Attacks on Russian Data Centers: It’s Not About Bots

A bunch of blue wires connected to a server

If you thought some Ukrainian strikes on data centers could stop the Russians from interfering with the U.S. midterms, you are sorely mistaken. These strikes pose a much greater threat to the Russian economy than to its online disinformation apparatus.

Bots on social media platforms require very little computing power, which means posts can be rerouted through other systems. The real concern is about impacts on essential digital services. Since Russia only has around 200 facilities, it wouldn’t take much to disrupt everyday business operations like transactions, telecommunications, and logistics.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today I wanted to clear up some confusion about what’s going on in the Ukraine War, specifically with Russian attacks on data centers. Most coverage is about the amount of spam and hate bots that have kind of vanished from the system. And people aren’t really talking about the real issue here. 

So first of all, there has not been a meaningful decline in hate bots by the Russians. We all know that the Russians do a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot with disinformation. And with the US midterms coming active, they’re certainly pulling out all the stops to support or more likely, denigrate the candidates they don’t want. But we haven’t seen any meaningful restriction in that. The way internet traffic moves is automated things like that can just go to the next node and they get sent out. And the amount of data processing that that is required to do a social media post is minimal. So yes, seven of the largest data centers that Russia has have been hit and probably will not reopen anytime soon, months at a minimum. But that hasn’t affected their ability to tinker with the political space. 

What it does, however, is for things that require more processing and especially are more important for time on target. So, for example, when you swipe your credit card, you want it to go through in a second, maybe five seconds if you’re really slow. But all of that gets processed through data centers. The same with cell phone calls. It requires a live connection, second by second by second. And so when you start burning through data center capacity, a lot of these things that we just associate as background information in our everyday lives, start to fail. And unlike the United States, which literally has like 20,000 data centers, the Russians only have 200 and only about a dozen are bigger than about 50MW, which from an American point of view, is not a particularly large one. And seven of those have now been hit, which means it doesn’t take a very big campaign by the Ukrainians against the digital infrastructure in Russia to cause some catastrophic changes to every day normal life. 

We’re going to link back to a video here of all the things that data centers are used for, and obviously anything on your computer, anything that requires communications, things like ordering food for grocery stores, maintaining logistics, you know, these are all critical things. And what people forget about the Russian situation is that the Russians jumped over a couple of stages of development. If you go back to the 1980s Russia, they were basically using 1960s American technology that even have a fax, because the fax were illegal. And then in the 1990s, and going into the financial crisis of 2008, the Russians just got hammered, hammered, hammered, hammered, hammered. After 2008, they started importing large amounts of semiconductors and building their first data centers. And that has accelerated in the 15 years since. Because, remember, most of the technology that goes into most data centers is not restricted in any way. So even when the Russians have been under sanctions, they’ve been able to get in what they need. They can’t make any of it themselves, but they can certainly maintain a data center that other people provide the equipment for, which means that if their data center sector goes away for whatever reason, they don’t slip back to where they were in the 2000s, because where they were in the 2000s was basically the 1960s. So if you were to wave a magic wand and all the American data centers went away, it would it would suck. We’d have to be doing everything by fax again, and we’d have to go back to landline phones, which a lot of houses don’t even have any more. But if you’re in Russia, that intervening technology that the Americans, that the West was using in the 1970s and 80s 90s and 2000s 2010s. That doesn’t exist. So you’re talking about them going back to, from an American point of view, relatively early industrial communications technologies, and then you’re talking about something that, at a minimum, would probably result in the economic equivalent of a depression. Not to mention that the political effect of that sort of massive step backwards would be horrendous, because in the United States, if we went back to faxes, it would be it would suck. We would we would be angry, there would be protests, but we could function. It’s not clear that the Russian system could, because, remember, the Russians don’t have a lot of skilled labor left. Their demographic bomb went off in the 70s, and they stopped collecting meaningful data in the 2000s. So they don’t even really know how bad the situation is. But as a rule, skilled labor, especially in things like it, costs more in Russia than it does in the United States because there’s just so little supply. So if you pull the plug on that, send them back 40 years or more, you get some catastrophic outcomes. That’s what’s going on in Russia right now with Ukraine war.

Ground Drones Hit the Frontlines in Ukraine

Gladiator Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicle at Redstone Arsenal | Photo by Wikimedia Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator_tactical_unmanned_ground_vehicle#/media/File:Gladiator_240G.jpg

The Ukrainians have introduced ground drones to the battlefield, attacking Russian positions and disrupting logistics. This is yet another innovation emerging from this war that is shaking up how wars will be fought.

These ground drones have been used in frontline attacks via fiber-optic cables, as well as being dropped behind Russian lines by aerial drones. These ground drones offer new ways of targeting vehicles, supply depots, and other logistical targets.

Like all wartime innovations, it won’t be long before the Russians and others replicate this tech. And the prospect of having to deal with mobile IEDs is pretty damn scary.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Good morning from Colorado. Peter Zeihan here. And today we’re going to chat about a new innovation that the Ukrainians are using on the front in the war ground drones. Now when people think about ground drones, they naturally think of some sort of early version of The Terminator, you know, a giant track thing with giant machine guns that just plows through human formations. That’s not what’s in play here. These things at max are about 90 pounds, usually about half that. And they look honestly a little bit like some of the little off road radio controlled toys that you might have used as a kid. You got a photo of a couple of the models here. 

They’re used at the moment, it seems, in two different ways. The first one is for direct assaults on Russian positions, and basically they just drive up and explode. So, you know, think of tremors if you remember that movie. Alternatively, a heavy bomber drone, which the fact that heavy bomber drones even exist, heavy bomber drones can carry 90 pounds, ergo the limit, and they drop them behind enemy lines to attack vehicles and logistical support. Now I’m reading between the lines here, because the Ukrainians are not talking a lot about the details of these, because it’s a new weapon and it’s in operational use. And every place they’ve used it, they’ve surprised the hell out of the Russians. But it appears that the ones that are used for the direct ground assault on the front itself generally have fiber optic cables trailing behind them. And by doing that, they can’t be jammed. But it also means that their range is very, very limited and their maneuver is limited. Because once you start dropping a cable behind you, too much maneuvering and you’re going to get tangled up and it become useless. The big advantage of ground drones over air drones in this sort of operation is they can park and wait for hours, for days. Normally, an air drone is only going to be aloft for a few minutes, maybe as much as an hour. When you talk about the ones that are targeted to the front, but this way you can position things slowly ahead of time and then come back and activate a whole slew of them and just obliterate the Russian position in concordance with direct aerial attack and humans and maybe even tanks. 

The ones that are dropped behind enemy lines are really interesting though. Remember, the Russians are the best in the world at electronic warfare. And so one of the problems the Ukrainians have, especially on the front line, is getting through that. And that’s why those tethered drones, the fiber optic drones, exist both for ground and air units. But once you drop it off behind enemy lines, there is no way that you can have a digital tether to it. You’re talking about 5 to 15km behind enemy lines. A couple of things they have going for them. Number one, E-W is normally directed forward and up because they’re worried about communications and the worry about aerial attacks. It’s not necessarily going backwards and down. And so it is possible for the Ukrainian ground drones if they’re dropped behind enemy lines, literally sneak up behind the Russian positions in places where there’s more powerful EM, where it’s really more of a dome. However, that still won’t work, and you still need to control this thing. There is no sign at present that some of the memory drones that are capable of limited decision making are implanted into the ground units, because there just isn’t enough pilot data to really work with. So you do have to have a communications. So it does have to be outside of the EM bubble. That suggests that they’re using another aerial drone as a relay when they activate these things, but then they’re going after trucks on roads and tanks and depots and things like that that are well behind where you could reach with front line drones or artillery. And in doing so, it appears over the last several weeks, the Ukrainians have just completely gutted the Russians ability to supply parts of the front. 

So you can combine that with deeper strike drones, air drones, that are hitting things 100 and 200km behind enemy lines and basically the entire front section of the Russian front, the last 100-150km has become a no go zone for anyone who doesn’t have strong EM, and that has made resupply impossible. And that in at least in part, explains why the Ukrainians have made so much progress actually retaking territory throughout September. 

As with all technologies like this that are really just based on putting old parts together in new ways, you shouldn’t expect this to be a perennial Ukrainian advantage. Probably by this time next year the Russians will be using them. But you also have to consider that the technologies here are not going to be limited to the Ukraine front of the war between Russia and Ukraine. We’ve already seen some of those memory drones leak out and be used by the Iranians. And probably very soon the Houthis. You start applying the same logic to the ground drones, and we’re talking about a new sort of warfare emerging that is going to make it very difficult for any sort of projection based military to push force somewhere else. So just to pick a topic, the US Army, the hardest thing they do is the logistical supply to keep their forces operating. In Afghanistan, that required daily convoys of diesel trucks going through Pakistan, for example. In an area that is saturated with aerial drones, especially now ground drones, that becomes impossible because it used to be that they would have to worry about things like IEDs on the roadside, and that required certain techniques in certain vehicles and certain detection methods. If you’re dealing with a ground drone, it’s an IED that can move, and all of a sudden the entire supply system for what the US did throughout the war on terror just isn’t viable. And we’ve got to find a new way to do everything. We’re not going to figure that out in six months.

The End of Black Sea Shipping

A cargo ship in the water

With attacks throughout the Black Sea raining down from the Ukrainians and Russians, we’re seeing the collapse of Black Sea shipping unfold.

The latest attack was on a tanker just off the coast of Sochi. When attacks like this begin, it’s no longer viable to put ships in the region. This is the end of shipping in the Black Sea, and that has huge implications for both sides of this war.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. It is the 7th of October, and the news is that we’re very close to a collapse in shipping in the Black Sea. The Ukrainians and the Russians have been targeting each other’s shipping and ports since the beginning of this war. But in the last year, we’ve seen a huge amount of activity increase as the drones have gotten better telemetry. One side will do an innovation, the other side will copy it. So in this case, it’s the Russians that are doing the copying. Starting a few months ago, the Ukrainians started using open source satellite information to track Russian ships. Basically, you go from a port, say, Novorossiysk, and there’s only one way out of the Black Sea, which is the Turkish Straits as Istanbul. And so it’s more or less a straight line. And if you have a transponder, you’re obviously a legitimate ship. If you don’t have a transponder on, that means you’re part of the shadow fleet. And so basically, the Ukrainians have cross-referenced everything and just attacked anything that didn’t have a transponder on. The Russians are now basically doing the reverse, attacking things that do have transponders, but only if they’re in the economic zone of other countries, specifically Romania and Bulgaria. So we’ve had three hits in just the last, I think, 36 hours. 

In addition, the Ukrainians were the ones who basically invented naval drones, which is either a jet ski or a small motorboat packed with explosives. Now, the Russians are doing that as well, and the Black Sea is small enough, and Russian and Ukrainian technological skills are high enough that there is no safe part in the Black Sea that is out of range. So we’re getting attacks all over the place. And the newest one, it looks like the Ukrainians hit an oil tanker off the coast of Sochi, which is Vladimir Putin’s favorite vacation spot, and the whole thing is on fire. We’ll show you some footage here, and there’s really no way to put that out. Even if the Russians had the mitigation equipment, which they don’t in the Black Sea, this is simply too big of a fire. What this basically means is, unless ship captains are willing to risk life and limb every moment that they’re in the scene, unless insurance companies are willing to basically write off their insurance policies, it’s difficult to see any shipping persisting as long as these attacks are happening, and we should expect the Black Sea to be shut down in days at this point. This is one of Russia’s primary export routes, about a million and a half barrels per day. This is Russia’s primary oil and of course, grains export point. This is Ukraine’s primary wheat, steel, coal and sunflower and food oil export points. This is kind of a big deal. And this is really only step one, because the Ukrainians have already shown they can hit most Russian targets in the Baltic Sea as well. And if the Black Sea is now shut down, that is the next target. 

I’m a little surprised that it’s taken this long for the Black Sea to be shut down. But this is not just the beginning of the end of the Shadow Fleet. This is the end of the Ukrainian ability to earn hard currency as well. Everything else has to go out by rail. And because a lot of the things that Ukrainians export are also exported by the countries they border, like Poland and Romania and Hungary, those countries have basically said, you can send stuff through our system, but you can’t export it through our ports because that’s already claimed. So you have to take it another country further and get it to Germany and Belgium and in Greece, which of course just means you need more cars and more time and then ultimately less cargo. So this is a big hit economically to both sides. And we are just getting started.

How Diesel Could Shape the Ukraine War

Photo of diesel nozzles at a gas station | Licensed by Envato Elements

A U.S. diesel ban could have reverberating consequences for the Russian energy sector, following the sustained attacks by Ukraine. Russia is now relying on places like Kazakhstan, Belarus, and India to supplement its fuel supplies.

The Russians rely on diesel to transport damn near everything, so shortages will directly impact their military capabilities. Should the U.S. move forward with removing its diesel from the global market, the Russians won’t have long to come up with a solution.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Toronto, specifically Queen’s Harbor. Anyhow, I wanted to put my $0.02 on a discussion that’s been happening for the last few days, and that’s a diesel export ban here in the United States. Now, we’ve already done a core video. We’ll link to it here about the economics of that and why it would work or not. But there’s another consideration, because the country that used to be the world’s largest exporter of diesel fuel, Russia, is now an importer because of all the damage the Ukrainians have been inflicting upon the Russian refining complex. It’s part of the reason why Donald Trump at the moment doesn’t like Ukraine. He goes back and forth. Anyway, they have been forced to import diesel from Kazakhstan, Belarus and India, which, while they are exporters, are not huge exporters. Right now, the shortage in Russia is probably in excess of about 1.5 million barrels a day of oil equivalent, and that number has probably gone up in the last two weeks, because the Ukrainians really have been doubling down on the attacks. Diesel is a big deal in the United States because we transport everything by truck, but the Russians aren’t too far behind. Primary transport in Russia is really two ways rail or truck. And the further away you get from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the more likely you are to move from an electric train to a diesel train, and the more like you are to move to truck, because the road network is basically local, clustered around population centers. In addition, most jets, whether they’re civilian or military, use a similar cut from the refining stack. So while we might not have an official shortage of jet fuel, something to consider in the Russian context. But more importantly, most of the military hardware that the Russians are using in the Ukraine war, especially tanks and the supply trucks are going to be using diesel as well. 

Remember that since March, we have a new type of drone category that the Ukrainians are using memory drones, where basically the drone gets over an area, looks around it, looks into a decision tree that you’ve loaded into it, maybe some silhouettes, maybe a map and picks its own targets, which means that anything within about two, maybe even 300km of the front is getting hit by these drones all the time. And as you take out the fuel trucks, you basically snarl every aspect of the Russian attack. So anything that the Russians have been doing now has been done with low amounts of fuel, and with the United States possibly about to remove the last remaining large supply and the global standards, that leaves the Russians completely high and dry. 

I’m not suggesting that this is the point where the war turns. There’s just too many moving parts. But if we actually go a six month period or more where the Russians don’t have enough fuel to keep their system operational from a military point of view, then we really have entered a new phase in this conflict.

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.

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Transcript

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.

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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.

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Transcript

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.

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Transcript

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

A patriot missile being fired

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.

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Transcript

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

A Ukrainian soldier in the trenches

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.

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Transcript

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.