Tomahawk Missiles for Ukraine

Picture of a Tomahawk cruise missile mid-flight

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the US has been trying to figure out the appropriate level of involvement. Tomahawk Missiles would be quite the game-changer for this cyclical conversation.

Ukraine’s current long-range drones are built for carrying out pinpoint strikes on smaller targets. So, a ~1,000-lb warhead with ~1,600-mile range wouldn’t just be a small step up, it would be a leap. But we’re not just talking about handing over the Tomahawks and waving good-bye, the US would have to give prototype US launch systems that would be used in directly targeting Russia.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Comedy from Colorado. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page. Specifically, do I think that the Trump administration is going to send a Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine? And if so, what sort of damage would they cause? Let’s start with the damage. Then we’ll go to the decision. Ukrainians would love to get their hands on tomahawks. 

Now, the Ukrainians have, shown no shortage of creativity and ingenuity when it comes to developing their own drone program. They now have drones that can regularly go several hundred miles. And they even have rocket drones that can go almost a thousand miles, and have used these things to attack pinpoint targets. But that’s the problem. 

Pinpoint targets, these sort of drones just can’t carry big warheads. So the good for targeting specific pieces of infrastructure? But they’re not good for mass damage. So if you want to say target the distillation column on a refinery grate, you want to take out the entire refinery? No, because those complexes, even in Russia, where the refineries are smaller, are like a quarter of a square mile, and you’re not going to take that out with 100 pound warhead. 

So they send fleets. But even then, you’re not going to attack, a really big building. It’s just not going to do appreciable damage. The Tomahawks, however different, a Tomcat carries a 1,000 pound warhead and can carry submarine mission. So you’ve put 2 or 3 of these into, like a four acre building, and you can basically take out the whole thing. 

They also have a range of about 1600 miles, which is almost double what any Ukrainian drone can do. So the idea is you would use these things, launch them from western or central Ukraine, nowhere near where the Russians could do anything to interfere with the operation. They fly low. They can’t be intercepted and they take out facilities deep, deep, deep into Russia. 

The three facilities that the Ukrainians would probably use these against are all drone production facilities. There’s one near Moscow. There’s one in the yellow book, which is in Tajikistan, which is at kind of the far edge of where the Ukrainians get it with the drones right now and and the third one is further east, getting into proper Siberia. He’s up to, maybe about 1300 kilometers away. Anyway, these are where things like the Shaheed are being mass produced, where the Russians own systems are being mass produced, where Chinese parts are coming in and being assembled. And if those three facilities could be taken out, it would really change the face of the war in a very big way. 

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. And the problem isn’t so much political, because we know that Donald Trump has really no problem with political niceties. The problem is technical. The tomahawk was designed for the Navy. It’s fired from submarines and destroyers, neither of which the Ukrainians have. And even if they did, can’t exactly quickly retrofit something to take a 20ft long missile, that was designed by a different country. 

So these things would have to be put on trucks. Now, the Americans are at the prototype stage of putting Tomahawks onto trucks. The idea was you hand them over to the Marines and they take them out to islands in the Pacific theater. And if a war spins up with the Chinese and you basically have these mobile launch platforms that can basically sink half the Chinese navy before the Chinese Navy even knows that war has been declared. 

Great little program. Problem is, it’s not ready. It’s only a prototype stage. So if the Trump administration was to do this, they would be sending the Ukrainians prototype weapons that haven’t been through the full testing regime in, in order to attack Moscow. Hopefully it is obvious that if that decision was made that we are in a fundamentally new position, not just with this administration’s risk tolerance, but with the war overall. 

So I would argue that this is not something that is going to happen. If it does happen, well, then we are in a fundamentally new chapter, and the Americans have decided to use the Russians as a testing ground. And that is a very different sort of political commitment. Now, the rhetoric out of the Trump administration has changed radically in the last six weeks. 

So I am expecting a significant change. I am expecting more blam stuff from the Americans to go to the Ukrainians. But remember this weapon system in the form that it could be used does not yet exist. So if we do get there, we’re in a new world and we’re using Moscow for target practice.

A Break for Ukraine

Ukraine solider on a armored vehicle with a split screen of Donald Trump

President Trump might finally be throwing the Ukrainians a bone, as the US may begin providing the precision targeting intelligence for strikes deep inside Russia. This marks a major shift in US policy on Ukraine.

Let’s zoom out first. For decades, US presidents would avoid actions that could spike global energy prices. Well, that held true through Trump’s first term and until Biden left office, but Trump 2 has shaken things up.

The erratic policy implemented by the Trump administration has been hard to follow, but the Russians have gotten more favorable treatment so far.

Things now seem to be shifting. Trump realized that Putin had been playing him this whole time, so Trump may finally be switching up policy. Couple this pivot with Ukraine’s recent strikes on Russian energy infrastructure and we could see Russian oil exports crippled very soon. This means Russia’s main source of funding for the war would quickly dry up. Places like China and Iran will have to decide if they want to bankroll Moscow without any incentives…

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Good morning, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about what’s going on in Ukraine and with the Trump administration. The new news is that the Trump administration. Well, let me rephrase that. Donald Trump personally, says that fairly soon the United States is going to be providing the Ukrainians with precision, targeting information. 

For the Russian energy system deep within the Russian Federation itself. Now, there’s a lot of back story that got us to this point. So let’s handle that before we move forward. The US administration, not just this one, all of them going back at least until the 70s. I’ve always been a little paranoid about energy prices as result of just the nature of economics. 

Energy demand tends to be inelastic. If you need a gallon of gas to get to work, and the price of gas goes up by 100%, you still need a gallon of gas to get to work. So it tends to be something that is very politically sensitive. And as a rule, political leaders, presidents are unwilling to do things that they know. 

We’re going to drive up energy prices. Now that relationship has loosened quite a bit in the last 20 years, largely because of the shale revolution in the United States, which has taken the United States from the world’s largest oil importer to the world’s largest oil exporter, which has some interesting effects on lots of things. But that general feeling remains. 

Now, back during the Biden administration, the Ukrainians started targeting Russian energy assets, most notably refineries, in an attempt to disrupt gasoline and diesel deliveries. The military tends to use diesel. The civilians tend to use gasoline. The idea was if we can stop the fuel flows, the Russians will be able to prosecute the war as much. In addition, the Russians don’t have a lot of storage, so if they can’t process fuel, they have a limited export capacity. 

And that means that they will have to shut in some production. Well, the Biden administration shut that down because they were afraid of the impact that it was going to have on global energy prices, which is not a ridiculous point of view, but I still think it was wrong because the shale revolution has changed of that. But the previous administration really didn’t understand petroleum energy economics, so I can’t say I’m shocked. 

That was the conclusion that they came to enter the Trump administration. The Biden administration was pretty pro Ukraine there just a few things they didn’t want him to do, like targeting energy. The Trump administration has been very erratic. In the early days, they were pathologically hostile to the Ukrainian government, up to and including inviting Zelensky to the white House just so they could yell at him. 

And relations. I don’t want to say they’re in the deep freeze, but they have not been great. Trump, as part of his reelection campaign, tried to convince everybody that he and Putin were best bros, and all it would take was one conversation between Trump and Putin for the war to end. Which, of course, was always really incredibly stupid because the war is happening for geopolitical reasons. 

And the only people think that the Russians invaded because Biden was president are Trump the people around him and some MAGA hardcore folks is the Russians think it’s hilarious that they’re actually Americans believe this. It’s a strategic issue. It’s a demographic issue. The Russians have been pushing towards the Carpathian since the 17th century. It didn’t change because of who was in the white House anyway. 

The Russians have gone out of their way to denigrate the American president, to make fun of them, to call them stupid. In the Kremlin, behind closed doors in European venues with the Chinese. But that information, as a rule, doesn’t make it back to Donald Trump, because Donald Trump has this really weird quirk. He feels that he has to be the smartest person in the room, and he likes to talk a lot. 

So what that means is he has gutted the top of the national security and foreign policy staff to make sure there’s no one ever in the room with him that could tell him something that he doesn’t want to hear, or would make him not appear to be the smartest person in the room, which means he’s basically gutted it completely. 

He’s not using the State Department. He’s not using the National Security Council. He has, however, installed a woman by the name of Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National intelligence, and she has gone through the CIA and the other intelligence bureaus and basically gutted them of the Russian experts, top to bottom. And she’s also the person who has the final say in what goes into the Presidential Daily Brief. 

So she makes sure that anything that makes the Russians look bad doesn’t actually make it into the brief. For example, Putin laughing openly on TV about Donald Trump’s stupidity. Anyway. 

Will this time be different? Because we’ve had lots of periods where Trump has got an inkling that something is wrong, and then Tulsi Gabbard has talked him down, or Putin has talked him down. Maybe, and the reason is because there’s another personality involved and this person is absent or his name is Steve Wyckoff. Now, if you remember back to Trump one, Jared Kushner was all the big deal, smart guy, basically served as a presidential envoy and actually got a few things done. 

For example, the Abraham Accords, which is the sum of the total peace deals between the Israelis and some of the Arab states. Kushner wanted nothing to do with Trump, too. he saw how the sausage was made from the inside. And Trump won. And he and his wife, who is Trump’s daughter, just bugged out. 

And so it’s the dumb sons that are actually in the white House now. Anyway, I’m getting I’m getting off track here. Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. Wait, wait. Cough. So, what? Cough has no foreign policy experience. And Trump basically entrusted him with the entire portfolio for all negotiations all over the world, all of which have gone really badly. 

So when Wyckoff shows up at the Kremlin, the Russians sit him down. They tilt his head back and they pour gallons of Russian propaganda down his throat. He goes Ben back to the white House and vomits that up in front of, the president of the United States. And that becomes gospel. And that is the primary reason, combined with Tulsi Gabbard, as to why we’ve really seen no movement. 

But things have changed recently because a couple months ago, if you remember there was a summit directly between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and it was supposed to last for several hours, and it was over very, very quickly. Putin thought he had Trump completely wrapped around his little finger. And if you look at policy from the last six months, that’s not exactly a shock. 

But Trump finally realized that this guy had been laughing at him for the whole time. And we started to get Trump looking at other bits of information like, I don’t know, media or talking to his wife. And he started to realize that he had been played the fool and that he was acting like a fool, and that perhaps the only way to change things was to change policy with a wild idea, I know. 

So we now have this, potential change in policy. The Ukrainians have started targeting Russian energy infrastructure again. Again, mostly going after refineries, but going after some pipeline places. And they’ve probably now reduced Russian refining capacity by 25%, which is the most it’s been offline since the Russian collapse back in the 1990s. The post-Soviet collapse. If if the Trump administration actually does what it’s talking about doing US satellite guidance combined with the weapons the Ukrainians already have, would be capable of targeting individual pumping stations anywhere in western Russia. 

And the Russians export about 5 million barrels a day through their various methods, about two thirds of that going out through the Baltic Sea, in the Black Sea, which are all within range of Ukrainian weapons. If you take out just a couple of the 

pumping stations per pipe, those exports go to zero. Now the Ukrainian thinking is if you do that, you basically destroy what has been Russia’s number one income source for the last 30 years. 

Oil exports. And then countries like Iran and China, which have been taking money from Russia and sending them drones and drone parts, will have to decide whether they want to directly subsidize the Russian government’s war in Ukraine. I find that unlikely. Iran is really in some dire straits right now. They need the currency. 

They don’t want to treat Russia as a charity case. And the Chinese, that’s probably a bridge too far, no matter how bad relations with the United States happened to be. So if that happens and the Russians have to fight on their own, it doesn’t mean that the war is over. But it means you have a catastrophic shift in fortunes on both sides. Will this happen? That’s entirely up to Donald Trump. 

He has changed his mind by my math, 77 times since January 20th. Who knows? But once the Intel is provided, for every day that it is there, the Ukrainians will definitely be striking. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians over the last year have been building up their drone capabilities, and we’re now regularly seeing attacks that use hundreds of drones on each side. 

You combine that with the precision targeting information, much less Western weaponry, and you can have a really dramatic change in the course of the war in literally a matter of days, and we may about be there.

Ukraine (And Everyone Else) Develops Glide Bombs

A Russian FAB-3000 with a UMPK guidance kit attached, converting the unguided bomb into a glide bomb | Wikimedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glide_bomb#/media/File:FAB-3000_with_UMPK_kit.png

Ukraine has added glide bombs to its list of military ordnance, enabling Ukraine to send modified dumb bombs up to 100km away. This likely won’t alter the outcome of the war in Ukraine, but the democratization of this technology is setting off alarm bells in the US.

Joint Direct Attack Munitions were the bread-and-butter for the US military, maintaining a multi-decade monopoly on the precision strike technology…but all of that is changing. Now that Ukraine and Russia both have this tech in their hands, it’s only a matter of time before it appears everywhere else.

This is yet another sign of the US stepping back from its role as global protector; meaning American strategic primacy is coming to an end.

You can find more info about glide bomb technology appearing in Russia’s arsenal and the beginning of the proliferation of this tech in the linked video released on March 12, 2024:

Russian Bombs Get an Upgrade
Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about a change in military tech that just happened in Ukraine. Specifically, there are factions of the Ukrainian military industrial complex that are now putting together glide bombs. Glide bomb is basically when you’ve got an old dumb bomb that you put a guidance kit on. 

It has kind of wings on it. And so instead of dropping it, it kind of glides to the target and the Ukrainian prototypes that are being tested right now indicate that they can go upwards of 100km, about 60 miles, which is well beyond the front lines. 

Why this matters, the Ukrainians have been on the receiving end of glide bombs these last couple of years. The Russians have converted several of their old Soviet bombs, which are typically a much larger than the ones the US uses. We use, 500 pound bombs. Sometimes they use either kilo bombs. Sometimes there’s even a thousand kilo bombs. 

Anyway, they drop them from outside of air defense capability. They drop them from within their air superiority envelope. So they just have basically modified dump bombs coming in that can’t be intercepted. And some of the bigger ones, when they hit, have a blast radius that’s more than a quarter of a mile. 

And so you drop a dozen or so of these in the general vicinity of a fortification, and then Russian forces can then move in. That’s how they’ve been used to this point. The Ukrainians probably won’t be using them the same way because they don’t have the manpower. That’s necessary to penetrate the Russian lines. And there’s multiple layers of minefields as well, making that more difficult. 

So we use it against things like supply depots and, convoys. But the Ukrainians are already doing that with first person drones. So the ability to change the battlefield in Ukraine, by Ukraine, having some of these is probably pretty limited. The targeting sequences are probably just not going to be as robust as it might be for the other side. 

For a country that is more likely to be on the attack, the Ukrainians are typically on the defense. So it’s not that there’s no utility. It’s not. It’s just not a game changer. Also, there’s just the amount of effort that it takes to build one and test it because every prototype is destroyed as opposed to like a first person drone, where you can fly it back and forth without actually having it blow up to make sure it works. 

And you can get new iterations every month. This one will probably take a little bit longer, but it still has a huge impact, just not in Ukraine and everywhere else. The issue here is that the United States has had a de facto monopoly on this sort of technology for decades. We hear we call them Jay Dams, Joint Direct Attack Munitions. 

We took our old Cold War bombs. We put a kit and some things on it and do precision targeting. And through the 1990s, the US had a total monopoly. These were first debuted during the first Iraq War. 

Desert Storm back in 1982 and then have been incrementally upgraded since then. But really, it wasn’t until as recently as five years ago that any other country in the world had their own. 

Well, the Russians developed their own last year, and now Ukraine, a country that is much smaller, with a much smaller technical base and industrial base, has them as well. And if Russia and Ukraine can have them, you know that it’s just a matter of choice before countries like Korea, both of them, Japan, Taiwan, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, pretty much every country in NATO, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, Israel, obviously, I don’t know if Iran could do it, but the United Arab Emirates could. 

Anyway. The point is, there is a long list of countries where this is no longer a technical barrier. And the technology that the United States has had a complete monopoly on this last generation, which has allowed it to shape strategic environments around the world, is now gone. And it’s only a matter of time, probably months, not even years, before we see copycat versions of the Russian and other Ukrainian versions popping up in a half a dozen different countries, and within five years they will be everywhere. 

Which means if the United States is going to maintain its military posture of having a global position without really any meaningful pushback, it’s going to need new technological tricks to do that. Most likely, combined with the Trump administration’s backing away from every alliance we have, this means that the United States is going to vacate militarily large portions of the planet and just let the chips fall where they may. 

Now, for those of you who’ve been following my work for the last decade, you will know that this was in some version probably going to happen because of American political considerations anyway. But we’re now set up a technological U.S. cannot just leave because it wants to. It’s going to be technologically pushed out from certain areas. And the question now is where first. 

And we just it’s too soon to have an answer to that question. There’s too many decisions that have to be made up at the white House, that color where the map is going to go blue and where it’s going to go red. But bottom line, the era of American strategic primacy with global reach that is now over. 

And it’s now a question about managing the withdrawal and dealing with the consequences of that.

REPOST: Jets, Drones & Refineries: Europe Remembers Geopolitics

Based on our discussion yesterday, we’re looking back at this post from April of last year to see how things have evolved.

It looks like the Europeans may have figured out that Russia’s war plans don’t end in Ukraine, so more and more countries are beginning to send aid to the Ukrainians. The Americans, however, are still working through flawed economics and political considerations.

The Norwegian government has decided to send some F-16s to Ukraine, joining Denmark, the Netherlands, and others in providing military support. The most important shift we’re seeing in aid sent to Ukraine is that it is intended to be used on Russian infrastructure and military units…within the Russian border.

The Biden administration’s caution regarding Ukrainian targeting is based on flawed economic analysis and pointless political considerations. This has led us to a strange intersection of this war, where Europe is done limiting Ukraine’s actions in fighting, but the more commonly aggressive American stance is still lagging behind.

Click to enlarge the image
Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

TranscripT

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a very windy Colorado. It is the 16th of April, and the news today is that the Norwegian government has announced that they are joining the coalition of growing countries that is setting F-16 jets to Ukraine, specifically the foreign minister, a guy by the name of Aspen Barth, I’d, probably has said specifically he hopes and encourages the Ukrainians to use the jets that at the moment are being provided by a coalition of Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, to stark to target infrastructure and military units actually in Russia proper.

In fact, his phrase was the deeper the better lot going on here to impact. So number one, to this point, the NATO countries have tried to limit the direct attacks by the Ukrainians with their equipment or with equipment that is donated, in order to prevent an escalation. But a few people’s minds have been tripped in recent days because the Ukrainians are now using one and two tonne bombs to completely obliterate civilian infrastructure and are going after aid workers, including, things like E-m-s services.

And this is really tripped the minds of a lot of people in northern Europe in particular, that this war is now gotten way too serious to have any sort of guardrails on what the Ukrainians can target. The French. Well, they have not weighed in on this topic specifically. They’re now openly discussing when, not whether when French troops are going to be deployed to Ukraine to assist the Ukrainians in a rearguard action.

And we have a number of other countries, especially in the Baltics and in Central Europe, that are also wanting to amp up the European commitment to the war. In part, this is just the recognition that if Ukraine falls, they’re all next, and in part is that the United States has abdicated a degree of leadership, both because of targeting restrictions and because there’s a faction within the House of Representatives that is preventing aid from flowing to Ukraine.

So the Europeans are stepping up. In fact, they’ve been stepping up now for nine months. They provided more military and financial aid to the Ukrainians each and every month for nine months now. And this is just kind of the next logical step in that process, which puts the United States in this weird position of being the large country that is arguing the most vociferously for a dialing back of targeting, by Ukraine, of Russian assets in Russia.

If you guys remember, back about three weeks ago, there was a report from the Financial Times that the Biden administration had alerted the Ukrainians that they did not want the Ukrainians to target, for example, oil refineries in Russia because of the impact that could have on global energy prices. And I refrained from commenting at that time because it wasn’t clear to me from how far up the chain it has come.

That warning. But in the last week we have heard national Security adviser Jake Sullivan and the vice president, Kamala Harris, both specifically on and on record, warn the Ukrainians that the United States did not want them targeting this sort of infrastructure because of the impact it would have on policy, and on inflation. Now that we know it’s coming from the White House itself, I feel kind of released to comment.

And I don’t really have a very positive comment here. There’s two things going on. Number one, it’s based on some really, really faulty logic and some bad economic analysis. So step one is the concern in the United States that higher energy prices are going to restrict the ability of the Europeans to rally to the cause and support Ukraine.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the Europeans realize that if Ukraine falls they’re next and most of the countries with an activist foreign policy are already firmly on the side of an expanded targeting regime. The biggest holdout would be Germany, where we have an unstable and unconfident leader and coalition that wants to lead from the back, not the front, which I can understand, but most of the Europeans have realized that if we’re actually getting ready for an actual war between Europe and Russia, that’s not going to be free.

And higher energy costs are just kind of baked into that pie. So almost all of the Europeans have basically cut almost all Russian energy out of their fuel mixes already in anticipation for that fight. So argument number one, gone. number two, the idea that this is going to cause the war to expand in a way that will damage Ukraine more.

Well, one of the first things that the Russians did back in 2022, in the war, was target all Ukrainian oil processing facilities. They don’t have much left. So, yes, there’s more things that the Russians can do, but this is basically turned into a semi genocidal war. So it’s really hard to restrain the Ukrainians and doing things that are going to hurt the Russian bottom line that allows them to fund the war.

So that kind of falls apart. specifically, the Ukrainians have proven with home grown weaponry they don’t even need Western weapons for this. They can do precision attacks on Russian refineries, going after some of the really sensitive bits. Now, refineries are huge facilities with a lot of internal distance and a lot of standoff distance. So if you have an explosion in one section, it doesn’t make the whole thing go up like it might in Hollywood.

As a result, there are very specific places that you have to hit, and that requires a degree of precision and accuracy that most countries can’t demonstrate. But the Ukrainians have a specifically go after something called a distillation tower, which is where you basically take heated crude and you put into a giant fractionated column, if you remember high school chemistry, and if you can poke a hole in that, it’s hot and it’s pressurized.

So you get something that spurts out and based where on the verticality you hit. The products that hit are either flammable or explosive. So we’re including a nice little graphic here to show you what that looks like. the Ukrainians have shown that they can hit this in a dozen different facilities, and the Russians have proven that it’s difficult for them to get this stuff back online, because most of the equipment, especially for his distillation tower, is not produced in Russia.

And a lot of it’s not even produced in China. It’s mostly Western tech. So as of April 2nd, which was the last day we had an attack on energy infrastructure in Russia, about 15% of Russian refining capacity had been taken offline. In the two weeks since then, they’ve gotten about a third of that back on using parts they were able to cobble together.

But it gives you an idea that this is a real drain, because we’re talking about 600,000 barrels a day of refined product that just isn’t being made right now. That affects domestic stability in Russia, that affects the capacity of the Russians to operate in the front. And yes, it does impact global energy prices, but that leads me to the third thing that I have a problem with the Biden administration here, and that the impact on the United States is pretty limited.

the United States is not simply the world’s largest producer of crude oil. It’s also the world’s largest producer of refined product to the degree that it is also the world’s largest exporter of refined product. So not only will the United States feel the least pinch in terms of energy inflation from anything in Russia going offline, we also have the issue that the US president, without having to go through Congress, can put restrictions of whatever form he wants on United States export of product.

Doesn’t require a lot of regulatory creativity to come up with a plan that would allow to a limiting of the impact to prices, for energy products in the United States. And I got to say, it is weird to see the United States playing the role of dove when it comes to NATO issues with Ukraine. Usually the U.S. is the hawk.

Now, I don’t think this is going to last. the Biden administration’s logic and analysis on this is just flat out wrong. geopolitically, there’s already a coalition of European countries that wants to take the fight across the border into Russia proper, because they know that now, that’s really the only way that the Ukrainians can win this war.

Second, economically, you take let’s say you take half of Russia’s refined product exports offline. Will that have an impact? Yeah, but it will be relatively moderate because most countries have been moving away from that already. And the Russian product is going to over halfway around the world before it makes it to an end client. So it’s already been stretched.

Removing it will have an impact. But we’ve had two years to adapt, so it’s going to be moderate, though not to mention in the United States, as the world’s largest refined product exporter, we’re already in a glut here, and it doesn’t take much bureaucratic minutia in order to keep some of that glut from going abroad. So mitigating any price impact here for political reasons.

And third, the political context is wrong to the Biden administration is thinking about inflation and how that can be a voter issue, and it is a voter issue. But if you keep the gasoline and the refined product bottle up in the United States, the only people are going to be pissed off are the refiners. And I don’t think any of those people are going to ever vote for the Biden administration in the first place.

There is no need to restrict Ukrainians room to maneuver in order to fight this war. in order to get everything that the Biden administration says that it wants to be.

Ukraine Hammers Russian Oil Infrastructure

photo of oil barrels

The Ukrainians have ramped up strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, sending ripples through Russia’s refining capacity and triggering fuel shortages. But what changes enabled this to occur?

Three big things have shifted, giving Ukraine political cover and better tools to disrupt Russian oil flows. These include opposition from the US diminishing, Europe cutting off Russian oil and gas (besides Hungary and Slovakia), and longer-range weapons to strike deeper into Russia.

This is allowing Kyiv to strike Russia’s most critical oil hubs; think the pipeline nexus Samara, or pumping stations that will force Novorossiysk to collapse, or even northern hubs serving the Baltic. Since oil remains the largest revenue source for the Russians, sustained attacks on this infrastructure threatens Moscow’s ability to fight this war.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all Peter Zeihan here coming from Colorado on a foggy day. Today we’re gonna talk about what’s going on in Russia, specifically. Ukraine has severely ramped up its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure. This is something that the Ukrainians have been doing in bits and pieces for about a year and a half now, but it’s now taken on a whole new level, and we have somewhere between 15 and 20% of Russia’s oil processing capacity offline. 

And it’s generating localized gasoline shortages throughout the Russian system, including in the capital, and certainly in the provinces that are closer to the actual front in the Ukraine war. So what has changed? Three things. First of all, Biden’s gone. Biden had this idea that attacks on energy infrastructure in, the Russian space would raise energy prices globally to a point that would be politically unpalatable for Americans. 

Now, I was always on the other side of that equation, as a rule, gasoline markets, not to be confused with oil markets, trade differently. And so a disruption in one hemisphere does not automatically trigger a broad scale energy price increase in the other. But regardless, Biden has now gone. That argument is no longer being made in Washington. 

And from Ukraine’s point of view, the gloves are off a little bit. Number two Europe, the Europeans are no longer taking any piped oil or natural gas from the Russians at all, aside from a small volumes that come into places like Hungary, which are basically operating as Russian parties. Which means that from Ukraine’s point of view, there’s no longer diplomatic or economic complication in Europe. 

The deals to transit oil and natural gas across Ukrainian space expired at the beginning of the year. Everyone who was smart and saw the writing on the wall, moved away from the Russian sources completely again, Hungary being the standout exception. And now going after the infrastructure in any way, shape or form basically has the unofficial blessing of the European Union. 

So the Hungarians and to the lesser degree the Slovaks, are screaming bloody murder. But Ukraine isn’t giving transit fees. They’re not taking any Russian energy. No one else in the EU is taking any of it either. So it’s okay to go after the infrastructure. We’ve actually seen a couple pumping stations get hit already. Third, the Ukrainians are much better at this. 

They’ve been developing bit by bit heavier payloads and longer range weaponry that can strike further and further and harder and harder at Russian targets. And so now reliably, it’s to a range of about 1200 kilometers. The Ukrainians can be striking, and that’s about 700 miles. And that puts a lot in range of these potential weapons, including the entire Moscow region. 

But Moscow is not the most important zone here when you’re talking about oil. There are a few pipeline hubs in the Russian system where several pipeline networks from different zones come together for focusing and refining, and then go on to export points. And in my opinion, the single most important of them is the city of Samara in southwestern Russia. 

It’s basically roughly north of the Caspian Sea, maybe northwest a little bit. Anyway, something around 3 million barrels a day flows through there at any given time. Pipelines, of course, can be redirected to a degree. But we now have the Ukrainians targeting refineries in the Samara area. And when they do that, the crude can’t be refined. It needs to be kept in the pipeline and sent on, and the pipelines flow on can only take so much traffic. 

So it’s put a real crimp in what the Russians can produce. And we’re already starting to see some reports, a few reports of shut in production because the pipelines can’t handle the flows to the volumes that are necessary because the refineries are offline. If and when the Ukrainians decide to go after the pumping stations on the pipelines themselves, then this whole part of the network breaks, and that will probably be the end of meaningful exports from Russian crude to the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. 

And as the Ukrainians continue to get better and better weapons, some of the distribution systems of the hubs in northern Russia will probably start getting hit as well. And that could really impinge upon the Baltic Pipeline system, which is where the Russians export crude from the Baltic Sea, from, near Saint Petersburg. The specific port escapes me at the moment. 

Anyway, so with the politics changed and the economic dependencies shifted, and the Ukrainians all of a sudden a lot better at what they were doing, we should expect a lot more Russian crude going offline. So regardless of what happens with the Trump administration and sanctions and its effort to peel, say, the Indians and or the Chinese away from the Russians, if the crude can’t flow, the crude can’t flow, and the Russian economic situation with then become a lot more difficult because oil sales remain what they have always been for Moscow, their single biggest source of income, going all the way back to Soviet times.

Ukraine Strikes Russia’s Druzhba Oil Pipeline

Surface of the Druzba oil pipeline from Wikimedia Commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druzhba_pipeline#/media/File:Wp_nefteprovod_druzhba.jpg

The Russians have been funding their war effort in Ukraine with oil exports, but some new Ukrainian tactics are disrupting that flow.

Ukraine has begun striking pumping stations along the Druzhba pipeline. Since the majority of Europe no longer relies on Russian crude, these attacks mainly pressure those few holdouts…like Hungary. This is Kyiv’s way of dipping its toes in the water; if Europe and Washington tolerate it, expect to see an escalation in strikes.

Should that happen, Russia’s ability to fund the war effort would quickly diminish and we could see the most dramatic economic shift in the war so far.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about oil exports from Russia and a new wrinkle in the Ukraine war. As I’m sure most of you know, there are a number of sanctions against all things Russian at all levels. And energy is one of the most important ones. Oil has has long been Russia’s number one source of financing. 

And until the Ukraine war began, the vast majority of that crude flowed west through what’s called the Druse, but pipeline network to Western Europe and Central Europe. But bit by bit, the Europeans have weaned themselves off. And aside from a few exceptions for Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic, who are all landlocked countries, and so I’ve limited options, everyone else in Europe is stopped using Russian crude directly. 

You can make the argument that the crude is being exported somewhere, refined in the finished product and sent back to Europe, and that’s fair. But in terms of raw crude, it’s no longer going to the Europeans really much at all. The Drupal pipeline maintains a capacity of well over a couple million barrels per day and is now only taking shipments of about 400,000. 

So we’re looking at a significant reduction already. And some of those flow through is aren’t even Russian crude. They’re Kazakh crude, which is not affected by the sanctions anyway, the newest development is that over the course of the last 18 months, the Ukrainians have gotten better at better at striking economic targets within the Russian Federation, specifically going after the energy complex. 

Now, until now, most of those attacks have focused on things like refineries, where the value add it generates some more income for the Russians and generates the fuel that they need for the war machine. But what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks is our first meaningful attacks against Russian oil transit, specifically pumping stations on the Druze. 

But network now, if you’re French or British or German or Italian, this doesn’t matter because you don’t use that crude. But if you’re Hungarian and you’ve been opposing European actions to assist the Ukrainians for a while now, all of a sudden you’re getting a little apple uptick. And so the Hungarian government has been very accusatory towards the Ukrainians. 

And you should expect more of this. What this basically is, is a test case to see what Europe’s collective response will be, to see what Trump’s response will be and if they are muted. You should expect the Ukrainians to go after those pumping stations in volume. Now that the Europeans have pretty much weaned themselves off completely, we’ve had a flip of the political considerations. 

Had this happened earlier in the war, the Europeans probably would have backed away from support in Ukraine for economic reasons. But now that they’ve moved on, the Ukrainians are seeing an opportunity belatedly to take out the entirety of the Russian oil export income. And if they can do that, then all of a sudden the Russians can’t pay the Iranians for imported drones, they can’t pay the Koreans, the North Koreans for imported artillery shells, and they can’t pay for all the drone parts that come in from China. 

If this works, it is potentially the most dramatic economic shift we’ll have seen in the war to this point. And the Russians are going to have to find a new way to fund everything. But this early days, this is just step one. The Ukrainians are now in wait and see mode to see how everyone reacts.

Russian Evolutions in the Ukraine War

A Ukrainian soldier in the trenches

We’re beginning to see a notable shift in the Russians war strategy in Ukraine. Those large-scale meat assaults are being swapped for small infantry advances and widespread air strikes via drones and missiles to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.

This pivot in the Russian war efforts has been brought on by increased Western military aid, expanded European defense production, and Russia reverting to a WWII-esque military production style of moving things deep into Russian territory. The Russians have also spun-up more domestic drone assembly, giving them more independence and resilience in their supply chains.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from a humid Colorado afternoon, which almost never happens. Anyway, today we’re going to talk about the Ukraine war and where we are at the moment. We’ve had a significant shift in the approach to the conflict by the Russians. Too soon to say it’s going to be successful, but it’s different enough that it is worth exploring. 

Instead of doing what they call mass meet assaults where you basically have to throw wave after wave after wave of humans into a mix, not really caring how many people get injured or killed trying to grab specific positions incrementally. We now have a position where the Russians are doing small scale infantry, and sometimes as few as two people at a time, just moving forward a few yards at a time. 

Parking for an hour and then continuing doing this all across the frontline while up above we have a change in the air war where the Russians will not launch just a bunch of drones, but dozens, maybe even a couple hundred at the same time, along with some missiles to saturate the air defense of an area and then strike local urban centers, specifically going for power systems. 

But really, any sort of logistics support? It’s a very different approach. It is generating results. Oil, very, very, very incremental. I don’t want to overplay it. But what is driven the change are a couple of things. Number one, the Trump administration is now starting to, at least in increments, provide more military assistance. The European defense industries have been spinning up for the last three years. 

They’re getting more artillery shells in the Ukrainian hands, which is preventing the meat assault from having any impact. But third, and most importantly, we’re seeing the Russians dust off an industrial strategy that we have not seen out of the Russians since the 1940s. 

For those of you who remember your World War Two history, you will remember that one of the turning points in the Second World War was when the Russians developed enough industrial plant out of reach of the Luftwaffe, the German strategic bombers, so they could build up all the industrial infrastructure and military capacity that they needed without having to worry about it getting blown up from the sky. 

This was called the Urals strategy. Basically, the Russians under Stalin built a series of industrial cities out east of the Urals, well out of range of German aircraft, and built their military capacity there and then shipped it into the front. There were obviously other things come into play. Lend-Lease. The, the invasion of Normandy, the invasion of Sicily, and ultimately mainland Italy. 

All of these combined to defeat the Nazis. But on the Russian front, it was the Russians getting the ability to build their own equipment that really made the difference. We’re seeing some version of that now, in the war to this point. Most of the drones that the Russians have used have either come from Iran or for China, largely already assembled. 

Maybe the Russians have plugged in a warhead in the front, but really, that was about it. the Russians were relying on industrial capacity on the other side of an international border to keep the flow coming. And so they were using primarily their old Soviet stockpile of equipment, of jeeps, of tanks, of ABC’s of artillery and so on. 

Well, three years on, the Russians are running out of their old Soviet largesse. All of the stuff that was easily deployed, things that were built in, say, the late 70s and the 80s were long ago destroyed. They never built enough of the more advanced things that have been built since 1992 to make a strategic difference, and most of that’s been destroyed. 

And then they started going back into their older stocks, weapon systems from, say, the 1940s, 1950s, early 1960s that were just wildly out of date, didn’t even have things like optics, but that meant that putting optics in them was relatively straightforward. So all of a sudden, we saw these 1950s air tanks coming out with like 1990s optics. 

All of that has been destroyed. That has left them with equipment that was built in the 70s and early 80s that had optics. But it’s crappy Soviet optics, and it all has to be ripped out and then replaced. That takes more time per tank, and the end result is just a trickle of equipment that comes in, and they’re now burning through that to basically 70 years of Soviet stockpile is almost gone. 

And now they’re reliant on equipment that is either come in from elsewhere, like say, artillery shells from North Korea or this new stuff. The new stuff is very different. The Russian military is an artillery force, and now that they’ve lost a lot of their artillery, they’re having to reinvent on the fly. And what they’re doing is taking that old girl strategy of building industrial plant behind the Urals and marrying it to the drone tech. 

So we now have multiple facilities in Russia proper that are manufactured in Iranian Shaheed drones. Now, Shaheed drones are pretty dumb. They’re basically dumb, slow moving, low warhead cruise missiles. And the original ones and the ones that make up even today, the bulk of the Russian effort don’t even have GPUs, they’re incapable of making decisions in any meaningful way. 

You basically just plug in where you want them to go. Maybe you give them the route to get there, and then off they go. Which incidentally, means that anytime they strike a school, it’s automatically a war crime because they had to program that in anyway. We’re now starting to see a second generation starting produced also get produced in Russia. 

That has some GPUs, Jetson chips from Nvidia specifically that probably run 6 to $900 a pop. So these are larger drones with bigger warheads, but they also have some primitive decision making capability. These like eight nanometer chips, far from cutting edge but order of magnitude better than what they’ve been using at this point. But the bottom line is these things are not being built in Iran and shipped into Russia for use. 

They’re being built in Russia. And That adds a step of complication to anyone who wants to interrupt the supply chain because it’s no longer foreign. The same thing is happening with Chinese equipment. It used to be that the Chinese would ship in more or less fully assembled drones, and then the Russians might make a couple modifications before deploying them. 

Now the Chinese are shipping in lots of components still, but the Russians are doing most of the assembly in Russia proper, again, outside of the reach of any sort of Ukrainian strike capability. And that means that the Russians are not simply getting more autonomy in their military industrial complex. They’re also getting a bigger feed through because they’re still buying the finished stuff from both China and Iran. 

So instead of using a few drones a day or a few dozen drones a day, there have been a number of attacks where they’re using a few hundred drones a day. And one of the things that they’ve gotten really good at is not even putting a warhead in some of these things and not putting any advanced chips in some of them. 

So maybe, maybe as many as two thirds of the drones that the Russians are firing at targets are actually just decoys that are very, very, very cheap. And so if Ukraine is using their limited air defense to try to clear the skies and they have to deal with literally hundreds of spoofed signals and false targets, more and more of the real things will get through. 

And the Russians are now starting to coordinate the timing of these drone assaults with their missile attacks. And the result has been a lot more damage to infrastructure, in Ukraine, including civilian infrastructure and urban zones. You can buy in these with things like, say, glide bombs with the Russians have no shortage of. And you’re talking about the Russians being able to completely obliterate what we would traditionally think of as a front 

line and just make this mess of shifting no man’s lands where those incremental one and two guys at a time can move 50ft at a time, and from time to time find a soft spot and get enough numbers forward that they can actually make a more traditional assault. It is way too soon to say that this is going to work. And of course, the Ukrainians will have to adapt to it by making their own changes. But we have seen a significant shift in the way that the Russians are prosecuting the war. And with the Technol involved changing day by day, week by week, month by month, that is absolutely worth noting.

Why Trump’s Stance on Ukraine Has Changed – Part 2

Ukraine solider on a armored vehicle with a split screen of Donald Trump

Let’s unpack Trump’s evolving stance on Ukraine a bit more today.

Trump came into his second term strapped with his loyalty vacuum, purging anyone who wouldn’t kiss the ring. This left Trump with a lackluster roster, many of whom had acquired a taste for Russian propaganda. All of that led to Trump giving Putin an extraordinarily long leash.

After six broken promises of peace, Melania talked some reality into Trump, and he is now pulling back on the lead. The question now is not whether to oppose Russia, but where to draw the line. US support for Ukraine has come cheaply so far, but nuclear retaliation from Russia is still looming on the horizon.

We still don’t know where Trump will take this, but his stance on both Russia and Ukraine is quickly changing.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Now, when Trump was out of power, he had a beef with the Republican Party because there were people who had studied policy in the world and the Republican Party who tried to steer his decision making in a way that reflected history and economics. And one of the weaknesses of Donald Trump, charisma. It’s his ego. And he feels he has to be the smartest person in the room at any given topic. 

So we all he was out of power. He restructured the Republican Party so that all of those folks were gone and basically turned it into an institution that was designed to glorify and reelect him. And it worked. He comes into power. He no longer has a cadre of several hundred people behind him to help him make policy. He just has a handful of people who, for their own personal reasons, have chosen to to hook up. 

And he has a cluster of Russian agents up to and including Tulsi Gabbard, who is currently the director of National Intelligence, who has been whispering in his ear and amending the national intelligence brief since day one with Russian propaganda. Well, as he comes in, he does the same thing to the federal bureaucracy that he did for the Republican Party and basically stripped it of expertise so that no one could ever tell him, you know, he was wrong. 

And what that meant is for the first six months, he was wrong a lot, especially as regards Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine war. We actually had some weird situations where Trump was blaming the Ukrainians for the Russian rape camps that had been set up, or the kidnaping of Ukrainian children, that the Russian government set up a cabinet level position to take care of, and the death camps and the mass murders and, you know, on and on and on. 

Using phosphorus to clear out village was, phosphorus is kind of like napalm. Anyway, turning point for Trump was in May and June. He engaged in personal diplomacy, with Vladimir Putin. He decided that, Steve Wyckoff, who had been his frontman, really didn’t know what he’s doing. And that was because Steve Wyckoff really didn’t know what he’s doing. 

And so Trump took it over directly. He couldn’t hand it off to the State Department because that is handled by, Rubio, who’s a guy he doesn’t particularly like. And actually, I’m a little surprised he hasn’t fired Rubio yet. He’s basically just sidelined the entire national, security and foreign service institutions. Put him under Rubio, then sent them off to the side and told them to do nothing. 

Anyway, he takes over the negotiations himself. So that puts Putin in a position where he’s lying to Trump’s face repeatedly and according to Trump’s own words, on six different occasions. We had a deal to end the war. And then less than 24 hours later, the Russians would bomb a civilian target. When I say bomb, I mean sending several dozen, several hundred drones and missiles and bombs into major cities. 

The first five times this happened. Trump seemed annoyed but willing to give Putin the benefit of the doubt. But the sixth time, the sixth time Melania Trump called Donald Trump out on it, and that apparently changed the minds. Keep in mind that Melania Trump was not born in the United States. She was born on the other side of the Iron Curtain in the former Yugoslavian republic of Slovenia. 

So she, among Trump’s inner circle now is the most aware of international relations of all, because she’s the only one who can’t be fired. How useful that will come to be in the days and weeks and months to come. I have no idea. But what she has done very successfully is convince Donald Trump that he was being played, that he was being lied to, and that he was being made to look quite unintelligent. 

And so a few weeks ago, the two weeks ago, Trump gave Vladimir Putin a 50 day deadline to change policy. And in the last 48 hours, Trump has said, I’m not going to give him 50 days because nothing’s changing and nothing will change. And that’s part of the problem with this conflict. Putin accurately sees the Ukraine war as the beginning of Russia’s last best chance to survive this century. 

From the Russian point of view, and I think the correct, if they cannot conquer all of these countries, not just Ukraine, the other 15 as well, Russia will vanish from the Earth before 2100 based on how the war goes, potentially a lot faster. So there can be no peace treaty that the Russians can agree to that they will enforce. 

That leaves any of these countries independent. This is a country that is fighting for its existence. Unfortunately for the Russians, in order to continue to exist, they have to conquer a number of people who collectively are of a greater number than there are Russian ethnics on this planet. So from the American and the European point of view, the question wasn’t will we or won’t we stand against the Russians? 

It’s where would we draw the line? Where is the point where we say no further? And for those of you who think that we can just wash our hands of this completely. A couple things to keep in mind. Number one, the Russians have more nukes than we do. And since they’re on their way out, the incentive to use them is a lot higher because from their point of view, in the long term, they have nothing to lose. 

Number two, if the line that we decide to defend is in Ukraine, well, then all of the Europeans and all of the Ukrainians are between the Russians and us. And the war to this point, the United States really hasn’t bled. We haven’t really provided much cash, and we haven’t provided much in terms of military equipment that we actually use. 

What the Ukrainians are using against the Russians, or at least until recently, has been American equipment that has been decommissioned since 1995. They are basically going through our hand-me-downs and holding the Russians off. And the cost to us is minimal. The alternative is, of course, to leave the Russians and the Ukrainians to it, break the alliance, go home, and just hope that in everything that happens with the conflict in the time to come, the Russians just forget that we have been the target of all of their nukes and all of their propaganda since 1935, and hope that should they ever be stopped by someone else, that on their way out the door of history, they 

choose not to send a few hundred nukes our way because they really do hate us massively. Anyway, for those of you who have bought the Russian propaganda, you’re going to have some uncomfortable times in the days ahead. Donald Trump’s ego has been bruised and he is now starting to direct policy against the Putin government. There are a thousand ways that this can go. 

I can’t predict the specifics. People like Tulsi Gabbard are still in place, who are still beating the drum on behalf of the Russians inside the white House. This can go a lot of strange directions, but hopefully this little brief gives you an idea of why things are happening the way that they are. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll make you reconsider a few things.

Why Trump’s Stance on Ukraine Has Changed – Part 1

Ukraine solider on a armored vehicle with a split screen of Donald Trump

It seems that the Trump administration might be listening to some classic rock lately, because his recent stance on Russia and Putin is awfully reminiscent of The Who’s 1971 classic “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Or maybe Melania just yelled at him.

The issue with the Trump and Putin dynamic is that they’ve been operating on two different playing fields. Trump thought he was just caught up in your standard playground pissing contest (the kind of conflict that he loves). Putin was playing along, but Trump is finally realizing that Putin’s war on Ukraine is existential. The Russians MUST take Ukraine. They MUST expand their borders. Otherwise, it’s the end of Russia as we know it.

This is the geographic playbook that Russia has always followed. Now that their demographic crisis has reached critical mass, there is only one path forward. So, Trump’s stance on Ukraine is starting to shift, but this is only the beginning.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re doing an educational video for folks who are of the MAGA crowd who, are discovering that the Trump administration is changing policy pretty dramatically on them in the case of Ukraine. 

When Trump was running for president, the third time to get a second term, he started repeating a lot of Russian propaganda about how the war was Ukraine’s fault. And Zelensky needs to go. Then he came in and discovered, that things perhaps were not, as he realized. So the point of this video is to explain to you what Trump has discovered over the last six months and why it’s leading to his policy change. This war was always going to happen. It didn’t happen because of who the American president was, or the German chancellor or the Ukrainian president. 

It happened because of how the Russians view their world. The Russian territories are pretty flat and open, and there’s no real good spot to hunker behind to shield yourself the armies of your foes. And so, Russian strategy going back to the time of the early czars, you know, centuries ago, has been to expand. 

Conquer the people next to you, subjugate them, turn them into cannon fodder, and then use them as a vanguard to attack the next group of people. And repeat and repeat and repeat until eventually you reach a geographic border that tanks can’t go through. And so Muscovite expanded into Tatarstan, expanded into Ukraine, expanded into the Baltics. And they keep going until they hit those geographic barriers. 

And the key ones are the Baltic Sea, the Carpathian Mountains, the deserts of Central Asia, and the tension mountains of Central Asia and the Caucasus. If the Russians, from their point of view, can do this, then they will have achieved a degree of physical security that they could not get from remaining at home. And the Russian leader, who ultimately proved most successful at doing this in the modern age is Joseph Stalin. 

And the borders that the Soviet Union held during the Cold War were the most secure that the Russians have ever been. You just have to keep in mind a few things here. Russia is not a nation state like Germany or the United States or Australia. It’s a multi-ethnic empire where the non Russian ethnics exist solely to serve as a ballast. 

And it’s cannon fodder in wars, which means that in times of prolonged economic or political decay, like, say, the 1980s, the empire breaks apart and all of the various nationalities that used to be used as cannon fodder all of a sudden are the on the other side of an international border. So Russia has only about, 60%, 65% of the territory of the Soviet Union. 

But all of those other zones are largely populated, and they’re populated with ethnicities that are not simply hostile to Moscow, but have been subjugated to Moscow in the past. Now, modern day, the Russian population is dying out. There are two big things that shape demographics, and the first is the degree of urbanization. And the second is economic, where for all and health. 

So first, urbanization starting under Stalin, but really getting serious under Brezhnev, the Soviets started a massive urbanization campaign, basically taking people off the farm and cramming them into small housing units. And in doing so, birthrates dropped by 80% in two generations. At the same time, this agrarian population was not really schooled up to deal with the realities of the industrial age. 

And you had a lot of people who became functionally dispossessed. One of the results among many, was insane levels of alcoholism. Then when the Soviet system collapsed in 1989, heroin became a big problem along with multidrug resistant tuberculosis and HIV. And so, arguably, the Russian population of the 2020 tens and today is the least healthy in the world. 

And one of the ones that has faced so low of birth rates for so long that the actual ethnicity of Russians is vanishing. These two trends come together in the Ukraine war. 

First, the Putin government has tried to expand on the cheap through the 2000, sponsoring coups and assassinating people throughout the what they call their near abroad. Throughout the 2020 tens, trying to shape the political space of these countries that they used to control in order to force them to do what Moscow wants. 

And they were always able to find collaborators among these countries who could be bought off, or maybe even wished for the return of Russian troops. But they could never convince the majority of the population that existing to serve Russian goals was in their best interests. And so the result among many, were things like color revolutions, where the peoples of these countries, it would basically rose up and throw off the pro Russian puppets. 

And then the second problem demographics is that the Russian birthrate has been so low for so long, the Russians are losing the capacity to field an army of their own, and they don’t control enough subject peoples anymore to generate a large conscript army full of cannon fodder. So the late 2020s, where we are now, was always going to be the last period where there were enough ethnic Russian men in their 20s where making a go of a military solution could happen. 

These two things come together. And the Ukraine war with the Putin government basically going all in. It was always going to happen. It was always going to happen about now. The only question is, how does the rest of the world in general and the United States specifically react to it? Because remember, the Russians will keep going until they reach a geographic barrier that can stop tanks. 

Ukraine’s only part of that. Ukraine is the ninth post-Soviet war that the Russians have participated in. And it will not be the last. We will also, if Ukraine falls, have conflicts in Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Azerbaijan and probably Uzbekistan as well. This is just the next phase of Putin’s plan of the Russian plan, that if anything was written 500 years ago.

A Ukraine-US Deal?

Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump shaking hands from wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Volodymyr_Zelensky_and_Donald_Trump_2019-09-25_01.jpg

Trump and Zelensky recently had a call where they discussed a mega-deal, centered around mutual weapons purchases and military tech sharing.

There is a lot for both countries to gain from a potential deal. The US gets access to all the military tech Ukraine has developed and gets to see it tested on a live battlefield. Ukraine gets the industrial power of the US and, of course, some much needed funding.

These are early days, but when the guy in charge is just after a deal, rather than all the important details…there’s no telling how this will shake out.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. A quick one today. 

Today is the 17th of July and supposedly Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, and Trump, the United States just had a phone call and Zelensky said it was all about a drone. Mega-deal the idea that Kiev will buy some weapons from Washington, and Washington will buy some weapons from Kiev. 

Now, if you go back to the Soviet period, the heart of the aerospace and missile systems in the former Soviet Union was in what is today Ukraine. And in the post-Soviet settlement, the Russians got all of the weapons, but the Ukrainians kept all of the scientists. And so once the Ukraine war began about four years ago, the Russians obviously came in big and strong with all the weapons and the Ukraine’s never much. 

But then the Ukrainians started to turn on their old Braintrust trained up their younger population and get into new weapons systems. And they’re standing to offer to any country is if you put troops in Ukraine, we will share all of the technologies that we have developed with you. And those technologies are pretty robust. So just to pick a few. 

You’ve got the Neptune missiles that sank the Russian flagship out in the Black Sea. You’ve got the rocket drones with a range of just under a thousand miles. You’ve got new loitering drones can go further than that. And of course, this wave of first person drones that we’ve seen more and more and more of. But increasingly, we’re seeing jet skis with missiles on them that are automated. 

Basically, they’re taking the automation revolution and marrying it to a new type of warfare and serving as a testbed. Because from the point that they actually finished constructing a prototype, it’s usually used within a week, and then they immediately start to iterate. So the speed at which the Ukrainians have been pushing the envelope is really impressive. Their problem is resources. 

So at the beginning of the Ukraine war, something like 5 to 10% of their weapons systems were actually manufactured in Ukraine. That number is now over 60% and continues to rise. So if the United States were to get access to that technological suite and the development pipeline, and you marry that to the U.S. industrial plant in the US taxpayer base, well, a lot of really interesting stuff could happen very, very quickly. 

We’re still in early days, but we all know that Trump doesn’t like to talk about details. He just wants a deal. So if the Americans are willing to put some money into this, you’re looking at a fairly short turnaround time for a significant overhaul. First of the Ukrainian military is the resources come in and then eventually the American military, as well as these technologies reach the precision, the range and the rugged ization that the US military demands. 

How much? How fast? I mean, that is entirely up to the two presidents. But one of the things that Ukrainians were very successful at doing was building out their industrial plant in order to make these new weapons and design these new weapons and test these new weapons. But probably about half of that industrial plant is sitting empty because of a lack of resources, which is where the United States could plug right in.