Ukraine Starts Cracking Open the Occupied Territories

Ukrainian soldiers holding their flag against a dark sky Photo licensed by envato elements: https://app.envato.com/search/photos/1ac20b11-1fac-4c14-9452-b1e5ca99fccc?itemType=photos&term=ukraine+war

Russia’s logistical nightmare in Crimea is just beginning. With Ukrainian strikes ramping up throughout Russian-held Crimea, Russian authorities have suspended civilian fuel sales since new shipments can’t reach the peninsula.

Since many of you have asked, the Kerch Strait Bridge primarily remains open to allow civilians to leave Crimea for Russia. However, Ukraine’s broader strategy for Crimea is to systematically destroy the infrastructure needed to supply it. And with the new drone supplies and capabilities, this is very plausible.

Much of the territory Russia has occupied since 2014 has become increasingly difficult to supply, and without effective countermeasures, Russia’s strategic position is steadily weakening. This isn’t a done deal, but the momentum is shifting in Ukraine’s favor.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 21st of June. And the new news is that in Russian occupied territory in Crimea, in southern Ukraine, Russian authorities have suspended all fuel purchases for all civilians, whether it’s personal cars or businesses. Short version is that the Ukrainians have now deployed enough drones reliably, enough that can target things like fuel trucks, that there is no more fuel coming in. 

The Russian Navy has long since abandoned the province, and everything has to come in by rail. And those rail bridges have now been damaged or truck. And now the Ukrainians patrolling with dozens of drones at a time over the territory and basically hitting the drugs before they can get anywhere close. So we basically have whatever little fuel is left being hoarded by the military. 

And the only reason that the Kurt Strait Bridge remains operational, that’s a that’s a bridge that comes from Russia proper over straight at the Sea of Azov into Crimea, is so that civilians in Crimea can flee to Russia. It’s not that the Ukrainians are planning a final push or anything to take over the territory, but they have systematically damaged all of the infrastructure that allows the Russians to supply Crimea. 

And as big of a deal as that is, and it is, and there will be more of it in the future. It’s just the first start of a broader Ukrainian offensive. Most of these attacks are coming from places like Kherson, which are just on the other side of the Dnieper River. But there are a couple of towns further up Nikopol and Dnipro, where the Ukrainians are starting to launch attacks as well, not interrupting logistics going to Crimea, per say, but logistics going to other parts of the occupied territories. 

Keep in mind, in the early days of the war, the Russians came in from the north, the east and the south and Crimeans in the south. The stuff in the north was eventually purged. It’s the stuff in the east that is now in question and in the southeast, because we have multiple provinces, that includes Donetsk and Luhansk that are hard up on the Russian border, and that provides a lot of backstop for the Russians. 

Ukrainians can’t dislodge those further. But as you move south and along the coast by cities like Mariposa and Meteor Pol, that does not apply. They can only be supplied by road or rail, just like Crimea or by sea, just like Crimea. And the sea link has already effectively been cut, and the Ukrainians have already been going aggressively after the ports in that region. 

And so the next stop is to do basically what they’ve done to Crimea, further to the northeast and east and east and east, until they get hard up to the Russian border, or at least into the Donetsk region, where the Russians have a few more geographic advantages. Basically, what we’re looking at here is roughly two thirds of the territory that the Russians have captured since the first war, going back to 2014, is now becoming a sandbag that the Russians cannot reliably resupply. 

And while Crimea might be the literal bridge too far because it’s just too far away, you can imagine a situation where the Russians lose access to that entire southern zone, or the ability to supply it, and the Ukrainians start crossing the river, or coming across at, say, Dnipro further north, and punching through and basically excising the Russians from the entire area. 

Not suggesting it. It’ll be quick, not suggesting to be easy. There’s still lots of minefields and this is still Russia we’re talking about here. But the balance of forces in this entire region is now shift. And the question isn’t will the Russian strategic position collapse? It’s how and what will the Russians do in reaction to that? There’s still a lot of options in the table. 

There’s still a lot of ways where this can go horribly, horribly wrong. But the Russians have yet to come up with a way to counter the Ukrainian memory drones that are capable of selecting their own targets, which makes them. And now that those are being produced in the hundreds per day, the Russian position across the entire southern parts of the occupied territories is really falling apart.

The Future of Drone Tech: Russian Scale

Photo of a military drone

While Ukraine has dominated drone innovation, Russia’s been able to mass-produce proven drone systems at a scale that Ukraine cannot match. The Russians have also been incrementally improving their drone tech.

Russia has been replacing propellers with jet engines and equipping certain drones with air-to-air missiles. So, despite Ukraine’s advantage on the innovation side, the Russians aren’t getting left in the dust.

Up to this point, both sides of the conflict have been able to draw on their strengths to adapt to the new tactics and tech that hit the battlefield.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, we’re doing another episode in our ongoing series on evolving drone technologies. And today we are specifically looking at the Russians. Most of the breakthroughs that we have seen that have reshaped the battlefield in the Ukraine war since March have been Ukrainian longer range, better targeting, faster assembly, mass manufacturing. Go go go go go go. 

But it’s not like the Russians have just been sitting there. Yes, yes, yes. Most of their parts are coming from the Chinese system and they’re just being assembled in Russia. But that doesn’t mean that the Russians don’t have a military industrial complex. In fact, still today, they easily have the third most powerful one in the world, legacy of the Soviet system, with a few things that have been added here and there. 

But when the Russians really shine, it’s when they take a proven technology and then apply it to a new platform and mass manufacture it. And we are now in the early stages of seeing that with what used to be called the shards. Those are the the dumb drones that they originally brought in from Iran. They now call them Garin if they’re made in Russia, Iran, and we’re now into the third and even the fourth generation. 

And the single biggest difference is that the Russians are taking the propeller off as method of propulsion and slapping on a jet engine. So the original shards travel at about 100 miles an hour, maybe 120 if they’re pretty zippy. The new ones coming out of Russia are traveling at pushing 400 miles an hour. So that’s problem number one, because there just aren’t very many interceptors that the Ukrainians have access to that can catch one of these drones. 

Usually what happens is you fire a bunch of interceptors and anything that doesn’t hit on the first pass as the penetrate turns around and chases it, that doesn’t work when your interceptor can’t catch up. And with the Garin four starting to come online now, we’re seeing more and more of these relatively cheap drones punching through air defenses because you only get one shot. 

That’s problem number one. Problem number two is as much advances as the Ukrainians have made in interception and long range strike. They still just don’t have control of their own airspace. Yes, they’ve got decent anti-aircraft capabilities. And yes, that has kept the Russians at arm’s length, where they launch glide bombs, then take 20 miles to glide down, hit their target. 

But the Ukrainians have lacked the ability so far to impose a degree of air superiority that would allow them to actually go after where the fighter jets are. So their solution has been longer range, bigger payloads go after the bases that these things launch from. That’s been working, but it’s not enough. 

And now the Russians are about to do something else. They have started putting something called an AR 60. That’s an infrared driven anti-aircraft missile on top of a Garand, and then sending that in so it doesn’t go as fast as, say, a MiG would go into a thousand miles an hour roughly. So the drones are going about half that speed, but then they launch an anti-air missile. 

So any F-16s or Griffins or Rafael’s or any other vessels, any other aircraft that the Ukrainians actually are able to get in the sky are going to start facing wave after wave of cheap, disposable drone firing a single missile. About the only good news news is that the missile itself weighs enough that that Garand cannot then also carry a warhead. 

So it’s just a one shot deal, not a two shot deal. But you throw a few dozen of those on the front every day, and it’s almost impossible for the Ukrainians to get anything up in the air, much less provide any sort of screen, much less project power into Russian territory to prevent those glide bombs from coming. 

So, yes, most of the breakthroughs, most of the changes, most of this really impressive stuff that we’ve seen in the last three months has been from Ukraine. It has been hurting Russia. It has been causing a lot of damage. But it doesn’t mean that the Russians are just lying there. They’ve basically taken steps to ensure that they can still hit nearly any target they want in Ukraine. 

They just have to send a few more of these jet powered drones after it. And there is no way that Ukrainians are anywhere close, getting any degree of control over their airspace. And as long as that happens, then if they do, the Ukrainians do manage to launch a ground assault, they’re going to be doing so under a hail of glide bombs, because they can’t really do much about it.

Will Ukraine Make a Play on Crimea?

A magnifying glass on a map of Crimea | Licensed by Envato Elements

Crimea has become one of the most important fronts in the war in Ukraine. Both the Russians and Ukrainians see Crimea as strategically essential, and neither side is willing to let it go.

Ukraine isn’t quite ready to reclaim Crimea yet, but they are making it as difficult as possible for the Russians to continue operations there. From continuous strikes targeting transportation checkpoints, Ukraine has forced Russian convoys onto predictable routes where drones and artillery can more easily attack.

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Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 12th of June, and we’re going to take a look at what’s going on in the Ukraine war, specifically on the Crimean front. Now, the Crimean peninsula is a chunk of territory that juts out into the Black Sea, about midway down the Ukrainian coast. 

Historically speaking, it’s been a strong Russian outpost and one of the few places where the Russians have been able to project naval power. 

But during Soviet times, Khrushchev, who was Ukrainian, transferred the Crimea peninsula to the Ukrainian unit of the Soviet Union, which is something that pissed off all the Russians. And the Russians have been wanting it back ever since, especially in the post-Cold War environment. Well, in 2014, in the first phase of the Ukrainian war, the Russians did manage to capture it and have been using it as a military springboard to attack southern Ukraine ever since. 

The issue for the Ukrainians is that the very definition of Ukraine is the Dnieper River, which flows down through Kyiv and enters the Black Sea of the vicinity of the Crimean Peninsula. So if you control Crimea, you can threaten that opening as well as Odessa, which is, for all practical purposes, Ukraine’s second city in its window on the world. 

So there is no version of a Russia that fails to get Crimean, has any sort of naval strength or power in the Black Sea. And for Ukraine, there is no version of Ukraine in which it doesn’t control the Crimean peninsula, or can have any sort of economic integration with the rest of the world in a meaningful way. So it really is one or the other. 

Anyway, at the moment the Russians are controlling it, but at the moment the Ukrainians new drones, which have better range and better targeting, the ability to even themselves, have been pummeling all of the logistical lines that supply the Crimean peninsula. There’s really only two sorts of routes. In one is the Crimean bridge over the strait, which has been hit enough that it can’t handle large vehicles or trains, just light traffic. 

Or you can come on land through southern Ukraine in occupied territory, hugging the coast of the Black Sea, and then go into a series of bridges that cross into the peninsula. That way, at its narrowest point, the connection is only about nine kilometers wide. 

And so, while there are a number of routes through those nine kilometers, none of them are great. With all the new drones, though, Ukraine now has the range to hit all of those bridges, and in the last few days they’ve been hitting all of them almost at the same time. And so we’ve seen sustained pressure by the Ukrainians on the entire logistical system that allows Crimea to function. And remember that now, naval drones are a big thing in the Black Sea. 

So the Russians have evacuated most of their naval forces from Crimea and can no longer reliably supply the peninsula that I see. So everything has to come by truck or by train. And now that entire backup transport system has been put under huge threat. So what we’re seeing is fuel shortages, ammo shortages and manpower shortages in Crimea and large scale the end of Crimea as a military springboard to attack southern Ukraine, because they just can’t get the gear and the material that they need. 

Now, does this mean that a Ukrainian attack on crime is imminent? No. There’s still the very real issue of this transport problem working both ways. If the Ukrainians decided to surge across. They’d first have to cross the Dnieper, get into occupied southern Ukraine, and then go to Crimea. What the Ukrainians are doing is making it so that Crimea is a strategic loss for the Russians, and a drain on the resources, rather than anything that can gain that, that they can take over themselves. 

And that seems to be working very well. I just don’t want to oversell this. Yes, the Kerch Strait, for all practical purposes, is out of commission from a military point of view. Just can’t handle the cargo. But all of these bridges north south that go from Ukraine proper into Crimea, a little different. Most of them are not going over large bodies of water that are deep. 

Some of them are like rail bed and you can’t really blow up a rail bed. Others are crossing dikes that separate some of the marshes and the saltwater lakes that dot its area so they can attack the road bed, and in doing so, put in a crater that makes it so that has to be repaired. But those repairs can take just a week or two and a real problem. 

The real issue of what the Ukrainians are after here is to try to destroy as many of the crossing points that are close to Crimea, especially in the eastern part of the isthmus, as they can to force the Russians to go further north and route around the entire area and come into the peninsula from the west, where the infrastructure is more difficult to destroy, because if they can do that, then the Russians are bringing their forces far enough north that the Ukrainians can attack them with more conventional weapons like, say, artillery. 

And anything that slows down the trucks makes it that much easier for a drone to hit it. Keep in mind we now have memory drones hunting at volume in Russian occupied territories of Ukraine where Ukrainians can get a drone into the general area and then release it, and the drone will pick its own target and fly in and hit the target. 

And jamming no longer works. And so for the first time of the war, we’re seeing the Russians large scale about abandoning their attempts to resupply Crimea. But they have to run a gantlet every single time. And if the Ukrainians put up giant pothole in the middle of the bridge, all of a sudden the 50 odd trucks that were about to cross it have to stop. 

And if you’re a drone hunter, that’s exactly the sort of environment that you want. So we’re seeing a sort of highway of death situation. If you remember Desert Storm from 92 getting set up here, where it’s probably only a matter of time, where until the Ukrainians are able to basically bottle up a series of Russian convoys in areas where they can’t really maneuver and then just wipe out the whole thing. 

You do that a few times, and the entire Russian logistical effort for the southern front crumbles. Keep in mind that two years ago, the Russians had almost run out of military supply trucks, and if not for huge shipments from China, they would have. Now we’re in a situation where the Ukrainians have set up kill zones, where they’re probably going to be able to wipe out those supply trucks faster than the Chinese can make them. 

And that is a serious volume issue that the Russians are going to have a hard time dealing with.

The Future of Drone Tech: Hybrid Drones

A quadcopter drone with mountains in the background

A new drone has appeared on the scene in the Ukraine War. This hybrid drone blends the precision and control of FPV quadcopters with the range and payload of fixed-wing drones.

Almost every drone style has been battle-tested in Ukraine. We’ve seen FPV drones wreak havoc on the frontlines and fixed-wing drones strike deeper inside Russian territory. However, these new hybrid drones offer the best of both worlds.

Ukraine is already seeing early success with the hybrds, meaning these drones could be a game-changer when combined with other innovations we’ve seen. Russia will develop countermeasures eventually, but we’ll see if Ukraine can capitalize on the opportunity this summer.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Hello from the Vegas airport at 0 dark 30. Today we’re going to pick up on the drone tech series and talk about different kinds of drones, specifically first person drones, which are typically quadcopters or hex copters. Verse is glide drones and flight drones, which are more fixed wing. Both of them have their own places. And one of the things we’re seeing in the Ukraine war today is that they’re starting to merge a little bit. 

So first quadcopters or hex copters, you’ve seen them. These are the hobbyist ones that have been pressed into military use, with new models coming out pretty much every week. The advantage of a quadcopter is control. They can hover. They can land to conserve fuel. You have direct control over them at all times, and that means you can do really crazy things like position them above a military asset, like a tank that has a hatch open and drop something on it, or even drop the helicopter right into it. 

You can fly into a hangar and look around and figure out what it is you want to go after the repair bay and aircraft, a fuel tank, whatever it happens to be. The degree of precision really is extreme, but the problem is, is these things have to have the rotors spinning all the time, so that really limits the range. 

At the beginning of the Ukraine war, these things really only had a range of 2 to 3km, which is about the same as a javelin missile by the way. So the way to extend range was to fly them towards an enemy position, land a lot of nearby and then send one ahead to Scout, and then the others would spin back up. It would buy you a little bit more control and flexibility, but ultimately range was the issue. But as the batteries have gotten better, specifically lithium phosphate batteries and they’ve improved aerodynamics, the range has gone from 2km to 5km to ten kilometers, 20km to 25km. 

And that has turned the entire front line into an area just littered with drones all the time. There’s also a lift issue, so their warheads generally are 10 pounds or less, with most of them being like 3 pounds or less. Fixed wing are different. They require some sort of launching system, which sometimes is no more complicated than kind of a large scale slingshot. They can carry more. They get a lot more lift because they have a wing system that gives them lifts. Quadcopters have no lift. You just have to have the rotors running. And this means that the fixed wing drones have significantly larger range, typically four and five times as long. If you’re spending the same amount of money and a significantly larger payload, because once they get up to a certain altitude, they can just kind of glide for a while and conserve fuel. 

And you can also build larger models. There’s definitely an upper limit when you come to a quadcopter. As they get bigger, you the lift to weight ratio changes against you, so you can only get so big, whereas a bigger and bigger and bigger airframe for fixed wing generates more and more lift proportionally. And so it’s the fixed wing ones that are carrying the bombs that are in excess of 100 pounds, who can fly 600 to 700 miles, really without any major problem. 

And those are the ones that are being used against most distant targets, and especially things like refineries and infrastructure. The advantages pretty extreme there. You can bring a lot of destructive power at significant range. The problem is control. With an FPV drone, you generally have either a digital tether from, say, satellite or cell phones or a fiber optic cable. 

But when you’re starting to talk about a fixed wing drone, the further away they get, the more the chances are that they can be disrupted by electronic warfare. You never have a line of sight to them anymore, and if they fly through an zone, you probably are going to lose the drone. Although there’s certain things you can do with buffering that allows them to kind of stay the course in the hopes that they’ll emerge on the other side of it. 

And you can pick up the signal again. But as a rule, the further away you go, the greater the chance you’re just going to lose control altogether. So these two broad classes have kind of defined everything with the war fees for close in and fixed wings for further destruction of infrastructure. But what we’ve seen in just the month of May is a new hybrid drone coming out that looks a little bit like a biplane, but the most of the rotors are horizontal as opposed to vertical, or the Ukrainians are starting to do is put detachable wings on the drones to get some of the best of both worlds, so you still use the horizontal rotors to achieve the thrust that’s necessary to leave the ground. But as they get going. The wing bevels into place and they can get lift from that as well. And in their first iteration of these things that have popped up in just the last few weeks, we’re already seeing the Ukrainians using these new hybrid drones to go 100km, which is double what we had before just in April. 

And it’s 20 times what these sorts of drones could do at the beginning of the war for years ago. And what that means is, in one stroke, these new drones are roughly doubling the strike range of Ukrainian closing drones, increasing their weight capacity a little bit, too, because of the extra lift. That is something that the Russians are wholly unprepared for. Basically, with each stage of this war as a new weapon has been developed. There’s a period where the attacker, whoever that is, achieves local supremacy and a significant tactical advantage. 

And then the other side developed countermeasures or copies of the technology, and the situation equalizes. But we’ve had so many Ukrainian innovations hit just since March that the Russians are reeling. So we now have memory drones that are hunting and self-selecting targets 50, 60, 100, 150km behind the front line, completely eviscerating the entire logistical system and now close in. 

Individual Ukrainian drone operators have doubled their hunt range. So any sort of movement within 50 to 60km of the front on the Russian side is becoming a no man’s land. Russian positions are becoming isolated and without the Ukrainian suffering any blowback whatsoever. It’s not that the Russians have had to abandon all offensive capability, but they can only focus in specific points. 

And that requires a degree of massing of forces. And those massing of forces usually happened more than 30km away, but less 100km away. All of a sudden, that is no longer viable. So we’re seeing a disintegration on the front right now. The question at this moment is whether or not the Ukrainians have enough offensive plunge and mine removal capacity to take advantage of that in any sort of sustained way, or we’re just waiting for the Russians to adapt these tactics adopt them to their own. 

It’s just too soon to know. But considering that this is happening in the first week of June, we have all of June, all of July, all of August, all of September in the first half of October, which is kind of the ground fighting season when the climate encourages offensive activity. And the Ukrainians have now spent the last 2 to 3 months preparing the battlefield in a way that has just completely decimated the entire Russian order of battle and pre-positioned logistical caches. 

At the same time, preventing troops on the front from being supplied with new men, new equipment, food, water, all the rest of the things. So I don’t want to overplay this because Russia’s defensive capabilities are immense. But it does look like this could be a summer where the Ukrainians break multiple parts of the front, and if they can get through those minefields, then we really are in a new game.

The Future of Drone Tech: Naval Launch Platforms

Photo of a US Naval Carrier

Naval drone warfare is nothing new, but the Ukrainians are now finding ways to spice up the Sea Babies and MAGURA drones.

Ukraine is using these naval drones as mobile launch platforms for smaller aerial drones. Since the naval drones can travel farther and are harder to disrupt, they can take canisters full of FPV aerial drones closer to targets and deploy them. This gives Ukraine better operational reach around Crimea and along the Dnieper River.

This opens up a whole new strategic envelope for Ukraine, allowing it to carry out surprise attacks without pre-positioning troops or drone teams.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Good morning. From Rome, where the building that I’m staying in is. If you can see this curve here at the converted interior, that 2200 year old Roman bathhouse. The bathhouse has gone. But they recycle everything here over the years. Anyway, today we’re continuing on with the drone series, new military technologies that are in the process being unveiled and used right now. And today we’re going to talk about naval drones. Naval drones aren’t new. The Ukrainians have been using them against the Russians, really, since the start of the war, especially the second year. The sea baby is the primary variant. There’s also something called the Megara that has a pretty good track record. The idea is you basically take a small boat or a jet ski or something like that. Hook it up to an automated system pilot it remotely. The advantage of a sea drone, of course, is wait. You can put a bomb that waste several hundred pounds in it and then center on its way. 

And because most vessels don’t have the ability to shoot down at things that are in the water, they’re designed to shoot at other ships. Really, all they can do is put some people on the deck with machine guns or RPGs or something like that, and try to take shots as they come in. And so the Ukrainians have had immense success with these. 

The problem is simply range. And you can solve that with more fuel tanks to a certain degree. So we’ve seen a number of attacks that have gone quite a distance, even going as far as Novorossiysk, which is the major Russian port on the Black Sea and has made the Russian Navy’s position at places several completely untenable. And so the Russian Navy has actually had to evacuate Crimea. 

That’s all old stuff. What’s new, what’s happened in just the last month is that the Ukrainians have now regularized the installment of aerial drones on naval drones. See, one of the fun things about naval drones is because they’re on the water. They’re really hard to interrupt with electronic warfare and jamming. So you can basically right up to your target, whether it’s a port or a ship, before there’s any danger of it being interrupted. 

Whereas an aerial drone, if it’s flying in, sometimes it gets within a kilometer or a couple hundred meters of a target. And the ECM that the Russians use will then interrupt the signal and the thing will crash. That’s one of the reasons why these new memory drones are so important, because they get around that by giving decision making to the drone and the terminal phase. 

With naval drones, there’s really no chance of them being intercepted along the way. So what the Ukrainians have done is have built canisters that are incorporated into these sea drones. And when they get to a certain point, maybe ten, 20km away, they then eject aerial drones that are technically first person drones controlled by a pilot. And those fly into target things, which means that if you put it on a fiber optic tether, which they are, you get somewhere between a ten and a 50 kilometer range where you can send smaller drones out by about a half a dozen at a time. 

A couple of things that have already happened. Number one, they’ve got these canisters to launch them. So this isn’t an experimental technology already. It’s already in full deployment. The Ukrainians just kind of sprung it on everybody just a few weeks ago, which is causing a lot of havoc. Number two, you’re limited in terms of payload because those FPV drones typically can only carry a payload of 10 pounds or less. 

So they’re great for anti-personnel or maybe even anti vehicle, but you’re not going to use them to blow up say a battleship. But if you know what you’re doing you can target strategic pieces of ship, strategic pieces of refineries or ports and cause a lot of havoc in a way that the Russians haven’t yet to invent a technology to cope with, except for maybe a net that only gets you so far. 

Third, and for the war, the moment. Most importantly, there’s a lot of naval frontage in play. If you remember from the early phases of the war, the Russians invaded from the east and the south, with about 100,000 people moving north from Crimea to the Kherson area and east from the territories that the Russians had captured in the last war back in 2014, all the way to the Dnieper River. 

And that whole southern and eastern front is in place to a certain degree. Well, with these naval drones, the Ukrainians can now do whatever they want around Crimea and can go up the Dnieper River and hit the Russians in any number of spots without having to first preposition forces, much less drone pilots that can use long range transmission or even satellite communications to control the naval drone and then tether that through the existing telemetry out through the fiber optic cables to the first person drones. 

So the degree to which the Ukrainians just surprise assault really, anything at this point is only limited by the number of drones that they can have on the water. Now, this does change the nature of the sea babies and things like them, because now they’re becoming drone carriers as opposed to just suicide drones. That will probably trigger a new evolution in the manufacture, because right now they’re designed to be one way and that’s it. 

But from an engineering point of view, that is actually a very, very simple problem. Taking a suicide drone, taking the explosive off of giving it more fuel, more range capacity, and then ultimately more of these canisters. That’s something we’re probably going to see within a month or two. I could almost do that in my garage, and I’m kind of a technical invalid when it comes to things like that. 

Big shifts in that space. That’s it for now.

The Future of Drone Tech: Mid-Range Drones

Photo of a military drone

The battlefield of the Ukraine War continues to be transformed by drone innovations. The latest is the (affordable and scalable) modification of existing drones to travel farther and independently identify and strike moving targets.

This has eliminated the notion of a safe rear area, as these drones can strike anywhere and anything. This makes moving troops, fuel, and ammunition much riskier for the Russians. If Ukraine can continue to produce these modified drones at this rate, we’re looking at a much different battlefield in just a few months.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Italy, Rome. This is the let’s try column there. And we are in the forno de, which I again doubtfully mispronounced. Anyway, continuing with our open ended drone series, there’s a couple of things that are going on in Ukraine that are fundamental breaks with previous military technology in the mid-range drone category, so that’s things that are free flowing roughly 10km to 200km. 

So not quite mid-range, not quite short range somewhere in between. Basically you’ve got a two step process. Step one is you have a pilot that kind of directs a drone to an area. And step two, the drone has the capacity with just a little bit of memory and a little bit of optics to kind of look around and pick a target and zoom in on it. 

This is already a significant step up from just what the Ukrainians were using two months ago, because it can actually target moving targets now, speed, which this is unraveling and shifting is really crazy. Anyway, what this means is that the concept of a front line from a logistical point of view, is basically collapsed. Used to be that the front line was a real danger zone, where if you were within 20km of it, then the fiber optic drones and the first person drones could target anything and do so in the hundreds of drones per day. 

Further back, you’d have things like the American app cams or advanced artillery that maybe came from the French. That would push back the Russians to force logistical support into an area that was more than a couple hundred kilometers from the front, so they’d be out of range, because we all remember from two years ago when the cams arrived in Ukraine. 

Then all of a sudden, all of these ammo dumps and airfields started blowing up. So the Russians just moved everything back. Well, with these new pieces of equipment, it’s not individual strikes, it’s not dozens of strikes. It’s hundreds of strikes every day. And they’re targeting everything from individual troops to trucks, which means that the entire logistical tail, not just the depots, the entire logistical tail going all the way back from the front line to wherever the supplies are, is now under threat every day from every angle. 

And we’re seeing a de facto collapse and the Russians capacity to even man the area. And so what we’ve seen in the last is 3 or 4 weeks is significant Ukrainian gains in any number of parts of the front, because the Russians can’t bring troops forward, they can’t bring fuel for they can’t bring ammo forward. And if they try, the Ukrainians just dice them up. 

So nobody has superiority in this area. But instead of having this shadow zone of 10 to 20km around the front, it’s now stretching halfway to Moscow. And in that sort of environment, the Russians don’t have a strategy, can’t have a strategy, because they’ve always relied on strategic depth to protect them. But that doesn’t work when you can have a free ranging weapon system that’s in the hundreds and very soon in the thousands that’s going over this entire zone, and anything that’s on a road or train is suddenly a target. 

This single point advantage isn’t going to last forever. Eventually, countermeasures will be developed, but it’s much more difficult for the Russians to do that than for the Ukrainians. But we’re going to save that topic for another day. Oh, one more thing. It raises the question of how financially viable this is long term for the Ukrainians. And the short answer is extremely. 

These are not fundamentally new drones. These are modifications made to existing proven models like the Seth or the dart, for example. Really, all you need to do is plug in a small processor and a moderately sized memory chip, nothing that was considered cutting edge in the last 15 years, so nothing’s under export control are really inexpensive. Total modifications, probably top out, about $100 per drone and in some models no more than 15. 

So yeah, they can do this in the tens of thousands per month. No problem at all. 

The Future of Drone Tech: Long-Range Strikes

Drone firing a missile

Ukraine has ramped up its long-range drone program, allowing it to strike targets up to 1,800 kilometers away. So, what does this mean for Russia and its oil?

With Ukraine able to strike targets well into Western Russia, energy infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable. Thanks to the recent surge of foreign financial support rushing into Ukraine, drone production has ramped up. Russia might be able to shut down and restart the southern oil fields, but any fields shut down in the permafrost would take years or even decades to repair and restart.

So, expect Russian transport and export capacity to continue to drop, especially if these longer-range strikes continue throughout the summer months.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter here still in Rome, approaching all the forums, continuing our open ended series about the changes of military technology. Now we’re going to deal with longer range drone system things with an excess of 300km. The Ukrainians have launched a series of systems over the course of the last roughly ten weeks that have increased their range upwards of 1800 kilometers total. 

So for those of you in metric, that’s roughly 900 to 1000 miles. And Moscow was only about 300, 350 miles from the front line. This means that Ukrainians can relatively reliably strike anything that is west of the Urals at this point, and even a few things opposite the URLs, if they really push it. These things are carrying warheads that are typically in excess of 100 pounds. 

They’re using them to heavily target not so much military assets directly, but infrastructure related to energy production and transport, pumping stations, refineries, ports, that sort of thing. Now, pre-war, the Russians exported about, oh, 2.5 million barrels per day of oil and about another million and a half barrels per day of refined product that is now facing some sphere problems. 

It’s really hard to give you accurate numbers because everything is changing day by day, and the Russians aren’t just sitting there. They’re repairing things as they go. So let’s talk about the technology and then talk about the impact. So first the technology, unlike the modified short to medium range drones where it’s just a matter, you know, just a matter of putting a couple new pieces of semiconductor to give it a limited decision making capability. 

This is a range issue. And so with the range issue, Ukrainians are limited by their industrial base, which they’re rapidly building out. We’ve had the number of drones per day in use, roughly Quinn Tipple over the course of the last ten weeks, and there’s no reason to expect that to slow. If anything, it’s probably going to accelerate. One of the things to keep in mind is because of the Iraq war and America’s inability to provide adequate air defense and missile defense to the Arab states, as we now have a cavalcade of countries in the Middle East and Europe that are providing funding for the Ukrainians to expand their industrial plant all over the place, and that’s giving them cash that is necessary to expand industrial plant and build out at home. Keep in mind that there are so many startups in Ukraine that are providing drone technology now that the Ukrainians actually ran out of money to fund them all. That’s not a problem anymore. So everybody is in the process of spinning up, and by the time we get to mid-summer, we’re probably going to be seeing daily strikes in dozens, if not hundreds of these things across the length and breadth of Russia regularly, every single day, most likely in terms of impact. 

It’s hard to get firm numbers on this because everything is a moving target. But oh yeah, fun little fact. The Romans had so much marble they used it for like, dust boards. Anyway, what this means is that we’ve had over 80 discrete energy targets across Russia come under sustained attack, sometimes getting hit three and four times a week. 

Major ports have gone offline and back. Online tanks are gone, pumping stations getting damaged. Even direct pipe strikes probably. There’s really no average here. But I would say on average, we’re looking at an overall reduction of somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million barrels per day of a combined transport and pumping and port capacity, and that gets well into the danger zone for the Russian system. 

The Russian oil complex kind of has two big phases down in the southern provinces. You can have some older fields that are basically supplied by water injection, and those you can run on reduced capacity or even shut them down safely and bring them back later. But collectively, that’s only about one to maybe 1.2 million barrels per day. Everything else is in permafrost territory, and because of heating and cooling problems, you can’t maintain a steady temperature at the production site at the bottom of the wellbore. 

In the pipelines and the pumping stations, everything cracks apart. Or in the case of some things, wax congealed in it. And then you have to replace the infrastructure completely. We’re now on the point where that has to be shut down, at least in part, and that stuff cannot be restarted on anything less than a multi year time frame. 

The last time this stuff all got shut down, it was in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, and it took the Russians 20 years to bring it back up to snuff like they had it during the Soviet period. So we are now already today at the beginning of the end of Russia, as a country that can even export petroleum or petroleum products at all to its west. 

And if you keep up this crescendo of attacks throughout the summer, by the end of the year, the Russians really won’t be an oil power in the western provinces at all. And that includes most of the western and northwestern Siberian fields as well. That’ll just leave what is out on the east side of the Urals, which is a separate infrastructure. 

But at the rate the Ukrainians are going as entirely possible, that that may be in range by the end of summer anyway. So from a war point of view, this is how Russia pays for everything. All is the single largest inflow point for the Russian state budget, which funds. Of course, the military natural gas is kind of like the kicker on the side, but most of the natural gas, a lot of the natural gas has already been shut in because it can’t be redirected in the way that liquid oil can be. 

So the Ukrainians haven’t felt the need to go after it. They’ll probably find some reasons in the next few months, as energy targets become harder to find, because there just won’t be all that many left. And that’s Palatine Hill behind me. That’s one of the original seven cities of Roman, where most of the rich folk lived during the High Imperial period. 

One more detail. We already have reports from several Russian oil officials talking about shut ins in places like Tatar, Saturn and Bashkir stand, which is where the water recovery basically pumped down. Water increased well pressure, and the oil comes up and you skim the oil off the top, where that’s already been shut down by a significant margin, at least in the high hundreds of thousands of barrels. 

But we’re also getting that’s the stuff you can turn back on. We’re also getting some reports of things further north, where we were getting some panicked reports about wells that will never come back on at all. So we’re already well into this, and the Ukrainians aren’t letting up, if anything. Intensification over the summer.

Winners and Losers of the Iran War: Ukraine and Russia

Toy soldiers advance across a map with an Iranian flag in the foreground

The Iran war has slashed oil exports from the Persian Gulf, creating a global supply shortage that’s just starting to hit markets. As prices are driven up and broader economic impacts unfold, winners and losers will begin to emerge.

Russia was enjoying the boost in oil revenues until Ukraine took out a chunk of its energy infrastructure with drone strikes. And those strikes don’t look like they’ll stop anytime soon. Russia’s support for Iran is also garnering political backlash that will weaken Putin’s long-term position. Ukraine is emerging as a winner, as its low-cost drone tech has secured deals with Gulf states to scale production and secure Ukraine’s position as a leader in military tech.

The Iran war is reshaping global alliances in ways nobody could have predicted, so we’ll continue to explore the winners and losers of this conflict in this new series.

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Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. So today we’re going to dive into our open ended series on the impacts of the Iran war on everybody else. We’ve talked about the United States at length and the Persian Gulf countries, of course, but what about everyone else? The region used to export 22 million barrels of crude a day. It is now down to probably something between 10 and 12. So we’re already looking at a shortage of 400 to 450 million barrels that haven’t gotten out, and a lot of that shut in is going to remain shut in for assuming no additional damage. It’ll remain shut in for a minimum of another nine months after the guns stop firing. 

And in the case of some of the Iraqi production, probably well over two years. These aren’t shale wells where you can just turn them on and off. Anyway, that has a lot of, in fact, a lot of people. We are only in the preliminary days of seeing oil prices go up. It was only last week that the last of the oil tankers pre-war from the Persian Gulf made it to Northeast Asia. 

And it’ll be this week that the last make it to Western Europe. So what it was a failure in throughput is now becoming a failure in supply. And we’re going to see that impact all kinds of things. So let’s start with the former Soviet Union, specifically Russia and Ukraine. In the opening days of the war. The conventional wisdom was twofold. 

Number one, there’s no way that Ukraine comes out of this in a better position. The Western world, the whole world is going to be distracted by what’s going on in the Persian Gulf, which for most countries is more significant than what happens in the Russian near abroad. The United States is going to be diverting its weapons system, most notably its missile interceptors, to its own needs in theater, rather than sending them to Ukraine. 

And on the flip side, Russia is going to make mat bank. Oil prices had been moderate until the war started, and now they’re regularly over $100 a barrel. And if you consider that the break even cost for a lot of Russian fields are between 30 and $50 a barrel. And they went from selling hit 60 to 100. 

You know, you’ve seen the profit for Russian oil sales increased by a factor of five or more almost overnight. And that cash coming in is obviously going to remake what Russia can do with the war. Most of their equipment is comes from China, but the China insist on hard currency payments and that requires oil sales. That was the conventional wisdom, and there’s nothing wrong with that. 

But now that we’re five weeks in, we’re seeing a much more nuanced picture with a lot of unexpected upsides and downsides for both sides. Let’s start with the Russians. The Russians have been actively providing intelligence and techniques and hardware to the Iranian government to target the United States’s forces in region. While Donald Trump remains firmly in Putin’s pocket, that is drastically adjusting things in the Defense Department and on Capitol Hill, where we’re seeing significant unrest in the United States with Donald Trump’s policies, in a way that can’t help, the Russians long term. 

More importantly, the Russians and the Iranians are not the only ones with drones. And during the war, the Ukrainians have showcased a new set of hardware with a little bit longer range and have used it to completely destroy the export capacity of Russian oil exports from the Baltic Sea. 

It’s conservative, removing a million and a half barrels a day of exports, maybe up to 2 million, because the Russians can’t really redirect. They don’t have a backup pipeline system. And so what was originally this big windfall has turned into a structural loss for them in terms of oil exports. They’re still earning more money overall. 

But once the Ukrainians are done with the Saint Petersburg region, they’re just going to turn those drones onto the next oil producing and transiting system. And we may not have any meaningful Russian exports from either the Baltic or the Black Sea within three months, or that close second Ukraine itself. The year that the Ukrainians have had to basically operate without American assistance, they’ve used to great effect and innovating into the drone space, specifically encounter, drone technology. They’ve got something called the Brave One, which can fit into a duffel bag. It has limited range. Not a great success rate, maybe 50%, but it only cost 2 to $3000 to make, versus 30 to 50,000 for a Shahed versus 4 million for pack three. 

So Zelenskyy in the last couple of weeks has been all over the Persian Gulf, signing deals specifically with Kuwait and Qatar and United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, each multibillion dollar deals to invest in drone production. The Ukrainian problem this last year hasn’t been innovation. It’s having the cash necessary to buy all the materials to make it. 

Probably half of the industrial plant that they’ve expanded in Ukraine in the last year is not being used because they don’t have the money. Well, say what you will about the gold farmers money is not the limiting factor. So we’re going to be seeing money pouring into these facilities in Ukraine, which is going to drastically increase the defense of Ukraine from the Russians. 

At the same time, they’ll be exporting drones to the Gulf states and the Gulf states will be building their own counter drone factories. So we’re talking about a whole number of countries that five years ago, no one really considered to be at the forefront of military tech. All of a sudden at the forefront of military tech in a way that the United States can’t participate in and isn’t benefiting from. 

So we’ve seen Ukraine and Russia get weird ups and downs in ways that were completely unexpected just a few weeks ago. But perhaps the biggest impact of this is because the Russians are so actively assisting Iranians, is that all of the Arabs of the Persian Gulf are noodling over what’s next for them, vis-a-vis the Russians and the United States. 

And if you remember back to roughly 1985, when Reagan really started pushing hard on the Soviet Union, that was the year that the Saudis decided to drastically open up oil production in order to flood the market and bankrupt what was then the Soviet Union. We now have the beginnings of a second generation of some sort of alliance like that. 

But instead of the United States, it’s the Europeans, instead of NATO, it’s Ukraine. And so we’ve got a number of pieces moving here, building new geopolitical alignments that really look very, very bad long term for Russia. None of this I probably would have guessed two months ago, but here we are.

Ukraine Strikes Hit Baltic Export Facilities

Drone firing a missile

The global energy trade has been taking hit after hit, and things might be getting worse. Ukraine launched a large drone attack on oil export facilities in the Baltic, proving they can disrupt Russian exports.

With the Persian Gulf effectively offline, losing Russian oil would be devastating to the global markets. Drone warfare continues to evolve and reshape the way these conflicts unfold, especially when targeting energy infrastructure.

I would expect Ukraine to continue these strikes, knocking out a large portion of Russian export capacity. Which means the global energy crisis could get much worse, very soon.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. More news, not Iran related from Sunday, the Ukrainians launched a fleet of drones into Leningrad province. That’s where Saint Petersburg is targeting. Specifically the pro-Morsi and the use Luga oil loading facilities. Now, combined, those two facilities can handle about 1.7 million barrels of crude a day of exports and another 300,000 barrels per day of refined oil products, primarily diesel. There are multiple reports of fires throughout the loading and tanker areas on the port specifically, and at this point, about 24 hours after the attacks happened, that port remains offline. Now, this is significant for two very, very, very big reasons. Number one, the Persian Gulf is offline. It’s probably not coming back. That’s 20 million barrels per day that we’re probably just not going to see again. 

And the world has yet to accept that is where this is ultimately going to lead. Second, there are really only three major sources of crude for the global economy. One is the Persian Gulf. One is North America, specifically the American shale sector, primarily in Texas. New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma and North Dakota. That one’s fine. And the third one is the former Soviet Union. 

Most notably Russia. Now, Russia has three major ways to ship its crude out. One goes to the Black Sea. And those have been under persistent attacks by the Ukrainians for a couple of years now. One goes out to the Far East, near the city of Vladivostok. Those are well out of range of anything the Ukrainians can do. 

And the third one is this one here in the Baltic Sea with Paramores can use luga. The thing is, these have typically been just out of range for Ukrainian attacks as a rule. And there’s this is a rule made to be broken. Any infrastructure that is within about 600 miles of a hostile actor is now completely vulnerable to ongoing cheap drone attacks like the shitheads at the Iranians are using against the United States in the Gulf right now. 

Like the Russians have been using against Ukraine since the beginning of the war, and now the Ukrainians have joined the club and they’re threatening, the Leningrad region. But the Leningrad region is about 700 miles away. So not only have the Ukrainians developed a new battle platform with better range, they’ve been able to generate enough drones to throw a volley of 60 of them at these two ports. 

To the point that they are able to shut down one of the largest facilities that the Russians have. So we now need to pencil in, in the not too distant future that, not only are we going to use the Gulf, not only are we going to use the Black Sea, we are also going to lose the crude that’s coming out of the Saint Petersburg region as well. 

And from the Russian point of view, that adds up to about another 4 million barrels a day, probably. There’s a limited degree for the Russians to shift crude around, but really not all that much. The Ukrainians have now demonstrated that this is, if not easy for them, well within their capabilities. And we should see attack after attack after attack in the days and weeks to come. 

The Iran War: Enter Sting Interceptors

Drone-intercepting Sting drone being prepared for launch | https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sting_drone-interceptor_being_prepared_for_launch.png#/media/File:Sting_drone-interceptor_being_prepared_for_launch.png

Defenses in the Persian Gulf are collapsing as Iran continues large drone attacks, but there’s a country that already has the answer. Enter Ukraine’s Sting interceptor.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. It is late on the 15th of March, giving you an idea of what’s happened over the weekend in the Iran war. A few big developments. Number one, it’s very clear that Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are almost entirely out of interceptors. And we’re seeing more and more shots getting through to that. 

And the Iranians have warned citizens of the UAE in the vicinity of military facilities and ports to move, because it is the Iranian intent in the next few days to basically destroy all of them. Judging from the number of drones that are still coming out, I don’t think they can destroy all of them in that kind of timeframe, but they can certainly wreak immense damage, especially to the energy infrastructure. 

So we’re now at the point we’re seeing the act of disassembly, if you want to use a less horrible term, of the physical infrastructure up and down the Gulf. And when they’re done with the UAE and Kuwait, they will obviously focus on gutter. In Saudi Arabia. We’re also seeing reports that Israel is almost completely out of, interceptors as well. 

And the United States does not have a replacement stock to help with any of the countries, the Trump administration, Donald Trump personally, I should say, has, taken to Truth Social to start demanding that other countries start sending warships to attack Iran. Gone is the bluster that, oh, the war is completely over, and it’s just a matter of tying this up. 

I mean, that was always really stupid. Now it’s being peeled back for the ridiculousness that it is. Specifically, Donald Trump has called upon the Japanese and the Koreans to send ships. A few things here. First of all, the Koreans don’t have the range, so it’s going to be very easy for them to ignore that one second. 

Japan does have the range and like the bar for us getting involved in a war that somebody else has started when we don’t have really the military capacity to appreciably, help. It makes it a bit of a stretch. But more to the point, there’s just the time, these are not countries that maintain navies on a wide ranging global patrol like the United States. 

Nobody does. And so if the Japanese did decide to send a meaningful contingent, they would not arrive in the next two, three weeks. That’s assuming they were ready to go right now, which is an open question. So you can just take that little bit of American propaganda and shove it to the side because it’s irrelevant. 

The other big thing is Ukrainian President Zelensky has said that he has provided the United States with definitive proof about how Russia is assisting Iran in the war with the United States. Specifically, he says it’s a combination of Intel programing and hardware, at the moment. 

the white House has been silent about that. And anyone who knows anything about this region of the Russians is going to know that. 

Of course, that was going to happen because the Russians have been doing it for the last 30 years. And just because we’ve had a change in president, that doesn’t mean that the Russians or the Iranians see the United States any different at all. 

What will probably happen is unless we have a significant shift in attitude out of Donald Trump personally, we will probably see the Ukrainians providing that information to the countries in the Persian Gulf that are actually getting hit so that the Kuwaitis, the Qatari, the Saudis, the Emiratis and everybody else understand exactly, how the United States has screwed this up. 

Once that happens, I would expect the Arab states of the Persian Gulf to start spending just immense amounts of cash in Ukraine to massively expand their capacity to build counter, drone weaponry interceptors. There’s something called the Brave One, which is about a foot long. It and its entire launcher fits into a duffel bag. 

According to the Ukrainians and some countries that have bought some, you can make these things for somewhere between 1 and $3000 each, whereas a shithead costs in the 35 to $55,000 range and a Pac three interceptor, the one to the United States is running out of are 4 million a pop. 

In addition, the United States can only make about 700 PAC threes in a year, whereas the Iranians pre-war could make 700 shitheads in a week. And the Ukrainians can probably make several thousand, brave ones a week as well. But they need industrial infrastructure and plant expansion in order to up their production, both for their own defense as well as for any sort of export sales. 

Say what you will about the Kuwaitis, the Qatari, the Emiratis and the Saudis. They’re not particularly good at anything that involves the military, but they have a lot of cash sitting on hand. You got over $2 trillion in sovereign wealth funds, and we will probably now, within days, see a fairly substantial chunks of that dedicated to investing in Ukrainian infrastructure in a way that we just haven’t seen from the Europeans, much less the United States, in the last year. 

That changes a lot of the math of what is possible and impossible in Russia, in Ukraine, in Europe, in Iran, in the Persian Gulf. We’re now in a position where the best chance for preserving the infrastructure to prevent some sort of global calamity, ironically, runs through Kiev, and Riyadh and Doha and Kuwait City. And the rest are going to come to that realization, probably in the next 48 hours. 

One quick correction on today’s video. The name of the drone right here that the Ukrainians are producing that is in high demand is called the sting, not the brave one. Brave one is the tech incubator that Kiev has set up to facilitate innovation across the entire drone and general defense space. So brave one is the institution. The sting is the actual piece of hardware that everybody is after.