Ukraine Archives - Zeihan on Geopolitics

What Is Zelensky’s Political Future?

Volodymyr Zelensky’s historical legacy is still being written. Sure, he’s remained highly popular as a wartime leader and would likely be reelected if elections were held tomorrow. But a lot of his legacy depends upon the outcome of the Ukraine War.

Zelensky has overseen a major transformation in modern warfare, and he’ll undoubtedly receive the credit for it. However, his legacy won’t be determined by how many fancy drones were made, but rather by victory or defeat.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Yosemite. Just finishing up the Buena Vista Crest. And I just wanted to show you this. It’s one of my favorite little hiddy-holes in the park. Check out this copse of trees behind me. There’s about a dozen big ones that just just just just keep going. Anyway, we’re gonna walk around a couple times and through it for this video.

Taking a question from the Patreon page and specifically is what do I think the political future of Zelensky, the president of Ukraine is going to be? He’s genuinely popular, for being a wartime leader. And if fresh elections were held, I have no doubt that he would win reelection. But that’s not the question. The question is, how is history going to view this guy? And history is being played out right now.

So the smart play four years ago was that the Russians were going to win this war. And they actually sent a Chechen hit squad to assassinate the guy in Kyiv, in the opening days of the war.

Okay, this is a little claustrophobic, even for me, but isn’t that neat?

Anyway, obviously the Chechens failed, and since then, the Chechen forces have suffered significant damage, and most of them have relocated back to Chechnya, where their leader, the leader’s name is here: Ramzan Kadyrov. He’s a psychopath, but I can’t remember. Anyway, And because of that, Zelensky got a lot more notoriety than he would have for, you know, a normal wartime leader. For years on, we’re now seeing a significantly different type of war that involves many, many, many, many, many, many, many new technologies that are being developed under his watch, which he will get credit for historically. Basically, we’re going through the second revolution in military affairs at the moment, which is digitizing warfare. Some people call it AI, but really it’s just using the hardware we already have in slightly more aggressive and novel ways. His name is going to be on all of that. So really it comes down to one of three things. Number one, if the Russians win, then Zelensky’s a dead man because they will make the handing over of him the contingency for any sort of normal relations with the European countries. Number two, this war enters a permanent stalemate until both Ukraine and Russia fail demographically, which is something that’s going to happen the next 30 or 40 years regardless. And at that point, he will be known as the guy who launched the new technological revolution that’s redefining what war means. The third possibility, I’m not saying it’s any more or less likely than the other two, is that the war is won. Ukraine manages to reclaim that most of the territory that is lost, and does so convincingly enough that the European Union and may even NATO admit Ukraine. And if that happens, not only will Zelensky be revered as the founder of the modern nation of Ukraine, regardless of what happens after that, but he will go down in history as one of the great Europeans, right alongside people like Helmut Kohl, who helped stitched together the continent into an entity that is at peace with itself and unified and free. Obviously, a lot of wiggle room among those three. But like I said, history is still playing out on this specific question, and we are not going to get an answer this year or next year or the year after that.

Ukraine Is Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Statue in Kiev, Ukraine against a misty forest

Ukraine has created a system to determine which ships belong to the shadow fleet and which belong to major companies. By sourcing ship identities, transponder data, routes, and ports from these companies, Ukraine can strike unidentified vessels with high confidence.

The result? Roughly 200 shadow fleet vessels have been attacked around the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Even if the Russians can replace the downed ships, storage capacity will be overwhelmed by damaged vessels and disrupted ports.

Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon page. Specifically, it has to do with how Ukraine is targeting Russian ships on the Black Sea, but ignoring others since a lot of countries are just not using the transponders anymore. Great question. The backdrop is we have had the Ukrainians attack about 200 shadow fleet vessels on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. During the past roughly two months, and we’re nearing the point where enough damage has been inflicted on the shadow fleet that it’s probably going to stop functioning later this year, which is going to end Russia’s presence as a significant oil exporter. A lot going on, but there are six countries Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey, yeah, six countries on the Black Sea. And how do the Ukrainians know who to attack and whatnot? We will also note that the Russians, from time to time hit a ship that is not Ukrainian. So why are the Ukrainians able to target and the Russians aren’t considering that the Russians are the ones who are the superior military power by most measures?

What happened is about a month ago, the United States government, the Trump administration, transmitted some information to the Ukrainians that they weren’t very happy about. The Ukrainians had been attacking a place called Novorossiysk, which is a significant naval port and commerce port on the Black Sea, on the Russian section. And at Novorossiysk is the terminus for a pipeline called CPC, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which transports crude from Kazakhstan, specifically the Tengiz field that is operated by Chevron and Exxon through Russia to that port and then to the wider world.

And the Trump administration was angry that the Ukrainians were attacking what they see as American infrastructure. Russians obviously don’t see it that way anyway. And basically said, stop doing it. Well, what the Ukrainians have done is they’ve contacted every shipping company in the world and said, hey, if you’re operating in the Black Sea, A, tell us the name of the ship be give us their transponder so we can follow them. C, give us their course and D,the ports you expect them to be at and when and if we can confirm that information as part of our operations, we will not attack those ships. And so far, every shipping company in the world is complying except the Shadow Fleet. Shadow fleet runs dark. Shadow fleet doesn’t report, and that’s the whole point.

So what the Ukrainians have basically done, they have mapped out the entire commercial world of shipping in the Black Sea and attacking the ships that don’t report. And so far, attacks on third parties have, I think, single digits while the shadow fleet is taking a complete pounding. Is it enough? Will it last. Well, I mean, really ultimately that depends upon how the Russians pay out their providing insurance for their own shadow fleets. And from what we’ve seen so far, it’s, they’re not paying out. But the Russians take ships that otherwise would be scrapped. So they’re not reducing the global supply of vessels. They’re reducing the global supply of vessels that were on the scrap heap.

There’s going to be some churn as the Ukrainians burn through what the Russians have. But there is an end in sight here. Because if the Russians cannot load cargo, whether it’s grain or crude, eventually the ports just run out of storage facilities, and that cuts down production inland. Just as effective as stopping the shadow Fleet would. So one way or another, we’re getting there. We’re getting there this year. And it’s kind of a minor miracle that it’s all happening without interfering with other shipping in the Black Sea. The Persian Gulf, a completely different situation. Nothing nearly so friendly is happening over there.

Russia Is Struggling to Defend Its Own Capital

Image of St. Basils Cathedral and the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia

A leaked Moscow memo stated that Russian air defenses are being concentrated around the Kremlin. This leaves the broader Moscow region, including refineries and key infrastructure, vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks. And if Moscow is this vulnerable, it gives you an idea of just how bad things are throughout the rest of Russia.

In addition, the Russians are looking to kick off a peripheral mobilization of ~300,000 people. However, all of the recruitment sources carry political risks for the Kremlin. If they depopulate the Far East, it weakens the border with China; if they take non-ethnic Russians and could fuel unrest; or you target immigrant workers and worsen the labor shortage.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about the combination of things that have come out of Russia. We’ve got two things. The first one is that a memo that was being circulated among the Moscow mayor’s senior staff has leaked. And basically they are admitting that even with the government, the national government, the Kremlin, redirecting the bulk of the country’s air defense to the Moscow region, the defenses are so concentrated around the Kremlin itself that they’re not providing enough anti-air defense for the broader metro region, which is the economic and political and cultural hub of the country, which means that refineries which are on the outskirts can’t really be protected at all. And they are expecting the refining system to not simply continue to come under attack. But they’re expecting the city to run out of fuel before the end of the year, and perhaps a lot sooner than that. So they are spitballing ideas of what to do about that. And the leading candidate right now is to break up Russia’s refining complex instead of the 100 odd refineries it has right now, and build a thousand plus that are just much, much, much smaller.

Now, it isn’t so much that this is a good idea because it’s not. You’d lose economies of scale. You’d still have to cluster the refineries around pipelines. So you have like five refineries, smaller refineries, where a bigger one used to be. That doesn’t really solve the problem, but more importantly, it would take years to build out and require lots and lots of equipment that the Russians can’t build and would have to import. So all of a sudden the sanctions come into place. So it’s really not feasible. But the point that the smartest people in the largest and most successful city in Russia are now desperate for options simply to keep the fuel flowing, tells you everything you need to know about the stability of the Russian economy right now. Because this is the capital, this isn’t some far flung province out on the edge. That’s piece one.

Piece two came out of Kyiv with the Ukrainian President Zelensky sharing some intel that they’ve been garnering on the Russian military system. Apparently, according to Zelensky, the Russians are preparing a fresh what they call peripheral mobilization for this coming September immediately after elections. And when they say peripheral in Russia, what they mean is non-ethnic Russians. Ethnic Russians, according to Russian statistics, are probably about 75% of the population and of course make up the super majority in the major cities, most notably Moscow. But when you move out of the Moscow region, out of the Saint Petersburg region, you’re going to be hitting higher and higher ethnic minority concentrations. And there are several republics, several dozen republics across Russia where non-Russian are either the full majority or the near majority. So far in the war, the Russian government has done everything it can to not pull ethnic Russians into the fight, favoring the forced recruitment of non-Russian ethnics whenever they possibly can, because they’re feeling is if those people rebel, you can just kill them. But if Russians, ethnic Russians rebel and you put them down like the Russians like to, that might spawn more protests in other Russian regions. And if you don’t have the buy in of the Russian population, or at least it’s apathy, then that is how the Kremlin falls, because that’s happened before. Reasonable, reasonable political analysis. The problem, of course, is that this is not the first time the Russian government has done this. It’s done this in three rounds so far in the war to date. And with the Russian government losing somewhere between 25 and 45,000 people a month in this war, the question is, how long can this hold the line before things break?

According to Zelensky’s Intel? And so far, when the Ukrainians have shared things like this on the development of the Russian military, they tend to be right, I’d say 90% of the time. But, you know, some of the details might be fuzzy. The Russians are talking about this peripheral mobilization, about 300,000 people, which would be enough to supply troops to maintain what the Russians have been doing at the last years burn rates for another 6 to 9 months. So it doesn’t really change the math in the long term. It simply allows the Russians to continue to plot on with what they’re doing as to where the people would come from. The greatest hits, where the greatest percentage of the local population would be drawn out, would probably be from the Far East. These are areas that are relatively lightly populated, relatively low urbanization, penetration. And basically the Russian state just goes through and rounds people up when they’re going about their daily business. The second big concentration would be recent passport holders. So there are a lot of people who have moved from Central Asia to Russia because as bad as the economy is in Russia, it’s worse in Central Asia. So especially in places like Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan, you’ve got several million people over the last 20 years who have moved north. And because they’ve had to get passports, they are in the system. And so basically what the Russians are doing is saying, hey, you’re in the system, we know where you are. Come work in the war because you don’t have a choice anymore. Getting Russian citizenship, the price is dying in Ukraine. The biggest concentration, the biggest numbers are going to be from ethnic republics that are closer to Moscow, that are more densely populated. So you’re talking here about places like Chechnya, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan, densely populated provinces with reasonably high birth rates, especially compared to the ethnic Russians, where you do have a presence of the Russian state that can basically force people in.

All of these come at certain risks. When you start taking out people from the Far East, you’re depopulating them to the point that there’s an open question about relations vis a vis the Chinese, who have 100 million people just on the other side of the border. When you start going after the people who are recent passport holders, you disincentivize people to come into Russia where there’s a demographic bomb going off in real time even before the war, and you’re losing the workforce, you need to keep the system going. And when you go after groups like Chechnya, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan, you’re talking about big population centers that if they ever did rebel, it’s not clear whether the Russian state could resist them. A new Chechen war would be as bad for the Russians as what’s going on in Ukraine right now. And if the Tartars or the Bashkirs rebel in any meaningful way, the Russians lose all the infrastructure connections they have to Siberia and Siberia, at the moment, is the only part of the oil complex that is likely to still be exporting a year or two from now. So none of these are good decisions, but it’s not like there’s a better one on offer, and we’re now seeing the entire system start to seize.

Russia, though, is capable of maintaining an incredibly high tolerance for pain, basically suffering as the Russian equivalent of baseball. And none of these by themselves are enough to break the system. But we’re seeing the weight increase at the same time as we’re seeing the Russians start to not just stall on the front, but be turned back. And every major Russian revolution in the past 300 years has been because the Kremlin has lost a military conflict. So you take the social pressures that this mobilization are likely to generate, play that against the battlefield situation. And yeah, this is looking pretty bad for the Kremlin.

Ukraine’s Flamingos Crush Russia’s Space Program

A cruise missile launching into a starry night sky | Licensed by Envato Elements

Ukraine sent a flamboyance of Flamingos (cruise missiles, not those pink things) and struck a Russian space complex in Samara. This complex was responsible for assembling Soyuz-2 rockets, as well as electronics and precision testing.

The missiles used, the Flamingos, are Ukraine’s version of the U.S. Tomahawk; dumber than the Tomahawk, but cheaper and easier to produce. These strikes and Ukraine’s growing large-scale strike capability are crushing Russia’s industrial and technological base.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. It is the 15th of August. And the news is that Ukraine, using a modified weapon system, has just attacked the city of Samara in Russia and severely damaged one of the space complexes, specifically the place where the Russians assemble the Soyuz-2 rockets. This is the primary Russian launch vehicle to get satellites up into space. Damage levels at this point are questionable, but we know there have been hard hits on the major buildings that actually do the work, especially for things like electronics and precision testing. So for the moment, Russia’s space program is now offline, and the idea that the Ukrainians won’t hit again is kind of silly.

Right now, Russia has kind of a hybridized space program. They’re still participating with the United States on the ISS, although I wouldn’t expect that to last a whole lot longer. ISS is the International Space Station, and they do have some legacy satellites up there, but they were hoping to build their own network of a couple hundred satellites. That to be kind of a local Starlink equivalent, so that they have independent military observation and independent communications, that is at a minimum on hold now.

They were really only planning on launching ten, maybe, if they’re really lucky, 20 satellites a year. And now that’s completely at zero. In addition to that, there’s the question of how the Ukrainians did this. It’s something called a flamingo missile. Now, if you remember back a year or two ago, there were some conversations about the United States sending some of its new truck mounted Tomahawk missiles, which is the United States premier mid strike cruise missile. Anyway, sending them to Ukraine. Ukraine lobbied very, very hard for that. But ultimately the United States decided no. So the Ukrainians, for all intents and purposes, built their own. The Flamingo has a warhead that is significantly more powerful than the Tomahawk. It’s modular, but it can be up to 1000kg, which is well over twice what the typical tomahawk carries. It has a slightly better range with a lighter warhead. It’s not quite as fast. Probably the biggest weakness of the Flamingo versus the Tomahawk is that the United States can use, off course, it’s satellite network to retask it on the fly, where the Ukrainians cannot yet do that. Although, considering, what they’re doing with drones, some version of that is probably going to be possible in the not too distant future anyway.

It, in essence, is a flying truck bomb. It’s not as accurate as the Tomahawk, but because it hits so much harder, it is almost as good. And the really important thing is it’s because it’s a simpler piece of equipment. Fiberglass instead of titanium. The Ukrainians can crank out three of them a day where as the tomahawk, they can only produce about 60 a year. So that’s what, five a month? Yeah, five a month. So a half a dozen of these things were used in the attack on Samara. Most of them were shot down, but with three a day being the production rate, it’s very, very simple to see this being a major industrial factor in the weeks and months to come.

So in summary, the Russians probably won’t have a space program by the end of the year that makes them completely dependent upon third party reconnaissance, primarily from China. The Ukrainians are being able to throw so much tonnage into the air that there’s really no industrial facility in Russia within a thousand miles of the border now that is safe at all, because if you’re not going to defend your space program as Russia, there’s really not much left that is more important aside from Moscow itself. And we’ve seen a contraction of Russian air defense around critical sites in Moscow and very little else. What we’re seeing is the disembowelment of Russia’s capability of being a technological power, and all that’s left is for it to be a resource power, exporting raw materials such as crude oil, in order to get the currency it needs in order to purchase Chinese product. But as the Ukrainians basically march with drones through the entire industrial plant, that capacity is disappearing. And we’ll probably see an end of Russia’s ability to be a large scale resource exporter before the end of the year as well, at least as regards the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. And that’s going to be over two thirds of the total. So we really are seeing the industrial destruction and removal of Russia from the global space.

That has thousands of downstream impacts. And that is a topic we will revisit at length in the days and weeks to come.

Moving Beyond the Patriot Missile

The U.S. is hesitant to allow Ukraine to manufacture Patriot missiles locally, partially to protect U.S. military IP, but more so because it doesn’t want Ukraine to do it better. The reality is that highly sophisticated weapons like the Patriot aren’t the right tool for modern warfare.

Sure, in an American-led globalized system, these weapons are the cream of the crop. But that’s not the world we live in anymore. $4 million price tags and complicated supply chains are no longer viable. Modern wars require cheap weapons that are easy to produce locally at scale, like the drones we’ve seen across the Ukraine War.

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from near the trailhead of Sherman Sheridan in the Mosquito Range in Colorado. Took me so long to find a place without wind. Anyway, the news today is kind of all over. Specifically, I want to talk about defense contractors. We have a situation where it’s leaking out that the United States Trump administration, Donald Trump specifically, is unlikely to allow Ukraine to license production locally of Patriot missiles. The reasons that were given. The first one that is being said out loud is intellectual property protection, which is reasonable once you hand over the plans so that somebody else can make them, somebody else has the plans. The second one that is being said behind closed doors, that is probably more compelling for Donald Trump, is that if Ukrainians learn how to make these things, they’re going to iterate them and they’ll learn how to make them cheaper, faster and probably better.

And that makes sense, because Ukraine was the node of aerospace and rocketry for much of the former Soviet Union, and that’s been applying those skills in real time to the war technologies that they’ve been developing in the last four years. And obviously, many of their weapon systems, most notably their drones, are now light years ahead of anyone else on the planet, including the United States.

And so to say that they couldn’t apply aerospace and rocketry technology to what is ultimately a rocketry question is obviously silly, but as true as that is and as much as that is likely to be the rationale for Trump ultimately denying the Ukrainians access to the plans. It’s kind of missing the point. We’re at a point here where we’ve got two reinforcing and contrasting trends. The first is deglobalization, and we’re losing access to the global supply chains that allow sophisticated equipment to be made. So, for example, when people talk about AI weapons, they’re probably blowing smoke out their ass. Because the technology just doesn’t exist yet. High end chips. Things below, let’s call it seven nanometers that are etched into silicon. Just can’t deal with heat or stress or shifts in momentum or vibration. You know, all of those things happen a lot when you’re dealing with military equipment. And these supply chains are fragile, so it doesn’t take much of a deglobalization event for them to break completely. Now, military folks get around that by using special materials like gallium when making the chips instead of silicon. The problem is that the gallium supply chain is also very vulnerable. So the idea that the United States is going to be able to keep making these high end weaponry systems is itself kind of a stretch.

Second problem, the United States is unique among all of the major powers in history, and that it basically has a hemisphere to itself. Ever since reconstruction and the Spanish-American War, there really hasn’t been a major power that has a sufficient footprint, much less a native presence in the Western Hemisphere to challenge American security dominance in a meaningful way.

And that has allowed the United States military to develop differently from everyone else’s. Everybody else, whether you’re a naval power or a land power, ultimately you have rivals that are relatively close. And so your military technologies that you develop, the military systems that you field always have a degree of short term desperation built in. The United States has never had to worry about that unless we’re in a long, protracted, hot war like, say, World War Two, we develop our weapon systems based on the idea that the homeland is fundamentally safe and that we just need to project power across the ocean. So our systems tend to be far more durable. They tend to be far more technologically advanced. They tend to be expensive, but they have reach and lethality that nobody else has. Because everyone else is worried about bringing large numbers of relatively disposable things to the fight as soon as possible. All right. We’ll finish this in a minute.

Okay. Had a hard time finding a place without wind. So here we are from the Colorado Intermountain above Fairplay, Kenosha pass. Where was I? Basically, we’re dealing with a changing environment in which the defense systems that were maintained by the global superpower and basically maintained during the Cold War in the post-Cold War era aren’t applicable anymore. The new weapon systems are simpler to build with more basic technology, whereas the more advanced systems that the Americans rely upon require global supply chains. And so we’re going to see a complete overhaul in how we handle defense over the next five, ten, 15 years. And the Patriot missile, while it is today by far the best anti-missile system on the planet, is probably going to lose that position.

If the Ukrainians are even mildly successful, they’re going to be able to drive down the price of the Patriot. Right now, it’s about $4 million a pop. The people who make the patriot of the United States say they’re going to offer a lower tier version that’s about $2 million a pop. The Ukrainians need to get down to that, to a quarter of a million, a pop maximum. Otherwise, it just doesn’t serve the purpose in this new era where you can spam somebody’s defenses with just thousands, if not tens of thousands of attacks. There’s one more thing to keep in mind. The US is the late comer to this technological revolution, in part because of policies out of the white House and personalities and the Defense Department. The United States is not fully engaged in this new era, and is being very slow to embrace drones as the new way of doing things. That’s going to change dramatically as the rest of the world basically skips by the United States, which means the United States is going to discover waves and waves and waves and waves of hostile drones and multiple powers, some of them allies. And it will not have enough patriots for all of its needs. And it certainly won’t have enough patriots for all of its allies. So we’re probably very close to the final delivery of American patriots to anyone, not just Ukraine. And once that happens. Well, pace of anti-ballistic missile technology is going to skyrocket because everyone will be researching an alternative.

Ukraine’s Military Reshuffling Highlights Resource Problems

Ukrainian President Zelensky has now dismissed two of the most senior military leaders, Defense Minister Fedorov and Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi. Beyond the speculation of internal power struggles, these dismissals highlight Ukraine’s glaring issues with resource allocation.

This is a multi-vectored war that is constantly evolving, which means the new drone tech is just as essential as the infantry and artillery, and vice versa. So, Ukraine can’t win without either capability. But with limited resources at its disposal, Ukraine has an allocation problem.

Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 23rd of July, and I’m going to attempt to untangle what has been happening in Ukrainian political circles, specifically around the Defense Ministry and the Army.

We’ve had a number of personnel changes over the last several culminating in the last several days of the dismissal of the defense minister, a guy by the name of Fedorov who is a techno guy. He’s in his 30s, big on drones. And Syrskyi who is the commander in chief of the army, a big infantry and artillery guy. This is being spun a lot of ways by a lot of people. Some are saying that it’s a debate between whether drones are the future of Ukrainian military versus the backbone that is currently artillery and infantry. Some are saying it’s personal and it’s really kind of all of the above. The very, very short version is that we’re going through a hot war and battlefield success versus failure generates a lot of changes in personnel, both from mortality and from political decisions that didn’t do enough or you did too much, or you are rising star versus you’re

But really, the core issue is this doctrinal shift between drones and artillery. And what neither side admits is that they can’t fight the war without it.

So in charge of the artillery has very successfully, I might add, held the line in a number of major battles where we expected the Russians just mow over the Ukrainians. But Fedorov with the drones, obviously has remade the face of warfare and given Ukraine not just a fighting chance, but the advantage in many battlefield situations. And to think that one of these will work without the other is very silly.

The problem is, both sets work, both sets are necessary, and both sets require their own procurement chain and manufacturing capability. And it’s not clear that Ukraine has the full capacity to do both of those at the same time with the resources that have. And that’s before you consider the complexity of all of the weapons donations that have come in from the Europeans primarily, and the political complications that come from relationships with the Trump administration right now. So basically, we have our old system led more or less by Syrskyi that is infantry and artillery, and the new system that is led by Fedorov, that is drones and fiber optic cables and computer chips, and each of them requires a huge pipeline of resources, whether that is people or finance or manufacturing capacity.

And the two don’t overlap very much. So when Fedorov became defense minister a few months ago, he’s tried to start switching all of the resources over to his preferred method of war fighting. And Syrskyi kind of had a coronary because there was no way that he could defend the 1000 mile long front without ongoing investments into artillery and artillery shells.

Both of them are right. Both of them are wrong. And now both of them have been fired. So what’s going on now is Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, is attempting to juggle these two factions so that both of them can function because they both need to function. And the reason that the protests in Ukraine in favor of Fedorov are continuing is because they’ve looked at the personnel that Zelensky has put in place of Syrskyi and Fedorov and said that so far there’s been no change.

And that’s true. There’s been no change because Zelensky is trying to balance the interests of two things he absolutely has to have, and the leaders of those two factions hate each other. And the only way they could work together if Zelensky was there personally hand-holding. And this is before you consider the problems with, say, corruption or consider the problems with Russian assassination, or consider competition with other branches of the Ukrainian services.

It’s a really tough situation to be in for everybody. It’s a post-Soviet society. So the pillars of civil society that normally you would rely upon to kind of bulwark the sort of institutional discussion just don’t exist in the same way that they exist in, say, say, Germany or the United States. It’s an ugly situation. I have no idea how it’s going to go, and I am not even going to bother talking about the personalities that are replacing the two principals, because I bet they’re mostly going to be gone within a week or two.

But at the moment we’re more or less in the same position now that we were six months ago. You’ve got these two parallel procurement and warfighting, doctrinally defined institutions, both of which are essential but really just can’t get along and don’t complement each other very well.

Ukraine Closes the Sea of Azov

NASA satellite image of the Sea of Azov | Photo by NASA and creative commons licsense

Ukrainian drone attacks have effectively shut down Russia’s use of the Sea of Azov, which is a critical export route for southern Russia.

The sea connects the Volga River canal system to the Black Sea, allowing agricultural goods, coal, iron, and more to reach global markets. And with Russia’s rail network already overburdened, losing this waterway is devastating.

If Ukraine expands these drone attacks into the eastern Black Sea, the shadow fleet will face even further disruptions. With no quick solutions on the table, the Russian economy and war effort will be on its back foot for quite some time.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from just below Cupid Peak, above Loveland Pass. And over here we have Grays and Tories and Grizzly Mountain. Not going to be able to do those today because we got lightning moving in. Boo. But I’m still going to do a video for you guys. I just got back from Yosemite and still catching up on everything that happened.

But one of the big things that happened in the Ukraine war is that the Sea of Azov is now offline. The Sea of Azov is a body of water to the east of the Crimean peninsula, that’s Russian occupied Crimean peninsula, and to the south of Russian occupied lands in southeastern Ukraine. It’s a waterway that freezes sometimes in the winter.

But the real important thing is that is the outlet for a huge amount of cargo. The Russian system is not well set up for shipping cargo. A lot of stuff has to go by rail, but the Russians are literally running out of ball bearings, so they’re hitting the max of what they can do, and they can’t replace the cars and the speed that they need to.

So they’re seeing reductions in throughput. That makes it much more important to ship things by water. The problem is, is that the Russian coast of the Black Sea doesn’t have any navigable river outlets. It’s somewhat rough and mountainous. And so what happens is you’ve got an inland waterway, the Volga, that goes near Moscow and snakes through Russia and empties into the Caspian Sea.

The problem is the Caspian Sea is a landlocked body of water. So what the Soviets did is they engineered a series of canals and locks that go from the lower Volga near the Caspian over some low ridges, and get into the Don River system. And the Don empties into the Sea of Azov. So, in essence, if you’re shipping coal or iron or especially agricultural products, you get it onto the Volga.

You go through a series of locks until you get to that connection. You take the canal over to the Don, to Rostov on Don, and then you get into the Sea of Azov, and from there you get into the Black Sea in the wider world. Well, while I was gone, the Ukrainians hit over 200 ships in like a week in their first big push and basically shut off the sea of his off completely.

So any of the cargo that used to use this waterborne export, which was one of Russia’s main ones, the primary one for southern Russia, suddenly has nowhere to go. They go onto the rails, but the rail system already overloaded and honestly starting to fall back. So a couple of things from this. Number one, we’ve got a lot of Russian cargo that is now just trapped.

It has nowhere to go and there’s really no quick fix here. The Russians have withdrawn a lot of their air defenses from places even like Crimea, to put it around Moscow, because Ukrainians have shown that any target that’s within roughly a thousand miles of the front is something they can in force. And that’s forcing the Russians to the air defenses that they have in places where they will serve political purposes.

Because of Moscow, came under heavy drone attack every single night for a month that might shatter the political coalition that holds the Russian system together. Right now. That’s one. Number two, Rostov on Don. This is one of the city’s one of the two cities in Belgorod that serves as nodes for transporting military gear to the front, and it has now lost all of its economic wherewithal.

It’s now just a military outpost, in effect. This is something that’s going to have a huge impact on the Russian economy and ultimately crimp Russia’s ability to get stuff to the front, because if that river is no longer available, if the canal system is no longer available, if the receipt of is of is no longer available, then one of the more wealthy cities in Russia just lost everything that made it work except for being a military depot.

And you should expect more tax there over and over and over again in the not too distant future. Third, now that the Sea of Azov is offline, next up is the Black Sea. It’s not that much further. The Ukrainians have loads of drones that are capable of taking the war now just across the Crimean Peninsula and into the ocean, and we’ve already seen dozens of attacks on things like tankers and Borchers, everything that’s in the shadow fleet.

So look for the Ukrainians over the next couple of months to repeat what they did in the Sea of Azov in the eastern side of the Black Sea, because no ships go there, really, unless they’re part of the Shadow Fleet. No one else wants to dock directly. And it’s not like they haven’t been warned if they decide they want to try.

The only real solution here that the Russians have, because air defense isn’t going to cut it, is to up their attacks on the Ukrainians to the point that it attracts the Ukrainians ability to do this. But since it’s from mobile launch sites with ever evolving drones and drones at the moment, the Russians haven’t figured out sorry about the wind drones.

At the moment, the Russians haven’t figured out how to replicate. That’s something that undoubtedly can’t happen this summer. This is going to be a problem for a year from now, or a potential solution for a year from now. And now we’re getting to India and I’ve got to stop so by.

The Future of Drone Tech: Naval Strategies

Ukraine can strike anywhere across the Black Sea thanks to its Sea Baby naval drones, and since jamming is less effective in open water, Ukraine can remotely guide them toward targets.

Take a shadow fleet vessel, for example. Ukraine can use satellite and transponder data to determine targets and then strike the engines and propulsion systems of these ships. With few effective counters, Russia’s ability to protect shipping in the Black Sea is steadily eroding.

If this current trend continues, Russian exports of all kinds, including oil, grain, fertilizer, timber, and more, could be lost.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Pike National Forest, from the southern slopes of Mount Silverheels. Behind me is the Colorado Intermountain, which is home to fair play, among other things. Anyway, today we’re going to talk about something that’s very mountain, you know, naval drones. So in the Ukraine, where we’ve seen several models and the ones we were to talk about today are the sea Babies.

These are things that the Ukrainians have basically taken motor boats, put a bomb on the front, automated them, and off they go. They are typically always first person drones because when you’re dealing with water, there’s really no option for doing a meaningful fiber optic line. There’s usually not going to have a lot of guidance because there are no landmarks.

So while there are certain things you can do with maybe a little bit of memory to provide a targeting suite, really these are things that have to be piloted by a person, and the terrain, such as it is, works to that pretty well. You see, jamming is something that the Russians are very good at electronic warfare in general, but you can’t really do it over the water.

I mean, if you’ve got a warship, maybe, but if you’ve got a warship, then all of a sudden the Ukrainians are going to be sending aerial drones against you to that have the memory to target specific things on the boat. But when you’re talking about, say, shadow fleet vessels, well, you’re not going to put a jammer on a Shadow Fleet vessel because it’s technically not a Russian ship.

And the Russians just don’t have that many of them to go around. So what happens is the Ukrainians now have these sea babies that have a range of 1500km in east to west. The Black Sea is only 1100 kilometers long. So it’s not just that the Ukrainians can hit any ship on the Black Sea, It’s they can go out there and loiter for a while.

So what the Ukrainians do is they pull down commercial imagery. SA is the type of synthetic aperture radar, and it basically lights up everything in a strip. And that strip can cover as much as 50,000km, which is a good portion of the Black Sea. And then they just go to a commercial website and see what ships are around.

You see, every ship in the world has a transponder except shadow fleet because they turn them off in order to avoid sanctions. So basically, you get this sheet satellite data that is accurate to like a quarter of a meter, and they then play forward and map out all the legal ships that have transponders. And anything else is a Russian shadow vessel.

And if they’ve got a sea baby near it, off they go. It’s also pretty predictable because there’s only 3 or 4 ports for the Russians on the Black Sea. Places like an overseas. And unless they’re going to a specific Turkish port, they’re all going to the Turkish straight to get out of the Black Sea and get to the wider world.

And that’s a straight line sail. So what we’ve been seeing in the last couple of weeks is these sea babies, which have like half a ton of explosives on them, basically getting in close to a commercial vessel, approaching them from behind and blowing the shit out of the engine room and the propeller. We’re not to the point where it’s had a huge impact yet, but again, these tactics are just like a month old.

Now, normally what you would do when you’re dealing with something like this on the defensive point of view is you’d fight these things off with helicopters. Small arms fire from the top of a ship really doesn’t do much, and battleship really doesn’t have the ability to lower their guns to the point that they can fire at something in the water and small arms fire.

Just so you use a helicopter. Now, number one, you don’t base a helicopter off of a commercial vessel. And in a few times when the Russians have had a military vessel nearby, or the Sea Babies have been sufficiently close to the coast that a helicopter from land can interdict. The Ukrainians really learned fast. Okay, we’ll just put an anti-air missile or two on this.

And they scored many hits. And so Now the Russians aren’t even doing that.

There’s really no good counter here. Helicopters were really only it, and the Ukrainians are now fielding more and more of these things. And as the Russians basically lose control over Crimea because they can’t have fuel. Even using Crimea as a base for helicopter is disappearing. What this means is probably by the end of the year, we need to start thinking about not simply the Russians losing access to the Black Sea for purposes of shipping out all and oil products, which is 1.5 to 2 million barrels a day.

Big deal right there. But also shipping anything wheat, fertilizer, timber, whatever it happens to be. Basically, the whole Black Sea is starting to become a no go zone. And again, the Ukrainians have only been doing this for about 4 to 6 weeks at this scale. They keep ramping it up just for a couple more months. There’s not going to be much left of the Shadow Fleet in the Black Sea at all.

The Future of Drone Tech: Ukraine’s Innovation

Camo clad man flying a drone outdoors | License by Envato Elements

The U.S. has finally secured its first contract to manufacture Ukrainian-designed drones, but don’t go celebrating quite yet.

The F10 drone that will be produced is a small FPV quadcopter built entirely from non-Chinese components. This is a big step for the U.S., but it’s not nearly the crème de la crème of Ukrainian tech.

The facility where these drones will be made is yet to be built, so even this initial order of 2,000 drones will take several years to complete. Regardless, this is a step in the right direction that will hopefully lead to further cooperation down the road.

Hey all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 1st of July and the news is good news. We have our first contract granted by the Department of Defense to have a US manufacturer produce Ukrainian drones under license. There’s not a lot of information out at this point. It’s all super secret, but I’ll share what I know and give you a couple of guesses based on what we know what that means.

So step one, the American company involved is called Ukrainian Defense Drones. Catchy name. And the Ukrainian company on the other side is called F drones. F drones is one of the big boys in Ukraine for producing ever more innovative policies and doctrines and designs and getting them to the front their F7 drone from last year, 2025, yeah, was basically voted the drone of the year for how good it was against emplacements and vehicles.

The new drone that the United States is going to be producing is called the F10. We know it’s 100% non-Chinese parts, and aside from that, we just know that the ten means it’s ten inches across, which means it’s a quadcopter and it is a first person drone. So you’re going to have a dude with a controller relatively close to the front line that suggests from its size that it has some range limitations, probably only 25 to 40km, and it probably can only carry a warhead that’s 3 or 4 kilos.

That’s probably not enough to take out a tank, but more than enough to wreck the day of, say, an artillery crew and go after personnel or trucks. That’s the good news. The bad news is there’s no sign at the moment that the F10 is one of the drones that has the terminal guidance that the Ukrainians have been starting to introduce across the front and across the entire drone fleet this past year. Those are the things that load a decision into the drone, so that when it gets over its target area, it can actually look around and pick a target for itself. And once it does that, it can’t be jammed. Now, this is just a contract. It’s part of the American program to try to get 200,000 drones in active service before the end of 2027, just next year.

But this is going to be a late bloomer in that, because the facility that has been tagged to build these drones in Ohio hasn’t begun construction yet. We only got go ahead for the construction last week, and they’re not expecting to finish construction until December of 2029. So three and a half years from now, and then they’ll start building out the first packet of drones.

And they’ve only ordered 2000 of them and at a rate of, say, 650 to $700. You know, these just aren’t particularly sophisticated drones, which is fine. The key thing is that for the first time, we have a direct contract from DoD for Ukrainian equipment, which is something we’ve been desperately to get in this country. I would argue, even though all of our Western allies and Middle Eastern allies are way ahead of us on this front, because they know they can’t rely on American hardware, there’s a lot of things can still go wrong.

For example, the reason we don’t have a contract until now is that Donald Trump personally despises President Zelensky of Ukraine. And it’s entirely possible at this moment that Trump is unaware that this contract even exists. And as soon as he finds out, he may well squash it. But hopefully it is the first of several thousand contracts to come that it would allow the United States to take advantage of the war zone in Ukraine, to help test an entirely new set of weapon systems and take advantage of the Ukrainian skill sets, which were by far the most advanced in the world when it comes to the designing and the use and the development of doctrine for these new types of hardware. Early days. Once this facility is constructed, it’s supposed to be producing a wide variety of defense equipment, of which Ukrainian drones are just one tiny little piece. So it’s a step in the right direction regardless. And I just hope that’s a small step all around a very long path of tighter partnership.

That’s probably just wishful thinking from me, but at least we have the first step.

The U.S. and Ukraine Make a Drone Deal