to this point is meaningless. Is there eventually a red line where if you step across it, the Russians will pull the trigger? Probably. But we now know it doesn’t involve population centers, territory, or cities within a few dozen miles of the wrong side of Russia’s internationally recognized borders.

And that ultimately is going to trigger a new sort of offensive operation that has the full support of pretty much every Western country. That is the biggest tidal shift in the world to this point. And that is something we’re going to see the consequences of over the next few months.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. I was out backpacking, but there was a forest fire near my house, so I had to run back in. Anyway, it looks like it’s under control. We have some thunderstorms moving in, so I guess that’s a silver lining. Anyway, it gives you an opportunity to hear me talk about a couple of things that have happened in the few days since I’ve been back.

The first thing I’m going to talk about today is what’s going on in Ukraine. As you know, the Ukrainians have become more and more creative at using imported weapons from the NATO alliance, as well as some of their own homegrown stuff, to strike Russian targets further and further away. In the week around the 1st of August, just before and just after, a series of attacks took out a strategic bomber in Russia. Specifically, they hit a refinery deep within Russia, over a thousand miles from the coast, which started a really big fire. They also sank a Kilo-class submarine. You know, that’s a $300 million price tag that the Russians just lost. But the most interesting thing I’ve seen is that a series of attacks took out at least five S-400 air defense systems.

Now, the S-400 is supposedly the most sophisticated anti-aircraft system in the world, capable of shooting down missiles and all that good stuff. However, its reputation has definitely been tarnished in this war. And these aren’t the first ones that the Ukrainians have taken out. They’ve taken out at least another six, to my knowledge. The Russians only started the war with 50 to 56 of these systems, so we’re looking at somewhere along the lines of 20% of them being taken out, with probably a few more damaged as well. Using around 50 of these systems to provide full air defense coverage for the entire Russian mainland is already a stretch, and now they’ve lost 20%. This has escalated from being a tactical theater issue to a full strategic threat, as they’re losing the ability to maintain a periphery for air and missile defense across the entire space.

The Ukrainian goal here is very, very clear. If they can take out enough of these systems, especially in Crimea and to a lesser degree in the Donetsk region, then when the F-16s arrive—which are coming in from Denmark, the Netherlands, and a number of other European countries—the Ukrainians will be able to use their air power without the immediate fear of everything getting shot down.

One of the big problems they had last year when they attempted their counteroffensives was trying to do combined warfare using artillery, rocket systems, drones, men, tanks, and aircraft, which they didn’t have. Attempting a combined warfare project without the air component was a bit of a problem. The Russians were able to call in airstrikes and artillery support and cut up the Ukrainians as they were trying to advance. If enough anti-aircraft systems can be taken out of the equation on the Russian side, then even if the Ukrainians cannot achieve general air superiority, they can certainly achieve temporary air superiority over specific zones where it’s important.

This creates a very different sort of conflict where NATO trainers will prove immensely useful because that’s how NATO operates. Anyway, the first F-16s have been repainted with Ukrainian livery. They are in Ukraine now, and probably over the course of the next few weeks while I’m gone again, we’re going to see the first efforts by the Ukrainians to actually leverage their new air power in league with their ground power. We might see a crack in the line, specifically in the direction of Crimea.

In just the last week, the destruction of the S-400 systems has induced the Russians to evacuate a couple of their airbases, pulling all of the aircraft out because they can’t defend them. Obviously, in the short term, that’s great for Ukraine because it means these aircraft are now going to be flying from Russia proper, much further away. Moving forward, if the Russians lose the ability to do quick turnaround launches when the Ukrainians are operating, then the Ukrainians have that much more leeway in everything else.

Okay, that’s it. Take care.