The ins and outs of the major oil and natural gas suppliers is a favorite topic of ours here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, and it forms a cornerstone of our expertise; my team and I have decades of combined experience on the issues facing global energy. Crack open any of my books and you’ll see that oil and gas are usually the topic of the longest chapters.
My second book, The Absent Superpower, chronicles the many outcomes of the American shale revolution. Most notable: an America able to divorce itself from the wider world, and a major regional war in which Russia invades…Ukraine.
The rapidly-building Ukraine War obviates nothing in the new book (thankfully), but it certainly focuses the mind on the burning questions of the day. How badly will the war impact the world’s second-largest energy exporter? Which consuming markets will be most (and least) impacted? How will those markets adapt to the sudden loss of Russian exports? How long will those losses last?
Join us March 4 for our next seminar on the fate of Russian energy, and how its foibles will shake the global economy off its foundation.
Can’t make it to the live webinar? No problem! All paid registrants will be sent a link to access the recording of the webinar and Q&A session, as well as a copy of presentation materials, after the live webinar concludes.
I thought it would be helpful to collect our recent newsletters on the subject of Russia and Ukraine in a single place for easy reference. As a reminder, the Zeihan on Geopolitics newsletter is free, and a searchable archive of all past newsletters is available here on our website.
Our team at Zeihan on Geopolitics is uniquely positioned to help industry leaders safeguard their interests in a global system that seems increasingly headed toward chaos. Anyone with overseas investments, operations and personnel knows that the global landscape has only become more uncertain.
Leveraging nearly 40 years of combined experience in geopolitical analysis, research and intelligence our custom analytical products and keynote presentations help our clients avoid risk and maximize opportunities, with a special emphasis on the following regions and industries:
The United States as an International Player
China and Northeast Asia
Europe and the Former Soviet Union
The Middle East and North Africa
Canada, Mexico and the Americas
India and South Asia
The US Shale Revolution and Global Energy Markets
Agriculture
Global Transport and Supply Chains
Manufacturing
Finance
Industrial Commodities
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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.
For those of you who have read my second book, The Absent Superpower, recent events in Ukraine should not come as a surprise. Chapter 6, The Twilight War, lays out how Russian geography and demographic realities would dictate Russian aggression in its immediate periphery. This is not a justification of Moscow’s aggression against its neighbor, but international watchers should not be feigning surprise. Nor should the current invasion of Ukraine be seen as a result of madness or a personal vendetta of Russian president Vladimir Putin; Russian leaders have viewed control of Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula and access to the Black Sea as vital to the security of Russia and Russian interests for centuries.
I would not argue that geopolitics is determinative. But geography tells a story. Russia’s wide-open, flat geography has provided little in the way of resistance to would-be invaders as varied as the Mongols and Napoleon, and the horrors of both World Wars still weighs heavily on the minds of Russians and their leaders. Does Putin wish for a return of the “glory” of the Soviet Union? Maybe. I can’t (and don’t want to!) claim any particular insights into the inner workings of his mind. But Putin’s flexing of his military might – in Chechnya and Georgia, and most recently in Ukraine – would not only have been understandable to Catherine the Great and the tsars (not to mention Soviet premiers), but seen as necessary for Russian security.
But unlike his predecessors, Putin’s working with a terminal demography. Russia’s geography certainly hasn’t improved, but in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 a collapsing healthcare sector, skyrocketing alcohol and substance abuse, falling birthrates, declining life expectancies, and the ravages of disease – including tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS – has left Moscow to secure vast territories with a shrunken, and shrinking, military. If Russian geography can help explain the why of recent aggression, Russian demography can help us understand the timing. It’s now or never, and for Russian leaders the latter isn’t an option.
Consider the above map from The Absent Superpower. Pushing into and securing the Caucuses gives Russia a hard, mountainous border to the south of its critical access zones to the Black Sea (and through the Turkish Straits, the Mediterranean). After a couple of largely successful military campaigns in the mid-aughts, plus a friendly Armenia, there is precious little to impede Russia from imposing its will in the region. Russia’s western flank and its broad swathes of flat geography isn’t so easily secured.
The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and the Russian-backed breakaway region of Transnistria aren’t Russian by accident. They bookend the narrowest part of the European peninsula. Securing them is vital for Russian national security interests, and in Moscow’s view the land bridge between them – better known as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine – exists to either link and secure Russia interests, or to threaten them.
Securing Ukraine is in no way the final step, but rather the necessary launching pad (along with Belarus) to securing the Baltic states and eastern Poland. I might have apologized for seeming alarmist before today’s events, but I think the last several weeks have shown the lack the lack of empathetic understanding on the West’s behalf of Russia and how it perceives its neighborhood and its future. The Russians do not see the Ukraine War as a war of aggression, or Putin’s egoistical quest for Soviet glory. Expect the Russians to fight as if their lives depend on the victory. In their minds, that’s precisely what’s on the line.
Our team at Zeihan on Geopolitics is uniquely positioned to help industry leaders safeguard their interests in a global system that seems increasingly headed toward chaos. Anyone with overseas investments, operations and personnel knows that the global landscape has only become more uncertain.
Leveraging nearly 40 years of combined experience in geopolitical analysis, research and intelligence our custom analytical products and keynote presentations help our clients avoid risk and maximize opportunities, with a special emphasis on the following regions and industries:
The United States as an International Player
China and Northeast Asia
Europe and the Former Soviet Union
The Middle East and North Africa
Canada, Mexico and the Americas
India and South Asia
The US Shale Revolution and Global Energy Markets
Agriculture
Global Transport and Supply Chains
Manufacturing
Finance
Industrial Commodities
If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.
The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.
Russia’s months-long build up of troops along the Ukrainian border is starting Russia has followed through with its months-long threats of invasion of Now that the question of a Russian invasion of Ukraine has proven itself not to be a hypothetical, Western governments will be pushed to respond. The United States and its European allies are likely to pursue a sanctions campaign, but this is easier said than done. While it has been popular to deride Russia and its economy as a “gas station” masquerading as a country, the reality is that Russia is a significant–often the largest–exporter of several critical commodities. Russian exports directly feed and fuel (or enable the processes to do so) vast swathes of the world from South America to the Middle East and East Asia–in addition to lighting and heating European homes and supplying crude oil to US Gulf Coast refineries. For the latter scenario, Russian crude exports to the world’s largest oil producer picked up significantly in 2021 as a result of US sanctions against Venezuela, illustrating the double-edged nature of sanctions in the globalized economy.
If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.
The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.
Russia’s months-long build up of troops along the Ukrainian border is starting Russia has followed through with its months-long threats of invasion of Ukraine. The Russian military has not focused on securing the separatist republics of eastern Ukraine; rather, the Russian military under the direction of President Vladimir Putin have launched missile and air strikes across the country with an aim of crushing not only the Ukrainian military but dismantling the independent government in Kyiv in total.
If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.
The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.
In a public broadcast late February 21 (local time), Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a lengthy, moody speech about the status of relations between Russia and its neighbor, Ukraine. Putin in essence declared a formal cold war with the West, while also making clear his belief that an independent Ukraine should not exist – going so far as to erroneously claim the nation a creation of Lenin, and that he will do something about it.
Effective immediately, Putin formally recognized the two secessionist bits of Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk) that he has been supporting with special forces troops, weapons, intelligence, and air support for the past seven years. In his mind, they are now “independent countries” and “allies.”
This is the identical playbook to what Putin did in a couple of provinces of another former Soviet state – Georgia – back in the 2000s. The idea being that these Russian-created, Russian-funded, and Russian-armed statelets are “allies”; allies deserve Russian troops to “protect” them; and under Russian law such Russian deployments are empowered to attack territories adjacent to the new allies to secure allied interests. In 2008 similar Russian deployments led to a brief war which smashed the military of Georgia. Russian troops remain in Georgian territory today.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Russians have been steadily amassing multiple invasion forces on Ukraine’s borders for a couple of months now, with the most recent guesstimate of the force total approaching 200,000, the greatest concentration of focused military power the world has seen since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. On a number of occasions, the Russians have claimed to be withdrawing forces, but civilian satellite monitoring has vividly illustrated that such “removed” troops have redeployed closer to the border. In the aftermath of today’s speech, multiple unconfirmed reports already indicate that Russian troops have moved into Donetsk and Luhansk.
Russia propaganda isn’t what it once was. In Soviet times it was often subtle, working through multiple intermediaries to provide rhetorical buffers, while also trickling into the conventional wisdom. It would seem to seep in from…everywhere. Now it’s just literally making up easily-disprovable stuff up on live television, and then moving on to the next blatant lie. About the only people who give it any credence are folks who have no choice (think: Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko) or folks who have consciously blended the Russian lies into their own domestic ideological narratives (think: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, US Senator Bernie Sanders, or Fox News Host Tucker Carlson). Even Chinese state media is giving the Russians a look that communicates “Really? That’s what you’re going with?”
Russian leadership isn’t what it once was. Once it became clear in 1975 that Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev was little more than an occasionally shuffling corpse, real power shifted to the Soviet intelligence directorate, specifically KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov. This shouldn’t shock. The Soviet system existed in an information vacuum, so the people with the most power were those who actually knew what was real and what was propaganda. In time Andropov became Soviet premier, as did two of his acolytes: Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev. And then the Soviet Union ended.
About the same time the KGBers took over, the Soviet Union went broke. The late-1970s and 1980s were a time of immense economic upheaval and near collapse (which preceded worse upheaval and actual collapse). One of the many ways the late-Soviet leadership attempted to square their failing circles was to reduce government spending. On everything. But most notably on education. Mass science and technical and manufacturing education in the Soviet Union in effect ended in the early 1980s. Russia is a pale shadow of the Soviet Union, and Russia never restarted mass educational efforts. Which means the last crop of Soviet KGB agents and leaders are the sole remaining pool of talent from which today’s Russian leadership can draw. Putin is 69. The youngest people who had completed their Soviet education before the bottom fell out are now 59. The average life expectancy for Russian males is 64.
The Russian strategic position is not what it was. The Russian heartlands are great wide opens. Defending great wide opens takes more troops than any country could supply. So, as Russian czar Catherine the Great famously put it, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” Extend them until they reach a physical feature that blocks invasion. Doing such would enable Russian troops to hunker down and plug the gaps between mountain and desert and sea.
At the height of Soviet power, the Russians controlled all nine of those geographic gaps that allow entry to the Russian heartlands. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia commanded but one. Courtesy of Putin’s wars of expansion and “peacekeeping” efforts in the former Soviet space, the Russians now have forces in six. Of the remaining gateways, two lie on Ukraine’s western border: the Polish and Bessarabian Gaps.
In my mind, the question was never “will” Russia invade Ukraine and attempt to absorb it in totality, but instead “when”. The Kremlin has been threatening Kiev for a decade now. My caution to today’s Russia watchers has been that there was little occurring which suggested this season’s round of Russian angst and anger was in any way unique.
Until today. Putin’s speech does more than merely suggest that Russia is ready to go.
Sanctions – real or imagined, in-place or threatened – will not shift Putin’s stance. For Russia, control of Ukraine isn’t simply seen as a birthright, but as an issue of national survival. The Russian population suffers so completely from drug abuse, alcoholism, malnutrition, and disease that it is the world’s fastest collapsing demography (although recent statistical updates suggest China is challenging Russia for the top spot). Patrolling Russia’s current borders is laughably beyond the capacity of Russia’s current population. But forward-positioning what troops remain in those gateways? That just might work. So, the Russians will try.
About the only would-be sanction which might – might – earn a blink from the Kremlin would be if the Europeans all swore off Russian oil and natural gas. That export line-item is far and away the Russian government’s largest money-maker, accounting for a hefty majority of income. But in doing so the Europeans would be cutting off their primary energy provider, condemning themselves to the dark and cold. And so that specific threat hasn’t happened. I’d be impressed – and shocked – if it did.
I’d be equally shocked if the fall of Ukraine were the end of the story. Ukraine is not a NATO ally. The West will not send regular troops to support Ukraine. That makes Ukraine – with its 45-million-strong population – the easy target. What assistance arrives will be designed to snarl the Russians in as painful and bloody of an occupation as possible. The real show – the real war – comes after. The two most important gateways to the Russian heartland remain: the Baltic Sea coast and the portion of the Polish gap that lies in, well, Poland. Unlike Ukraine, the countries in question here – Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – are members of the NATO alliance. And of the European Union as well.
The Baltic beaches and the plains of Poland are where the future of Russia and the West, of the European Union and NATO, will ultimately be decided. It is there that Russia will succeed or die. This is far worse than it sounds. Russia’s population is in free-fall. A Russian occupation of Ukraine completed to Russia’s satisfaction will still absorb most of what’s left of Russia’s conventional military capabilities, leaving only the decidedly unconventional available for the next conflict.
Russia won’t fight its Twilight War with soldiers.
If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.
The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.
Russia’s months-long build up of troops along the Ukrainian border is starting to yield tangible results… though perhaps not in the way that Moscow originally intended. Rather than successfully convincing NATO and the United States that any milque-toast defense of Kyiv would not be worth their while, Russia has instead watched as political and materiel support for its former Soviet satellite steadily increase.
If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.
The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.
Russia has maintained a threatening posture against Ukraine, including maintaining approximately 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border. The United States and the United Kingdom have taken the lead in crafting a set of financial sanctions they are threatening to levy against Russia in the case of any aggression. Moscow has said that such a move would result in a cessation of energy supplies to the Europeans–who happen to get about 30% of their oil and natural gas from Russia.
Russia’s energy leverage over the EU (and as many other states as it can connect itself to via pipelines) is significant, particularly in terms of natural gas. Global liquefied natural gas production–including the burgeoning US LNG industry–might help alleviate some of these pressures, but not all.
If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.
The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.
Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.
Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.
The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.
Financial sanctions; diplomatic isolation; peer pressure – these are the tools the West is using to convince the Putin government that it should abandon its “Ukraine adventure.”
They are the wrong tools for the wrong job. The Russians are not in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine to boost Putin’s popularity at home or out of a fit of pique that Ukraine had a revolution. Russian power is in motion as part of the first stage of an extended effort to secure the Russian homeland. Moscow will continue until the European Union and NATO either form an unbreakable wall of opposition or crumble.
Russian territory is part of an endless flatland unparalleled in the world. The open portions of the Eurasian steppe are nearly as large as the entirety of the US Lower-48. Web-working infrastructure across its arid plains proved so expensive that even the strategic-minded, price-insensitive Soviets sharply circumscribed their efforts. Even today, only one road and two rail corridors venture east of the Urals to lay claim to Siberia. Russia is a place where only a manpower-heavy military capable of swarming over vast tracks of land can rule effectively. Let’s call it the Hordelands.
Key to ruling the Hordelands is the ability to limit outsiders from entering them; once they do, any defender becomes locked in a war of mobility and attrition. The trick is to reinforce all nine of the lands’ access points: the Tien-Altay Gap, the Central Asian Corridor, the two Caucasus coastal approaches, the Crimea, the Bessarabian Gap, the Polish Gap, the Baltic coast and the White Sea coast. Failure transforms the Hordelands into a bloody buffet. The Soviet Union once controlled all nine. The day the Soviet Empire fell in 1992, those holdings were reduced to two. With Russia’s reacquiring of the Crimea in February, Moscow now is up to three.
That explains why, but not why now? The Russian resurgence began almost fifteen years ago, shortly after which Russia rationalized its finances and debt. As early as 2006, high energy prices granted the Kremlin more cash than it could spend. Russia proved it could implement complex and sustained intelligence and military operations as early as 2008. Why now, in 2014, is Moscow finally moving?
Simply put, it is running out of people.
Immediately after the Cold War’s end, the bottom fell out of the Russian birth rate, gutting the lower ranks of the Russian population structure. A quarter of a century later, there are more 50-somethings than teenagers. In five short years, those teenagers will prove inadequate to fill the Red Army’s ranks. If Russia is to use that army to re-anchor the Hordelands’ access points, it needs to do so while it has enough soldiers.
Instead, a would-be engineer must first apprentice with an established engineer for several years. Technical training in Russia collapsed before the Soviet fall, and now the youngest cadre of engineers who have the full suite of technical skills has entered their 50s. In chauvinist Russia, nearly all are men, and according to the last non-politicized data that escaped the Federal State Statistics Service, male mortality is only 59. Maintaining the Russian system — which includes everything from the national rail network to the natural gas fields to Moscow’s steam tunnels to the Red Army to the nuclear missile forces — for a territory as expansive as the Hordelands requires a huge skilled labor pool that Russia simply no longer has. In a few short years, Russia will degrade from having a very small and expensive skilled labor pool to not having one at all, forcing the Russians to choose which bits of their system to not maintain.
If the re-anchoring is not achieved soon, Russia will lose the ability to even try, which would condemn it to wither from within. While the overall Russian demography is failing, the damage is almost wholly concentrated among ethnic Russians. There are many minorities — largely Muslim minorities such as the Tatars and the Chechens — whose demographics are as young, healthy and growing as the Russians are aging, sick and shrinking. Adding Ukrainians and more to the mix will certainly make managing Russia’s “internal” issues more complicated, but intimidating minorities into compliance is a bit of a national pastime. Russia has been doing it — and doing it with frightening effectiveness — so long as there has been a Russia. Maintaining control over such diverse groups in a country with secure external borders is feasible. Doing it with exposed borders is not.
And so the Russians are coming. Coming for Crimea, and Donetsk and Torez and Luhansk and Slovyansk and Odessa. And not just for Ukraine, but for Georgia and Armenia and Azerbaijan and Moldova and Belarus. And when that is done Romania and Estonia and Lithuania and Latvia and Poland. In an era when there enough Russians to man Russia, Moscow thinks of the independence of all of these places as a disturbing academic exercise. In an era where Russia is running out of Russians, the independence of all of these places is a mortal threat. The Russians will not stop until either they re-anchor or are made to stop, and there currently simply isn’t a recognition in Europe that this has already gotten very real.
Which brings us to two outcomes: one financial, one strategic.
Financially, the Russians have far more room to maneuver than most think. They have $1 trillion saved in various funds — one of the upsides of a demography that is dying young is that retirement funds can be used for other things — and can survive any sanctions the West can throw at them. The Russians also are making a gambit for survival, and if pushed willing to walk away from everything – partnerships with ExxonMobil, debt payments, shipments of nickel, even long-term natural gas sales. Russia is happy to continue to sell the world its wares — and certainly prefers to — but if a choice is forced between Russia’s expansion to defensible borders and a few hundred billion in annual economic gains, bet on gritty austerity rather than capitulation to sanctions.
Strategically, three of the Hordelands’ access points — Bessarabia, Poland and the Baltic — will require the Russians challenging EU and NATO members. Aside from a few hundred troops rotating through NATO’s border states, there currently is no indication that any EU or NATO country is taking the Russian advance seriously. Moreover, the European countries — and this includes the five NATO/EU members that face the direct threat — have had 25 years to wean themselves off of Russian energy, but have instead moved in the opposite direction. Their strategic policy is to rely on Russia to keep the lights on, and to rely on America to protect them from Russia. The result of those (in)actions is a painfully uncomfortable question: will the Americans bleed for those who have proven unwilling to raise anything but the pitch of their voices in their own defense?
Those curious can find the answer to that question and the world that unfolds in its aftermath in The Accidental Superpower, available November 4, 2014.
