Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Back from my backpacking trip. I’m back in Colorado, and today we are going to talk about the most recent evolutions in the Ukraine war, which are wildly significant. Let’s deal with this from the least important to the most. First of all, going into Russia itself—nobody invades Russia on a whim.

I mean, part of the problem that the Russians have always had expanding from Moscow is that there is no logical place to stop this within a thousand miles of them. So they expand, conquer some minorities, occupy them, try to crucify them, turn them into cannon fodder, and throw them at the next line of minorities.

And they continue this process over and over and over and over and over, until they eventually reach a geographic barrier that they can actually hunker down behind, which is typically like the Baltics, the Carpathians, and the Black Sea. It works until it doesn’t. What we’re seeing with Russia right now is that the demographic decline among the Russian ethnicity is so high that within a few years, they’re going to have problems occupying their own populations.

Anyway, anyone who wants to attack Russia has to do that in reverse. And even if you make it all the way to Moscow, that’s not all of the Russian Federation territory. You basically have to go until Russia is broken. And by Russia, I mean the population. We have the possibility of seeing that in the next 10 or 20 years, but we’re not there yet.

The incursion that the Ukrainians have made into Russia proper isn’t all that impressive from a territorial point of view. Basically, in the last two weeks, the Ukrainians have invaded Russia proper. They’ve taken over about 1,000 km² in the province of Kursk. The question is why? And what is next? Well, the Ukrainian plan seems to be to take a pretty sizable bite out of the territory.

They have already destroyed the three permanent bridges that are over the River Cem, which is an East-West river that cuts through Kursk Province. By doing that, they’ve made it very difficult for the Russians to reinforce the territories around where this incursion has been. We know that the Ukrainians are currently expanding on at least four different axes: northwest, northeast, north, and east.

In doing so, they’re basically looking to swallow, at least temporarily, about half the province—about 6,000 mi². To give you an idea of scale, the Donbas in the southeast, where most of the fighting has been concentrated for the last year and a half, and the Ukraine war combined, is about 20,000 mi². So, you’re talking about an area about a third of that territory.

The 1,000 square kilometers that the Ukrainians have captured so far is greater than the entirety of what the Russian army has achieved in the Donbas in the last 18 months. So, from a Russian point of view, this is a small amount of territory. From a Ukraine war point of view, it’s a huge amount of territory. And because those bridges are now out, the Russians can only resupply with pontoons.

Unlike hard bridges that require some pretty heavy weaponry to take out, pontoons can be taken out by much shorter-range things like artillery. And they are. So, the Russian ability to fight back has been relatively limited. The question is, how far can this be pushed? Why is it happening? Let’s start with the why. I have always identified the city of Belgorod as one of the cities that the Ukrainians have to neutralize if they’re ever going to win this war because it’s the tip of the spear for Russian forces. This is where, in the northern theater, all of their armies and all of their artillery are concentrated because it’s at the end of the logistical lines. It’s a big rail and road hub. Well, if the Ukrainians are capable of basically taking the southern half of Kursk Province, they take out most of the infrastructure that feeds into Belgorod.

So, it neutralizes a city of a million people without actually going in and conquering a city of a million people, which I’ve got to say is pretty clever if they can pull it off. And with the bridges now out of the equation, I’d say there’s an even chance that they’re going to be able to pull that off. However, this is the end of their deployable reserves.

The Russian strategy is basically to launch a lot of artillery assaults, send in a huge number of barely trained—if trained at all—conscripts to soak up ammo and pin Ukrainian defenders in place, and then follow up with more and more and more artillery. It’s a very slow, grinding process, but because the Russians have manpower superiority, it’s one that has been broadly effective, at least in keeping the Ukrainians from doing things like this.

It took the Ukrainians scraping up the last of their reserve units, along with some advanced units that were training with NATO for future operations. I don’t think they’ve got a very deep bench beyond this. But they have succeeded in doing what they’ve always wanted to do in this war, which is to trigger a war of movement in Kursk, in Russian territory, ironically, in a way that they haven’t been able to do on their own territory.

The counteroffensive that we’ve seen from Ukraine in the war so far in the Donbas and near Crimea has basically been hamstrung by Russian defensive lines. You’ve got multi-layered lines of tank emplacements, artillery emplacements, and most importantly, minefields, so that when the Ukrainians move into these areas and have to start to clear the mines, the Russians are able to call in artillery barrages, and the Ukrainians ultimately have to decamp for other locations where they’re not going to die.

That doesn’t apply in Kursk. Those defensive lines are in Belgorod, but you don’t have them in Kursk. So, the Ukrainians have been able to basically locate a battlefield that plays to their strengths rather than the Russian strengths. And they’re kicking some serious ass. The problem is they probably don’t have enough men to fully take advantage of it.

But neither do the Russians have the men necessary to eject the Ukrainians. For the last two and a half years, the Russians have spent most of their logistical efforts in building a pipeline of men and material. Basically, they scrape together whatever men they can forcibly draft from the population, put guns in their hands, and throw them to the front.

To do this in a way that does not trigger a political crisis, they can only do it so fast and only in so many places. They prefer to go to those occupied minority populations where they think the young men are disposable. And in fact, if they die, that’s actually a plus from the Russian point of view because it means they can’t rebel against Russian rule. But they’ve basically dragged all the people they can of the appropriate age group out of those zones.

And now the cupboard is getting dry.

The pipeline isn’t simply running low in terms of forces but in leadership. Putin has basically used every military commander that he has already that’s even remotely competent. And so, he’s just assigned one of his former bodyguards to run the operation in Kursk.

And you can imagine how well that’s going.

The Russians also now have 10,000 Ukrainians, including the Ukrainian support echelons, running around in Kursk. As a rule, the Russians have never attacked an area where they don’t enjoy at least a 3 to 1 manpower superiority. They prefer 7 to 1, and they don’t have the forces to put there.

So, their options are to either partially abandon the Donbas offensive or dig deep into the Russian population. What we’ve seen them do in the last two weeks is basically mobilize every military force they have left in the country, which is not a lot, and include the Pacific, the Baltic, and the Arctic theaters of what little security personnel remain and throw them into Kursk, in many cases untrained.

They’ve even raided the security forces around the cosmodrome in the Far East. And I’ve got to tell you, if your security force was designed to keep a launch pad safe, it’s probably not very good in the face of an Abrams barrel. There’s nothing left. They haven’t been able to find the 30,000 to 70,000 troops that they need in order to retake Kursk.

With the bridges gone, they can only approach from the east.

So, the Ukrainians are having a bit of a heyday at the moment, running around in Kursk, dealing with lightly armed and wildly untrained troops that don’t even have the benefit of large-scale artillery support. I don’t mean to suggest for a second that the Ukrainians are not taking casualties themselves. It’s an active war zone. I don’t have good data. I would be shocked if, in an offensive operation of this scale, they’re not taking heavy losses, especially in their armor. But the fact remains that the Ukrainians have found a way, relatively on the cheap, to play to their strengths, neutralize Belgorod, and change the narrative of the war.

Anyway, all of this collectively pales in significance to the real shift that we’ve identified as a result of the Kursk operation.

Nukes haven’t flown.

Throughout this war, the Russians have at every stage identified a series of red lines, saying that if you cross this line, we’re going to nuke Washington and Warsaw and Berlin and Paris and London and the rest.

And at every stage, it’s turned out to be a bluff. Well, now the Ukrainians have crossed the international border in force. They have castrated the Russian military in the area. There’s very little standing in the way of them taking even more territory. And they’re about to castrate a city of a million people that used to serve as the primary launching point.

And the Russians haven’t launched. One of the big concerns in the Western capitals ever since this war started is—well, they call it escalation management. The idea is we know that the Russians are a major power, but most importantly, we know that the Russians are a major nuclear power. And at some point, the Russians very well may kick off some nukes because they feel threatened.

Well, now we have an incursion that has crossed the international border, and the Russians are broken in the area. And yet, the nukes are still capped. Whether this is because the Russians are unwilling or unable is a discussion we can have, and that is a legitimate discussion to have. But the fact remains that even now, the Russians are showing an inability or an unwillingness to go to that level, and that tells me that the conservatism in Western capitals about challenging the Russians is about to evaporate.

Because if the Ukrainians can do this without that sort of counter-reaction, then pretty much every Russian threat to this point is meaningless. Is there eventually a red line where if you step across it, the Russians will pull the trigger? Probably. But we now know it doesn’t involve population centers, territory, or cities within a few dozen miles of the wrong side of Russia’s internationally recognized borders.

And that ultimately is going to trigger a new sort of offensive operation that has the full support of pretty much every Western country. That is the biggest tidal shift in the world to this point. And that is something we’re going to see the consequences of over the next few months.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. I was out backpacking, but there was a forest fire near my house, so I had to run back in. Anyway, it looks like it’s under control. We have some thunderstorms moving in, so I guess that’s a silver lining. Anyway, it gives you an opportunity to hear me talk about a couple of things that have happened in the few days since I’ve been back.

The first thing I’m going to talk about today is what’s going on in Ukraine. As you know, the Ukrainians have become more and more creative at using imported weapons from the NATO alliance, as well as some of their own homegrown stuff, to strike Russian targets further and further away. In the week around the 1st of August, just before and just after, a series of attacks took out a strategic bomber in Russia. Specifically, they hit a refinery deep within Russia, over a thousand miles from the coast, which started a really big fire. They also sank a Kilo-class submarine. You know, that’s a $300 million price tag that the Russians just lost. But the most interesting thing I’ve seen is that a series of attacks took out at least five S-400 air defense systems.

Now, the S-400 is supposedly the most sophisticated anti-aircraft system in the world, capable of shooting down missiles and all that good stuff. However, its reputation has definitely been tarnished in this war. And these aren’t the first ones that the Ukrainians have taken out. They’ve taken out at least another six, to my knowledge. The Russians only started the war with 50 to 56 of these systems, so we’re looking at somewhere along the lines of 20% of them being taken out, with probably a few more damaged as well. Using around 50 of these systems to provide full air defense coverage for the entire Russian mainland is already a stretch, and now they’ve lost 20%. This has escalated from being a tactical theater issue to a full strategic threat, as they’re losing the ability to maintain a periphery for air and missile defense across the entire space.

The Ukrainian goal here is very, very clear. If they can take out enough of these systems, especially in Crimea and to a lesser degree in the Donetsk region, then when the F-16s arrive—which are coming in from Denmark, the Netherlands, and a number of other European countries—the Ukrainians will be able to use their air power without the immediate fear of everything getting shot down.

One of the big problems they had last year when they attempted their counteroffensives was trying to do combined warfare using artillery, rocket systems, drones, men, tanks, and aircraft, which they didn’t have. Attempting a combined warfare project without the air component was a bit of a problem. The Russians were able to call in airstrikes and artillery support and cut up the Ukrainians as they were trying to advance. If enough anti-aircraft systems can be taken out of the equation on the Russian side, then even if the Ukrainians cannot achieve general air superiority, they can certainly achieve temporary air superiority over specific zones where it’s important.

This creates a very different sort of conflict where NATO trainers will prove immensely useful because that’s how NATO operates. Anyway, the first F-16s have been repainted with Ukrainian livery. They are in Ukraine now, and probably over the course of the next few weeks while I’m gone again, we’re going to see the first efforts by the Ukrainians to actually leverage their new air power in league with their ground power. We might see a crack in the line, specifically in the direction of Crimea.

In just the last week, the destruction of the S-400 systems has induced the Russians to evacuate a couple of their airbases, pulling all of the aircraft out because they can’t defend them. Obviously, in the short term, that’s great for Ukraine because it means these aircraft are now going to be flying from Russia proper, much further away. Moving forward, if the Russians lose the ability to do quick turnaround launches when the Ukrainians are operating, then the Ukrainians have that much more leeway in everything else.

Okay, that’s it. Take care.

Hey, everyone. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the south of France and the National Park. One of the questions I’ve been getting repeatedly in Europe is, “Isn’t Russia due for a coup or a revolution or something?” People are looking for a way to end the Ukraine war quickly. Well, there are three problems with that.

Number one, I don’t think we’re going to see a palace coup anytime soon. Most of the people at the top of the Russian political heap are folks that Putin has known or trained for the last 30 years. One of the many characteristics of the Soviet system is that the intelligence folks tended to be in charge, especially after they threw an internal coup back in the early ’80s. That’s when the Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev trio came to power, all former intelligence officers. Putin is an heir to that legacy. Remember, he used to be stationed in East Germany to steal industrial secrets from the West. After that coup, everyone else in the communist hierarchy was basically purged. So, those were the people who took over the post-Soviet Russian system.

There are only about 120 of them left at this point, but all of them are personally loyal to Putin from their days in the KGB or are former interns of people like Putin. Take Alexey Miller at Gazprom, literally a former intern. They all see the world through the same lens, and they all owe their positions partly to Putin. Putin has spent the last 30 years purging this group of anyone who might be disloyal. So, number one, they see the world the same way. If something were to happen to Putin, they would probably have a really interesting conversation about who’s in charge next and then just prosecute the war more or less as it’s been going.

Number two, they’re personally loyal. About the only one of the 120 who might have the guts to try something a little scrappy would be Igor Sechin, a former gunrunner who now runs Rosneft, the state oil monopoly. He probably has the guts to kill Putin. But the other 119, if there’s anything they agree on, aside from seeing the world through the same lens, it’s that they all hate Igor Sechin. So, if Sechin did try something, he would probably be dead the next day. So, an internal palace coup is probably not going to happen.

That leaves the option of revolution. The standard of living in Russia is dropping. They can’t access Western goods or Western travel destinations. The economic elite, such as it is, is having a rough time of it. Inflation is an ongoing issue in many parts of the world, Russia included, because now the Russian industrial complex is being retooled to make tanks and refurbish military equipment. So, it’s not available for what paltry commercial goods it was capable of producing in the first place.

So, what about a revolution? Well, the problem is that this is not the West. These are not democratic societies. These are despotisms. As a result, you usually don’t get public uprisings in a place like Russia unless and until the standard of living tanks and the sense of nationhood itself is thrown into question. Russia has had popular uprisings in the past, but the Cold War wasn’t one. Basically, you have to see the Russian army disintegrate in a military campaign to the point that people know the strongmen are gone and broken. We’re not there yet, and there’s nothing on the short-term horizon in the Ukraine war that suggests we’re anywhere close.

For those thinking this is still perhaps the path forward, I don’t want to say you’re wrong because we do have a lot of similarities right now between what’s going on in Russia and what went on in the 1980s: similar economic dislocation, similar failure of state institutions. The best parallel I can draw is the Wagner rebellion of last year. We had a rogue paramilitary commander who marched on Moscow for a thousand miles. Much to Putin’s delight, not a single military officer joined him. But much to Putin’s despair, not a single military officer stood against Wagner either. No one loves Russia, just like no one loved the Soviet Union.

When this does go, and the odds are it will in time, the whole thing goes—the whole regime, the whole governing structure—just like it did in 1992. Because aside from the corrupt, there is no vested interest in maintaining this system. It just has to have some sort of short, sharp shock, like an extreme military defeat, for us to get from here to there.

So, are we going to see a revolution in Russia? Almost certainly. But there aren’t going to be any warning signs until the day it happens. And as soon as it’s over, that’s it for the Russian state. They don’t have enough time, demographically speaking, to try something new. So, when this is over, it’s over.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Denver International Airport, where I’m about to catch a flight to California for some hiking in the area. This means you won’t get any updates from me on Ukraine or anything else for the next month, as I’ll be out of touch. So, let me give you an idea of what I’ll be looking for when I get back, as there’s a new wrinkle in the conflict worth noting.

The Ukrainian government, over the last five or six weeks, has been reporting a tripling in the tolls inflicted on Russian artillery. Russian artillery is critical to their military strategy. The Russian military is fundamentally an artillery force, rather than an infantry or armored force. Approximately 80% of the casualties suffered by the Ukrainian military have been due to artillery. When the Russians advance into a town, they don’t clear it door by door; they use artillery to reduce everything to rubble and then take control of the ruins.

While I can’t confirm the accuracy of this reported tripling—it’s likely part propaganda and part optimism—independent reports also indicate a significant uptick in artillery activity. However, these reports are often somewhat dated. There are a couple of factors suggesting that the Ukrainians are seeing more success.

The first factor is somewhat technical: a lot of North Korean shells are now entering the field. These shells can’t be used with modern artillery systems. North Korea is many things, but a technological leader it is not, so most of the artillery pieces the Russians have that can use these North Korean shells date back to the 1950s. They have a much shorter range.

Until now, Ukrainian loitering munitions only had a range of about 12 miles, which meant not many Russian artillery pieces were within range. But with the North Korean stuff, some are, and more importantly, the Ukrainians have built up an industry from scratch for robotics and drones. There are now not just dozens, but hundreds, possibly even low thousands, of basically garage shops around the country.

These garage shops are producing more advanced and, most importantly, longer-range drones, with ranges now extending to 20 to 35 miles. This puts a majority of Russian artillery potentially within range. So, it’s really a question of how quickly the Ukrainians can ramp up production. It’s not just the Ukrainians, of course.

Most Western allies have now allowed Ukraine to conduct at least limited strikes within Russian territory using the weapons they’ve been provided. Weapons like the American ATACMS are having a significant impact. However, the number of these weapons is relatively limited, so they’re reserved for large concentrations rather than single artillery pieces.

But if the Ukrainians can produce thousands of drones and deploy a dozen to each target, this could significantly change the frontline dynamics. By the time I get back in a month, we should have a clearer idea of whether this strategy is working. The Russians started the war with about 2,000 artillery pieces in active units and another 19,000 in reserves, in various states of disrepair. If the burn rate on these artillery pieces has indeed tripled, the Russians won’t be able to keep up with new production and refurbishments.

While I hesitate to use the term “game changer,” given the many variables in play, this development could certainly be the most significant happening this summer.

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the French-Italian border on the Mediterranean. And today we’re going to take an entry from the Ask Peter forum, specifically, if the goal of the West in Ukraine is to ultimately, break the Russian military, then wouldn’t it make sense to simply go after the what are currently the legal oil revenues, put them under full sanction, actually interrupt the flows? 

right now, the official policy of the Western nations is to keep the oil flowing from Russia, but do so in a way that prevents the Russians from overly profiting from it. there are two ways that the Russians get their crude to market. Number one is in compliance with the sanctions, where other people provide insurance, other fraud shipping on the second is via something called the shadow fleet, which may be as many as 20% of the tankers that are out there now that are no longer registered to anyone. 

they simply shovel crude back and forth doing CTC transfers, taking them from Russian ports direct to third parties who don’t care about the sanctions very much, and allowing the Russians to circumvent things like price caps. it’s a reasonable question. And if, if, if this war is ever going to end in a way that actually breaks Russian power, Russian income has to be destroyed as part of that process. 

But to make that happen, there’s going to be a lot of collateral damage along the way. So a couple things to keep in mind. first of all, if you’re going to take this stuff offline, there’s a lot of it to go. Russia exports roughly 5.3 million barrels of crude per day and about 2.6 million barrels per day of refined product. 

Of that, only about 1 million barrels of crude is exported by pipe to China Direct, and maybe 300 to 400,000 barrels a day of refined product. Israel. That’s China. The rest of it has to hit a port somewhere and then be part of this shadow fleet or the sanctions regime system. So you’re talking about a disruption of at least 6 million barrels per day of oil and oil products. 

That’s huge. that is well over 10% of globally traded, energy product by volume. And for those of you guys who’ve forgotten your basic economics, oil demand and fuel oil demand is inelastic. So if you only have a disruption of, say, 5 to 10% in terms of output and production, you can get a price increase of 50 to 100% or more. 

Because if you don’t have the crude, if you don’t have the gasoline, you just can’t carry out normal economic activity. So your pay whatever you have to. That’s one of the reasons why the recessions in the 70s and the 80s were so severe, because everyone was dependent on this stuff, and when some of it not even very much went away, well, shit hit the fan. 

So if, if, if, if this were to happen, you would deal with a major price shock in the case of a populist government like Joe Biden’s here in the United States, that means inflation. And that means that his perception is that the political floor would fall out from under him. In any chance he had a reelection would go away. 

so this is something that has not been seriously considered in most Western capitals, most notably in the United States. there is one way you can get around that, and that is to use existing power that Congress has already granted the president to sever the United States from global energy markets. right now, actually for nine years now, ever since, I think it was the 2015 omnibus bill, Congress has granted the president the authority to end oil exports. 

And if you did that, since the U.S. is a net exporter now, you’d have a supersaturated oil market in North America, angle America specifically, while you would also have a removal of another 3 to 5 million barrels a day of crude and refined product from the rest of the world. So basically, you double down on the elasticity problem for the rest of the world and cause a massive global depression. 

At the same time, North America has a few problems with crude quality. This lady does on its own way. if if if that were to happen, you could probably kiss the Western Alliance largely goodbye, because the white House would have consciously chosen to favor its own domestic political issues and some economic issues, to be perfectly honest, against the security and economic needs in the long term, basically the entire alliance structure. 

Then there’s also the issue of enforcement. You can’t just, like, wave your hand and say, no, this stuff isn’t allowed. You have to do something about it. And your options are to go in and bomb Russian ports, which would trigger, let’s just say, other issues, or to go after the shadow Fleet itself to take those ships out of circulation. 

I mean, they’re all basically owned by the Russians at this point, but they’re shipping crude primarily to China and India. So if you basically declare or have an undeclared economic war against those two countries, that complicates a lot of things very, very quickly. Now, will we get there in the end? Yeah, probably. but that requires pulling out all the stops and a lot of strategic questions that, would occupy a great deal of political bandwidth for any government. 

In the end, if the United States really if the goal really is to break Russia, then there needs to be changes to military policy to make sure that the Ukrainians can strike logistical hubs within Russia. And it means an end to Russian energy exports at a large enough scale to break the income flows that are necessary to keep the Russian military machine running. 

We are not there yet. I’m not saying we’re not going to get there. In fact, I would argue we are. But that requires a significant change in the political and economic calculus of all the Western capitals, first and foremost, the United States. So good question. I’m not yet. 

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. it appears that we’re about to see a major offensive by the Ukrainians. now, the next couple of days or anything like that. Probably going to be a couple months off. but they’re definitely preparing the ground. what’s going on is that the Ukrainians are preparing to receive a large, allotment of F-16s from NATO countries. 

and that’s right on the heels of a significant arms package, one from Europe, one from the United States, that is allowing the Ukrainians to start to shape the battlefield. What we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the Ukraine is becoming much more aggressive, not just turning the Russian assault on Kharkiv in the northeast into a killing ground for Russian troops. 

not only picking up the pace for some of the counter assaults south of the Dnieper River, where there have been some battles where the Russians have suffered 21 casualty ratios. those are actually the sideshow, the really big stuff in terms of, military strategy is using, middle range rockets and missiles to go after, Russian aviation assets deep within Russia, in some cases 500 miles from the border, and also throughout the Crimean Peninsula, going after anti-aircraft batteries, specifically, the S-300 is in the more advanced S-400s. 

the S-400s are considered the best in the world, and at least the last two weeks, the Ukrainians have taken out at least four batteries, one of which had only been up and running for a few days at the point where it was taken out. what the Ukrainians are doing are trying to deny the Russians as much air defense as possible before the F-16s arrive, because if the Ukrainians can establish regional air superiority or even just local, it is for moments, they can start using some of the training and some of the equipment that the NATO allies provided them a year and two years ago. 

if you remember back to the first wave of counter offenses we had in 2022 and into 2023, the Russians really hadn’t fortified anything. So the Ukrainians were able to punch in and take out a few specific nodes and then just chop up the Russians, inflicting massive casualties and cause massive, if not retreat routes from places like Kherson or near Kharkiv. 

but as the war moved on, the Russians started to take things a little bit more seriously and laid layer after layer after mines, building these multilayered defenses that the Ukrainians had had to punch through NATO training for a lot of Ukrainian forces taught them how to use combined arms, basically combined infantry with mounted infantry with tanks, with helicopters, with missiles, with aircraft. 

But but but the Ukrainians didn’t have the equipment to pull that off, most notably the airpower. So they’d launch this big assault, but they didn’t have air power. And so the Russians were able to call in artillery strikes because they had maybe not air superiority, but the ability to deny the Ukrainians, the skies. And that made these subsequent, counter-offensive basically bogged down in even after a lot of casualties and a lot of equipment and a lot of time, the Ukrainians only made minimal gains. 

Well, what the Ukrainians are attempting to do this time is to prepare the battlefield so they don’t have that air power problem again. So that the new aircraft, when they do arrive, can operate in a less contested environment. And if that happens, then the Ukrainians can return the favor. And any time the Russians try to concentrate forces, they get hit with Ukrainian artillery rather than the other way around. 

we have seen the Ukrainians basically get better and better at this without airpower over the last few weeks, taking out any number of strategic, radar systems deep within the Russian space. So if we get to the point in about a month when these F-16s start to arrive, the Ukrainians might actually have regional air superiority over most of the peninsula. 

And at that point, cutting the remainder of the infrastructure links from Russia proper into the southern front should be pretty easy, because there’s really only two links left. You’ve got the Kerch Bridge itself, which is already damaged, and then you’ve got a supplementary rail system that goes through occupied Ukraine on the southern coast, which is already within artillery range. 

What we’ve been waiting for to the war, this point is for the Ukrainians to use superior speed, innovation and reach in order to chop up the Russians logistical capacity at ease, and basically isolate large pockets of troops and generate the sort of political humiliation that in the past has triggered a Russian climbdown or maybe even a collapse of the government. 

I’m not saying that that’s what’s going to happen this summer. I’m saying that’s what the goal is. And with the way that they are preparing the battle space, it looks like we’re going to have some of these decisive conflicts later in this year. Assuming for the moment, of course, the Ukrainians proved to be as adept on the F-16s as they have been on everything else. 

Still a lot of moving parts, still a lot of unknowns. But we actually do see things building to at least, in Crimea, a bit of a head. that does not mean that the entirety of the war is over. I mean, hell, even if the Ukrainians were able to completely capture Crimea, Russian logistics going into the Donbas in eastern Ukraine are far more robust. 

This war is not over. But if you can trigger a global humiliation. In the past, about half of the Russian governments that have collapsed have been because of a major military defeat. And this is the first potential battle of this war that might fall into that category. 

You’re someone who has famously for a long time predicted and tried to warn people that, not only is Russia’s war with Ukraine inevitable, but Russian national security, national strategy, doctrine dictates that the Russians are likely to expand their war westward from Ukraine. But given this framing of this conflict or this aggression as being from a national security standpoint, why does Russia need to do this if they have such a large nuclear, arsenal? 

And I guess part of it, maybe a tagalong would be, why is Russia enduring what it is in Ukraine if it has nukes, is that sort of a faster way for giving things? The, the non-UK approach has been the Russian strategy for a lot longer than we’ve had. So there’s always that little inertia thing in terms of people’s minds. 

But one of the things that the Russians have discovered since 1990 is they thought they thought that they could do this on the cheap, that they could infiltrate societies, use disinformation, use plants, bribe people, and basically break the democratic processes and the strategic commitments of countries from Estonia to Bulgaria, to Azerbaijan to to take a stand. And what they’ve discovered is they’ve just pissed everyone off. 

The idea was that they could get all the strategic goodies that they thought they needed without actually having to occupy the places, and that has fallen apart everywhere except for Belarus. And so the question then is, can we threaten people to not take strategic decisions that we don’t like? So the United States, we’re going to nuke you unless you give us an aircraft carrier that doesn’t fucking fly. 

And that’s basically the strategy that you’re recommending here, is that we, as they threaten countries between them and the Western world in order for them to do exactly what Moscow wants. the Russians have discovered very, very clearly that the only way to make someone do what you want is to occupy yourself. And while we in the West might not see our way of life as threatening the existence of the Russian state, they obviously have a different opinion on that. 

the only time the Russians have ever, ever felt secure is after World War Two, when Stalin succeeded in conquering all the buffer states and concrete, all of the access points into the Russian heartlands, and that held until 1992. And the Russians are desperate to have that back. Unfortunately for them, the only way they can have that back is to by occupying countries with a combined population of more than their own population, that’s not going to fly in those countries. 

It’s not going to fly in the West. It’s not going to fly in the United States. And so we have a war. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed Moscow to seek some nontraditional, material supply, alliances or partnerships with some of the countries most antagonistic to American leadership. The role and think about North Korea. It’s, you know, in a tighter economic embrace with China. 

It’s getting drones from Iran. Do we see the potential for the emergence of a Moscow led kind of NATO? And I think, you know, we’ve seen this once before. It was the, the US saw it, but, the North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, lesser Cuba into the mix, too. it’s Friday. Do we need, these I hesitate to call them powers, but there’s this assembly of, foreign. 

America’s like the bad guys together, present a considerable credible, worrisome threat to, the American that global order. No. Well, I mean, I don’t think the American led world order is doing that great or is going to last that much longer. But no, I don’t think this is what’s going to tear it down. keep in mind that even at the height of the Cold War, the only Soviet ally that ever deployed troops out side of its own country was Cuba. 

And that was to Angola. You never had Polish troops in Romania, Romania, troops in eastern Germany. and so even at the height of Soviet dominance, they were never able to pull this off. From a purely logistical point of view, forget political or economic. So you might have places like North Korea and China and Russia and Iran and Cuba not liking how things are going if you’re there on the world, but them deploying is a completely different situation. 

In addition, keep in mind that while Russia has figured out how to deploy a small number of troops and things like Wagner, China has only ever had one deployment outside of its home country that’s in Djibouti. That barely counts. North Korea’s never done it, ever. Cuba is not nearly as powerful now as they were 30 years ago. 

So the capacity just isn’t there. Much less coordination, much less the deployment capacity. Now, the dangerous the American let order are primarily in the United States from interest. And I still still still see the biggest danger to that order will be when the United States wakes up one day and realizes that the countries that are benefiting most from its presence are the countries that it is most opposed to, because without America providing global naval coverage for civilian shipping, there is no Russian energy industry. 

There is no Chinese manufacturing sector, there is no Iranian trade. There’s not even anything for Cuba. And if the U.S. starts to use its navy to interfere with those flows, instead of protecting those flows, we’re in a very different world the next day. And the countries if the United States thinks of as the problems are gone the day after. 

Thank you very much for your time, Peter. I enjoyed the conversation and thank you for all our subscribers and followers for your questions. please continue to send them in and I’ll look forward to having conversation like this with you again. Thank you. Take care.