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.

What Happens After Trump and Putin Split?

Split Screen of Putin and Trump with a question mark

On Monday, I talked about the impending breakup between Putin and Trump, and the “plan” that Trump has laid out following the split. But the fallout from this relationship isn’t so straightforward.

There’s a 50-day horizon for Russia and Ukraine to sign a peace deal before the tariffs on everything Russian kick in, but that’s just the beginning of the logistical nightmare for Trump.

With a hollowed-out government and a lineup of Witkoff, Gabbard, and Vance to deal with, real policy change is just a distant glimmer that Trump might not ever see. Unless, of course, Trump welcomes experts with open arms, rebuilds his foreign policy team, and let’s someone into the room who is smarter than him…

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re gonna talk about Donald Trump and Russia and Ukraine, war and tariffs and sanctions and blah, blah, blah. So in the last couple of days, Donald Trump has gone out publicly and said repeatedly that he’s really pissed off at Vladimir Putin because Vladimir Putin has been saying all the nice things, and then it’s all bullshit. 

And he just continues the war. Now, anyone who has been following the Ukraine war at all, or really Russian relations for the last 35 years, knows that this is not a new thing. The Russians lie a lot. And on the Ukraine war specifically, they feel that this is a strategic issue for them and they will say anything to continue the conflict. 

They will continue not just until they have conquered all of Ukraine, but until they’ve gotten a number of countries further to the west. Donald Trump came in saying that he knows Putin very well and he can negotiate a truce in a day, and obviously things have not worked out that way. And so with every stage, Putin is basically lied to Trump more and more and more, and it has made Trump look like a fool in the eyes of the international community, and not just a few Republicans back at home in the United States. 

And it seems that in the last couple of weeks that has finally reached a critical mass. So the current threat from Donald Trump is if in 50 days, Vladimir Putin has not agreed to some sort of ceasefire and peace deal, details TBD, then there will be a 50 to 100% tariff on everything from Russia and an another 50 to 100% tariff on anyone who buys stuff from Russia. 

Now, the logistics of implementing this would be colorful, because we don’t have an institution in the United States to handle things. Secondary sanctions, especially not at that kind of volume, because it would apply, among other things, to China. But let’s just assume for the moment that Trump is serious about this, for this to happen. Three things have to go down in the Trump cabinet because remember, remember, remember, Donald Trump has the least staffed government in American history, still hasn’t filled out over 90% of the appointed positions. 

He is the least capable and least competent national security team, and the one person on his national security team actually knows what’s what is the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who’s been pushed to the side and really has no impact on meaningful policy. So there’s three personalities you need to watch how Trump interacts with them. The first one is a guy named Steve Witkoff who does not belong in government at all. 

He is a real estate developer in New York. He’s an old buddy of Trump, and Trump has been throwing about every international issue the Ukraine, Russian negotiations, the Iranian negotiations, the Israeli guys and corrections of this guy knows nothing about any of it. And it’s obvious because as soon as he gets into the room, whichever group happens to have the best PR basically twists them around their little finger and gets him to spout their propaganda up to and including in Donald Trump’s ear. 

That is absolutely how the Russian situation has evolved, which is the primary reason why Trump looks so dumb when he’s talking about Ukraine and Russia specifically, and in foreign affairs in general. So Witkoff probably has now been edged out because it’s difficult to imagine how Donald Trump would have had a change of heart to this degree if Witkoff were still being allowed in the room. 

Time will tell, but it looks like he’s already gone. That’s number one. Number two, the director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi Gabbard, has been a Russian plant and a Russian agent long, long before she joined the government. Long, long before she became a Republican. She used to be a Democrat. And part of the presidential debate briefings were about how she was somebody who was probably already on the Russian payroll. 

And even if you don’t believe any of that, look at her foreign policy stances. If it involves the United States. Tulsi Gabbard has been on the opposite side of the United States on all issues regarding China and North Korea and Iran and Syria and Libya and, of course, Russia going back 20 years. And one of the first things that she did when she took over as DNI was to basically fire everyone on the Russian desk who would tell the truth to the president. 

And then she spent most of her time going through whatever had been published and redacting it, to put it in Russian propaganda and Russian propaganda. To this day remains her primary source of information. So if she’s not specifically and directly working for Vladimir Putin, then the Venn diagram that represents their worldviews is almost a perfect circle. It’s probably 99% overlap, with the remaining 1% being hairstyles because Putin is bald. 

And Tulsi Gabbard, I will give this to her. Her hair is fabulous. Number three Vance J.D. Vance is part of a group of people that are directly in the U.S. government, or one foot in, one foot out, like, say, Elon Musk, who are a certain flavor of white, ultra nationalist, Christian, ultra nationalist, based on how you want to phrase that. 

Anyway, they see Russia as the great white hope, as the country that has been suffering and pushing to protect the white race. Now, of course, that is unmitigated bullshit because the Russians are equal opportunity genocides and the Ukrainians are whiter than the Russians. But he’s the vice president, and he can’t just be pushed to the side and set out to pasture like, say, Witkoff. 

And even somebody like, say, Tulsi Gabbard can just be fired on a whim. Vice president is a little different. Even if formerly officially, the president can just fire the VP, which there would be a court case. Congress is going to get involved one way or the other. It’s a big step for Trump to turn on Vance. Now, I’m not saying that any of these are going to happen. I’m saying that this is what has to go down. If we’re going to see a meaningful change in foreign policy out of this administration on the question of Ukraine and Russia, now, does that change need to happen? 

Oh dear God, yes. We’ve had some really disastrous decisions made on national security as regard this topic. But even if all three of those people were suddenly gone, it doesn’t really solve the overall problem. Trump has a real issue with letting people in the room who know more about a topic than he does. That’s one of the reasons why the government is so lightly staffed. 

That’s one of the reasons why Rubio has been banished to the sideline. And so he would have to do one of two things. Number one, he’d have to dedicate his entire presidency to this one question, because this is this is a lot. And just keeping up to date on it would be robust, especially if you don’t have any deputies. 

Or number two, we’d have to see him turn the page back quite a ways to something that more resembled what he did in the first Trump presidency, when he brought in lots of people from the national security establishment and from the Republican Party, and actually stepped up a proper government. Now, that didn’t work very well, because as soon as I said anything that made him feel little or unintelligent, he fired them. 

But the whole point of being a good leader is to know what you don’t know when. Surround yourself with people who do. No, he hasn’t done that. If he starts to do that, then we’re looking at a very different presidency. But there’s a saying about carts and horses, and we are not there yet.

Trump and Putin Split, Ukraine Gets Aid Again

Split Screen of Putin and Trump

It looks like Trump is going through another breakup, this time with Vladimir Putin. After years of deception and lies, Putin’s most recent reneging of promises to Trump seems to be the final straw; Trump has announced that US arms shipments to Ukraine would resume.

Since the Russians failed to defend any of the “red lines” that they established during the Biden administration, Trump can send pretty much anything to Ukraine without risk of an immediate major escalation. That doesn’t mean Trump shouldn’t be careful, he just has more flexibility in providing aid than the previous administration had.

On the economic side of things, Senator Lindsey Graham has proposed slapping a 500 percent secondary tariff on any country handling Russian crude. This sounds great in theory, but in practice it’s a legal and logistical pandora’s box that’s best left sealed.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Brilliant. Sunny day. We may. May, may, may be on the edge of a significant shift in American relations with Russia and Ukraine. For those of you who have not been in a hole or drowning in conspiracy theories for the last couple of years, you will know that Vladimir Putin has been lying to Donald Trump’s face for quite some time and has gotten him in bit by bit by bit to move away from Ukraine for reasons that are very, very positive for Russia and very, very negative for the United States. 

In the long run. But time and time again, Trump has basically been made a fool of on the international stage and then has covered for Trump and either peeled back sanctions or removed weapons that were being shipped to Ukraine, and to basically take steps that will cause decades of international problems for the United States moving forward. Well, the tide may be turning. 

In the last week, we’ve had three communications between the white House and the Kremlin, all of which Putin basically lied to Trump to his face and then told Trump he wasn’t going to do anything that he didn’t want to do, including signing any sort of meaningful peace deal with Ukrainians up to and including the point where, Trump felt that he publicly needed to declare that he was sending weapons to the Ukrainians again. 

If you guys remember, a couple of weeks ago, the Defense Department basically canceled a lot of weapons shipments for weapons that we have not used in 30 years. Saying that we didn’t have enough supplies, which is exactly something that the Russians have planted into the American system because so few of the old Russians have been allowed to continue working for the Trump administration. 

Most of them have been fired, either from defense, from the Bureau, from the NSA, or from the CIA itself. Anyway, something seems to be breaking in Trump’s mind, and that kind of forces us to consider this from a couple different directions. Number one, I’m sure we all know people who have fallen for conspiracy theories, and we have all know people who have fallen for lies. 

And when you call them out, they take it personal and they blame you instead of the people who have been lying to them. And Trump is no different from any of those. However, when they do finally make the adjustment, they tend to over adjust. We’ll do it in their own way, saying that this was all part of a test and I was playing the long game or whatever it happens to be. 

But when they do finally adjust, they tend to overcompensate because they’ve been made to look really stupid, and now they feel they need to look strong again. And when the person who feels that he’s been made to look stupid and now needs to feel strong again, is the president of the United States can get really real really fast. 

So the question isn’t so much Will Trump eventually change tune? No one can decide that but him. The question is, what will he do in terms of military actions? There’s actually a fair amount of room for ramp up. One of the things that people loved and hated about how the Biden administration treated the Ukraine war is we never knew what the Russian red line was. 

Will it be providing something that’s more advanced than a bullet to the Russians? So we eased in. Will it be mid-range weaponry? Will it be aircraft? Will be the Abrams tank at every step. There was a lot of debate about whether or not this would push us to a nuclear exchange with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. A lot of people said, no, you need to do what’s right for the right reasons or just do it. 

And I think, I think there’s nukes in play. There needs to be some nuance here. And so the Biden administration may, in retrospect, have gone slower than a lot of proponents for Ukraine would have argued. But considering that if you got it wrong once. Yeah. Anyway, how it left the last year, the Biden administration is that the United States was up to and including allowing mid-range and even long range American missiles to be used by the Ukraine’s launch from Ukraine into Russia proper. 

And the Russians did nothing. So all of the roughly 80 red lines that the Russians had established proved to be false, which means that there’s really no American conventional weapons systems that could be deployed to Ukraine that are in risk of even going another level up, because all the levels that are short of direct American involvement have already been ticked. 

So it really is just a question of what sort of weapons systems the Trump administration decides it wants to share, and that could be a whole lot of things. Keep in mind that roughly 85% of the equipment that we have sent to Ukraine is stuff that the US military hasn’t used in 30 years. So we’re not talking about anything for most of this stuff that generates a shortfall in what the United States has in its reserves. 

That’s that’s for the most part, a falsity of the remaining 15%. About half of that is ammo, mostly artillery. And that is something to be concerned about. And the United States has basically quadrupled its production of artillery ammo over the time of the Ukraine war. It needs to be expanded more. And then the final little bit are things like patriots that we actually do use. 

And those are a legitimate concern. But most of the weapons systems that the Russians are using to attack Ukraine are low tech drones and missiles, that the Patriot really isn’t the appropriate weapon system for. It’s not that it doesn’t have a use, it’s just it’s not a headline issue that really changes the balance of power. So there’s a whole world full of American munitions that have been developed and deployed since 1992, that the United States could throw into this mix. 

But just keep in mind that most of them like, say, the Abrams would require additional training and perhaps technology transfer in a way that the United States really hasn’t considered at this point. And considering that the US Defense Department has been just as gutted as all the other American government agencies the people would handle, these details really aren’t present in volume anymore, making it a very technical conversation that is very much beyond the capacity of the US defense secretary. 

He was arguably the most incompetent person in the government right now. There’s no one to lead this conversation in a meaningful way like we used to have. So even when you take somebody at the top who’s likely to make a knee jerk reaction, we could get some really erratic policies here with some very, very powerful weapon systems and some very, very proprietary technology which could lead us down a lot of roads that in the long term could be more problematic than beneficial. 

That’s number one. Number two, let’s talk about the economics of it. The Trump administration, Trump specifically has started to make positive sounds about a bill going through the US Senate, sponsored by US Senator Graham of South Carolina. 

Anyway, Graham has been a Russia hawk since the beginning of the war. 

Has really been pushing the Trump administration to take a firmer line. Works pretty much hand in glove with the Biden administration on the aid packages that happened under his term, and has been visibly upset with the inclusion of basically pro-Russian and maybe even Russian agent provocateurs within the Trump administration, up to including the white House, with Tulsi Gabbard, of course, being the worst of them all. 

Anyway, this bill, if it was turned into law, would enable the US president to put a 500% secondary tariff on any country that absorbed any Russian crude. Wow, that would be fun. Now, there’s some obvious problems with the bill in its current form, and that’s one of the reasons why the Trump administration has reached out to Senator Graham’s office. 

Number one, there’s not a lot of flexibility for the US administration, which is in part by design. But if the Trump administration is more willing to engage the senator on this topic, and honestly, it would pass through the Senate with flying colors if it was put forward. It’s an issue of enforcement. Okay. Secondary sanctions are something that have yet to be done, and the US does not have the staff in place to do them. 

You basically just have to get a declaration out of what the Commerce Department, the Treasury, the State Department is saying that this country is in violation. And so bam, all of a sudden, imports from that country are going to cost six times as much as they did. It’s a bit of a lower. The boom would get everybody’s attention. But how it being enforced is a bit of a question. Second, it doesn’t necessarily cover things like the Shadow fleet. So right now, about half of Russia’s oil exports are transported by ghost tankers. Things that are either uninsured or UN flagged or unsafe or old or should have been broken down into scrap years ago. It comes out to about 2 million barrels of crude a day. 

And one of the reasons that the Biden administration never really went after the shadow fleet, it was, was unclear again how to do the enforcement. You just grab the ships on the high seas because they’re not going to dock at any Allied port because they’ll be confiscated. And if you decide that you’re going to use your Navy to basically go out and do privateering, what becomes of the ship? 

What becomes of the cargo? Is it now the property of the country that confiscated it? And all of a sudden you have sovereign countries engaging in a degree of piracy in a world where there’s something like 15,000 ships on the high sea at any given time, you’ll never get a legal framework for dealing with it, because there’s not a legal framework for how ships are handled on the high seas. 

Now, it’s just kind of this gentlemen’s agreement and a bunch of winks and nods and handshakes that everyone agrees that they want free commerce, so they let it all flow. If you start interfering with that without a mechanism, then all of a sudden all commerce everywhere to a degree becomes under threat, because the precedent will be set that a state can just go out and grab things. 

The Biden administration couldn’t figure out a mechanism to make that work without breaking down global trade, which is not something they were willing to do. The Trump administration is broadly hostile to global trade, might not think that they need a mechanism, and might just go do it, which could lead to any number of less than satisfactory secondary effects. 

So the Trump administration is entering this era where the knee is about to jerk, and it’s probably going to kick out and do some things that some people might like in the short term, but it will trigger all kinds of problems in the long term. And this is going to fall very, very clearly under the category of things that you wish for. 

Don’t always go the way that you were hoping.