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.

Strike Targeting Problems in Ukraine

Imagine of a drone firing missiles

The U.S. is pressuring Ukraine to avoid striking specific Russian energy infrastructure. As you could imagine, this all has to do with American economic interests.

Chevron and ExxonMobil have a stake in major Kazakh oil projects, which flow through Russia to be exported. Ukrainian strikes on any related infrastructure risk harming those American energy companies’ bottom line, and that simply will not do (even though Trump stopped providing military aid to Ukraine over a year ago).

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. The news this week in Kazakhstan, of all places, is that the United States is starting to point its finger at Ukraine about the targets it’s supposed to attack in Russian territory. The issue is that over the last several months, Ukrainian drones have gotten more effective with better range and more explosive capacity and better accuracy. 

And they’re now regularly targeting Russian infrastructure, several hundred kilometers. On the other side of the international border. And several of those attacks have struck an area called Novorossiysk, which is an oil loading facility on the Russian part of the Black Sea. The issue that apparently the American government has is upstream of that pipeline on the other side of another international boundary with Kazakhstan. 

We have some investments by American super majors, and those super majors have gone to the U.S government and said, hey, hey, hey. And so the U.S government has gone to Ukraine, said no, no, no. The two projects in question are called Tengiz and Cash are gone. Now. Tengiz is the original foreign direct investment project by Western companies into the former Soviet Union. 

So old that actually predates the fall of the Soviet Union, was negotiated under Gorbachev. And then Kazakhstan got it and it became a Kazakh project. It is a consortium that involves, Chevron, which has a 50% share. ExxonMobil, which has a 25% share, and then a series of local and Russian firms, it produces about what’s called 700,000 barrels a day. 

On a good day, considerably below where it was supposed to be. But the problem with that project is the pipeline. C, the pipeline, comes out from Kazakhstan, goes around the Caspian Sea, crosses into Russia, and then uses a lot of old repurposed Soviet section. So it’s kind of jigsaw together before it gets to another SEC. And so the Russians have insisted that they be able to put their crude into the pipeline as well. 

So while you do have a signal field that does produce a large volume, it’s kind of capped at what it can do because the Russians demand access to the pipe for the rest of the capacity. The second project, kasha gone is much more difficult. It’s offshore. It’s in the Caspian Sea. You only have one American company involved. 

That’s ExxonMobil. They have about a one sixth share. It’s not doing nearly as well, but even it is getting up over a 400,000 barrels a day. So you put it together. You’re talking over a million barrels a day. This is this is real crude. And the overseas terminal can handle it. And then some. But it’s impossible for the Ukrainians to attack the Russian energy infrastructure that ends in overseas without it also being perceived by American companies that it’s impinging upon their, economic interests. 

And so the Ukrainians are basically told, go attack something else. And that is exactly how the Ukrainians have interpreted it, not don’t attack energy infrastructure like the Biden administration used to tell them, don’t attack energy infrastructure for which American interests are involved. How this is going to go is going to get really interesting because when something loads up at an overseas port, you don’t necessarily know what it’s loading up with. 

And as soon as Ukraine started going after shadow fleet tankers, more and more tankers are refusing to even go to Novorossiysk. So this is one of those six and one half dozen another. How do you define it? How are you going to enforce it? But the bottom line is, is that the United States is no longer contributor to Ukraine’s military defense. 

And in the way it used to be. It used to be that the United States was the majority of the military aid and provided very little economic aid. They left that to Europe after a year of Donald Trump. The United States is still providing no economic aid, but is now providing no military aid at all. So how talks evolve among the Ukrainians, the Americans and the Russians is going to termine how the Ukrainians decide to leverage their military technology here. 

There are a number of ways that the Ukrainians could go after pumping stations on different projects for, say, the Druze, the pipeline that used to bring in lots of crude into Germany. 

But those attacks target facilities that supply crude to Hungary and Slovakia, which are two countries in Europe that are extraordinarily pro-Russian at the moment, to the point that they’re even shutting off fuel and electricity deliveries to Ukraine because they want to make sure they can still get Russian oil flowing through Ukraine. 

So it’s we’re still dealing here with the detritus of the Soviet collapse, because it’s not just one empire anymore. 

It’s 25 different countries across Central Europe. In the former Soviet Union proper. All of them have chunks of infrastructure that were designed for a different air and a different political reality. And Ukraine is just in the unfortunate part of being in the middle of it. 

While under attack. There’s no such complications. However, further north, there’s another major pipeline system, the Baltic Pipeline network, that terminates near Saint Petersburg, which is just as big as what’s going on in over a sec. And as we’ve seen in recent months, that two is now within range of Ukrainian drones. More importantly, we have the Europeans that are in the process of negotiating how to go after the shadow fleets directly. 

So we could actually have a number of NATO countries, ten of them who border this littoral, who could all of a sudden all decide on the same day because they tend to coordinate policies, that no more. And then you’ve got to have Denmark, Britain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany and Poland all at the same time. 

Same. Nope. It’s over and there is no way to redirect that crude somewhere else. And if you want to talk about something that’s going to hit Russia’s bottom line, that’s the way to do it. And now the Ukrainians are in a position where they may be forced to concentrate all of their long range attacks on one specific system. 

I would not want to be running that system.

Ukraine Goes on the Offensive

A ukraine soldiers patch/flag on their uniform

Starlink cut service to Russian forces along the front line, leaving these troops largely isolated. Ukraine has taken advantage of the situation by launching localized offensives and reclaiming a nice chunk of land.

The Ukrainians remain outnumbered. However, since Russian units are scattered, isolated, and unable to communicate, they are left vulnerable. So, organized Ukrainian offensives are finding success…for now.

The Russians will likely adapt, or the Ukrainians will come face-to-face with entrenched units and minefields, but Ukraine has regained the offensive momentum for the time being.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 18th of February, and the news is a significant change in the battlefield in Ukraine. We did a video talking about how Starlink had been unofficially siding with the Russians in many ways until they got caught out and basically accused of several dozen counts of second degree murder. 

And so they have cut off, connections to their Starlink receivers throughout the front region, this time emphasizing the Russian side of the operation. And what we’ve discovered in the last 96 hours is that the Russian forces in the area were completely dependent upon Starlink for communication among themselves, and that communication is functionally stopped. Now, keep in mind that drones today are either first person drones that can be jammed or on a, tether, a fiber optic tether that has a limited range. 

And so the best way to jam is to have an electronic warfare unit in Ukraine needs to become the best in the world. That by far, far better than the United States. Which means that normal types of radio communications simply don’t work if you’re relatively close to the front. And now the Russians have been cut off completely. 

And even though the Ukrainians are outmanned and outgunned, they have gone on the offensive and captured about 50mi² over the course of the last several days. I doubt it’ll last. It’s only a matter of time before the Russians come up with backup plans, or the Ukrainians hit those massive minefields that stopped their assaults a couple of years ago. 

But it does allow, in the short term at least, the Ukrainians could, to completely liquidate Russian positions while on the offensive. Normally, you only attack and location if you enjoy about a 3 to 1 ratio. In vantage in troop numbers. The Ukrainians are doing it with far less than that, sometimes even being outnumbered. But because they’re able to isolate the Russian forces in detail, they’re able to completely wipe them out. 

Keep in mind that over the course of the last year, we’ve seen the Russian tactics change considerably. So instead of big massed assaults, assaulting, Russian positions, they sneak in 2 or 3 at a time and pepper the area through until a few of them survive. And then reinforcements can come in. That means you’ve got lots, dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of little spots where there’s two, three, 4 or 5, ten Russians holding the position and against a coordinated Ukrainian attack that still enjoys drones and communications. 

They don’t have much of a chance at all. So I doubt this will last very long. But for the moment, the Ukrainians are pushing forward in a way that they haven’t been able to for a couple of years, and their critics said was never possible again. But here we are.

The Ukraine War, Drones, and Starlink (Bonus Video)

A starlink rocket

Drones now account for the majority of casualties in the Ukraine War. One of the innovations that has allowed Russia to improve strike range is by mounting Starlink terminals to drones.

This highlights a broader evolution in warfare, in which private tech platforms can now control information flows and battlefield capabilities. Gone are the days of nation-states being the only big dogs at the table.

This new era shows that individuals and corporations can shape warfare, security, and media ecosystems at scale. This isn’t going to sit well with most governments, so expect a large geopolitical shift as a result.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we are talking about a new technology that is evolved and how it’s, linking into other social issues that we’ve been discussing from time to time. It involves drones in Ukraine and the company Starlink, which is owned by Elon Musk.

In Ukraine, about two thirds, maybe closer to 75%, based on who’s numbers are using, of the casualties had been inflicted in the last three years of the war, have been inflicted by drones and most of those drones, what you call first person vehicles.

So you’ve got a, a drone that is controlled by a radio controller, and it goes off and blows into something, but it’s directed by a person the whole time. And the chief technology and countering that to this point has been, jamming, which the Russians are pretty good at. And the Ukrainians are become very good at. So the way you get around jamming is you have a fiber optic spool of cable on the back of the drone that just kind of just let out as it flies.

And then that can’t be jammed. It has to be destroyed some other way, which is very, very hard to do. While the Russians have hit on a new strategy, Starlink is the company that has several thousand satellites up in orbit and is providing internet coverage to everyone who can pay for it, especially in remote areas like where I live and, well, The Russians have started using portable units. You’ve got your normal corporate units or your house unit, which you put on and you point up at the sky, but you also now have these smaller units that can basically mount on a car or even carrying a backpack. The Russians have started putting those on drones and using those to send drones, not the 1015 miles you can with a first person drone or a wire drone, but hundreds of kilometers so you can attack things deep within the country.

The legal implications of this are pretty dark. Because this isn’t like having a computer chip that you sell to someone and eventually ends up in a drone. You’re not controlling that computer chip or enabling it over its operation. But with Starlink, you are using the active satellite network for a data connection, and then you control the drone through the Starlink satellites.

So you can’t basically have it intercepted conventionally, and you can use it to drive it in whatever building you want. And we now have footage that has come out of Russian channels of the Russians using this to target things like government buildings and schools and playgrounds and malls and most famously of recently, a moving train full of civilians.

Elon Musk has, taken a very direct position to confronting this, he’s basically called the European ministers who have brought this to public attention, drooling morons and has said it’s not being used this way at all. And so the Ukrainians went through the wreckage and pulled out several dozen Starlink units, complete with their serial numbers, and said, guess again.

And in the last ten days, Starlink has started to change the way they regulate their receivers in the vicinity of the war. So, for example, if you’ve got a Starlink unit that’s going 45 miles an hour not on a road, it’s probably a Russian drone, and they’re starting to shut down some of these things, which is having some really big problems for the Russians on the front line, because over the course of the last couple months, this had become the primary method for inflicting damage on Ukraine.

And if you’ve been following news, you know, there’s been a lot of hits on power plants as well as trains that provide the fuel to the power plants. Almost all of those were operated by Starlink and powered drones.

From a legal point of view, this is a pretty big deal because here in the United States, when something is used in that way with you actively allowing and empowering your product to cause a death and destruction, it’s called depraved indifference. And if someone dies as a result of that operation, it’s a second degree murder charge. And now we have dozens of cases where it’s basically been confirmed that Elon Musk’s Starlink company was actively involved in abetting, Russian attacks on Ukraine that were deliberately designed to kill as many civilians as possible.

At the moment, that seems to be addressed, but that’s peace. One piece, too, is what’s going on elsewhere in the world. One of the things that you have to keep in mind is that when it comes to free speech, the United States has a relatively different position compared to the rest of the world. We’re really iconoclastic about it.

And we especially when a new technology is involved, we want to like, see where it’s going to run before we put any restrictions on it. So the iconic example is The Telegraph, which came out after the Civil War during reconstruction. The way media worked in the United States before that was everybody was basically a local newspaper. There really weren’t any regional, much less national papers, because you couldn’t get the paper delivered in time for it to matter.

So you had all of these local papers, and all of them basically had their own political views, and they basically lied about the other side. But because it was all local, no one really cared. Once the Telegraph came out, the lies could go national instantly. And we started to get a much more visceral politic, which has continued to this day.

And it even got the United States involved in a war, because if you remember Pulitzer, he basically accused the Spanish of blowing up the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. That’s not how it went down. It was just an internal ammo explosion. But the Spanish got the blame. Americans got all riled up. We went to war.

We’re kind of in an echo of that situation now, elsewhere in the world, where they take a much more nuanced view to things like free speech. They’re starting to get upset with what in the United States is functionally a right to lie is what it’s starting to be called, because it’s exactly what it is. The idea is that no matter what you say, no matter what the social media platform is, you can’t be held legally liable for it, regardless of what you said and what your intention is.

That’s not flying very well in the rest of the world. So in some countries, like Brazil, they’re establishing a national authority that evaluates what people are saying, what they intended, and if it’s false and the intended harm, they’re starting to prosecute people in other countries. They’re simply restricting the use of social media for minors with 16 years old kind of being the general threshold against these people.

Elon Musk is also very, aggressive, calling them totalitarians or dictators, specifically the Spanish, prime minister, who Spanish is the most recent country to kind of follow that path. We also have a number of European authorities, French, most notably, they starting to raid, Elon Musk Company’s offices, specifically X or Twitter to everybody else, because we now have programs running in the background of Elon Musk, media companies that, will if you just ask them, take a photo of anyone and turn it into a porno for you.

And, you know, that’s a little ugly. And apparently it’s really popular among the pedophiles. So we have this captain of industry in the United States that is basically arguing that child porn is an inalienable right, and that really doesn’t resonate with a whole lot of people. And so we’re starting to see this combination mindset starting to bubble up in a lot of places, most notably Europe.

That Elon Musk personally and his companies in general have become both a cultural threat, a safety threat, and on the other side, a security threat because of what’s going on in the Ukraine war. I don’t have a good solution for this, but I think it’s worth pointing out that live in an era where the nation state was basically the determiner about what happened with things like physical security and media.

We now have this person, Elon Musk, in his company, Starlink X, and the rest that have built this alternate constellation of power that doesn’t just control information, but now can control military munitions. That’s not something we’ve really seen since the early days of the telegraph and industrialized warfare, but this time it’s much more personal and precise with its application where this is going to go, I don’t know, but I can guarantee you that Elon Musk will not be the only one.

He won’t be the last one. And we will see things like this picked up by nation states in the years to come, so that we have not just conflicting and deliberately clashing narratives, but conflicting and clashing security systems in a way that most countries can’t even pretend to deal with. Starlink already has thousands of satellites up there. How do you combat that?

So bottom line from all of this, it’s a brave new world already. And we’re going to see nation states like the European start to see what they can do to rein in or redirect institutions like the one that Musk is building, which of course, will lead to some sort of at least indirect clash with the administration on this side of the ocean.

We’re only the very beginning of this sort of overhaul of how the world works, and I have no idea what it’s going to look like five years from now, much less on the other side.

Electronic Warfare Innovations and Exports

Laptop with green coding and a server

Let’s talk about the current state of electronic warfare in the Ukraine War and how Iran is fitting into all this.

Drones are all the rage. You’ve got fancy autonomous systems, short-range with remote pilots, and fiber-optic tethered. The next logical step to countering drones is to beef up jamming capabilities; Ukraine has done just that. However, the Russians have taken this logic one step further. They’ve created a tool called the Kalinka. The Kalinka is a mobile detection system that listens for signals. This gives them an early warning for drone strikes and other signal-based attacks.

Electronic warfare innovations are spreading quickly, and this tech is already appearing in other regions. For instance, Iran used the Russian Kalinka tech to locate Starlink users during the protests, allowing them to shut down comms and suppress dissent.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado, I hope everybody who is east of the Rockies is enjoying the cold front because, Canada worst. Anyway, today we’re talking about what’s going on in Ukraine and Russia and Iran from a technical point of view, specifically electronic warfare. Drones basically fall into three general categories. Number one, you got autonomous ones that can make decisions on their own. Those are incredibly rare and incredibly difficult to maintain because the chips themselves are unstable when there’s vibration or heat or cold or humidity or anything. So really, aside from a few here and there that are very expensive, not a lot of play. The second are those that you fly first person, and for that you have to have a connection to them somehow so that the telemetry can come back and forth and you can control them. 

Now, the United States does that with things like Reapers through satellite connections. The Ukrainians primarily do it on a shorter range, and the Russians also on a shorter range, typically no more than, 20km. And the problem with that is they can be jammed. And so both the Ukrainians and the Russians have gotten very, very good at here. 

I mean, I would argue that right now, today, Ukraine’s jammers are by far the best in the world, probably an order of magnitude better than America’s. Once you consider in cost. And then the third type is to do, fiber drones, which have a thin fiber optic cable that they drag behind. Now, these don’t have nearly as much range as a rule, but they can’t be jammed because there’s a hard line. 

And these, as a rule, are five kilometers or less. Although there are now some models where the fiber optic cable is light enough. You can go more than ten. Anyway, so those are kind of what’s going on there. But there’s another aspect to countering drones or any sort of electronic battle platform, that doesn’t involve jamming, but it’s still electronic warfare. 

And in this, the Russians have definitely, cracked the code on a new tech that is really interesting and has a lot of applications. So they call it the clinker. It’s basically a electronic warfare detection system that is mounted onto a truck or an armored vehicle. You basically drive around, find a place to park, and then you just listen and you pick up signals whether this is a cell phone or a drone connection or more importantly, in recent terms, as we’ve discovered, a, Starlink terminal. 

So one of the things that the Ukrainians have been doing is taking mobile Starlink terminals and putting them on things like drones, and then they go out into the Black Sea and blow up something that’s Russian. And the Russians don’t like that. But if you’re having a constant link in from a Starlink terminal and you can detect that, then the Russians finally have a way of knowing that it’s coming. 

I’m not saying it works perfectly. The range is only about 15km, and one of the CBP drones, they’re pretty quick. It’s not a lot of time to react, and it doesn’t jam the connection. It just detects it. So the Ukrainians have learned to turn things on and off every couple of minutes so that the Clinkers can’t, link up. 

But one of the things you have to keep in mind is that we’re in a fundamentally new type of warfare here, and when drones first appeared on the battlefield in a meaningful way that was not American. It wasn’t in Ukraine. It was in Armenia. We had a war back in 2020 between Armenia and Azerbaijan. And the as a region has had, Turkish drones that they basically used to completely obliterate the entire armed forces of Armenia in the disputed territories and would go on a crowbar. 

The Armenians weren’t ready for it. And so what we’re now starting to see is Ukrainian and Russian technology coming into other theaters and just completely wiping the board. So, for example, in the last couple of weeks, we have we’ve had those big protests in Iran, and people were wondering how the Iranians were able to shut down communication so effectively. 

Well, it now looks like the Russians gave the Iranians a few clinkers, and they basically just drove them around town, identified where all of Starlink’s were kicked in the door, shut the people involved, or brought them in for beating or imprisonment or whatever it happened to be. And lo and behold, the, situation from the Iranian point of view was diffused. 

So we now have a technology that has very, very strong implications for use in a civilian management system. We’re going to be seeing more and more things like this of technologies from a hot zone where they’re iterating every day and every week suddenly pop up in a theater that you wouldn’t expect, where it completely outwits maneuvers outclasses the preexisting systems. Iran is just a taste of what is to come on a global basis.

The New Ukraine Proxy War

Russia is rapidly depleting its stock of prewar vehicles and losing soldiers faster than population growth can replace them, thrusting it closer and closer to military exhaustion.

Ukraine has its own set of problems, but at least it has stronger nationalism and a growing European military-industrial base behind it. As Europe steps up as the primary aid provider for Ukraine, we’re entering a new era of proxy wars. We have Europe backing Ukraine and China backing Russia.

This is reshaping global military technology. Europe vis-à-vis Ukraine is now leading drone and counter-drone innovation. China is advancing alongside Russia. And guess who is getting left in the dust…

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Transcript

Hey, all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado early in the new year. We’ve had a lot of information drop out of the Russian Ministry of Defense. Ukrainians. A lot of folks on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine that study the war. And we’ve seen a few interesting patterns emerge in just the last four months that I think it’s worth spending a little time talking about. 

The short version is we’re, to a degree, seen a deindustrialization of the war effort, specifically on the Russian side of the equation. The Russians started this conflict with a massive advantage in armored vehicles and tanks, something like 20,000 or so that they had left over from the Soviet period. The Ukrainians had a lot left over as well, but not even a quarter. 

The amount probably closer to a 10th, actually, by most measures. But the Russians go through equipment like they go through men. They run it hard, and they put it into situations that are perhaps not the best. And their doctrine isn’t very good. And everything gets shot up. And that’s before you consider the climactic and, geographic situation in Ukraine, where for large, portions of the year, the area is just really muddy. 

And if you put a tank into mud, it doesn’t move very well. And it’s really easy prey for a drone. And so bit by bit over the war, vehicles have become less important and drones have become more important. But for the Russians, who actually have to bring equipment to the front, vehicles are always going to be more important for them than it is for the Ukrainians. 

Well, it seems that they’ve run out, pretty much all of their pre-war battle tanks are now gone and their ability to replenish them, it is something like 2 to 3% of what they had before. They’re only able to make a few tanks a month. In addition, things like APCs and armored vehicles, they’ve pretty much run out of. 

And now they’re even running out of civilian vehicles and things like golf carts to the point that we’re actually seeing horse charges starting to pop up on the front again. Because horses are available and cars are not, this is really led to a change in Russian tactics, obviously, because if you don’t have the equipment to move your men, you have to move your men differently. 

And so some of the new strategies that we’re seeing on the front is instead of sending a thousand men or 100 men or ten men, it’s sending 2 or 3 men to try to infiltrate a zone. And you do that with 2 to 3000 men over the course of a month. And eventually, hopefully, you have enough people that have infiltrated the zone that they can make it untenable for the Ukrainians to maintain their positions. 

Can this work? Yeah. And it’s probably was used, in places like Cuba and areas, in the Donbas. But the pace is incredibly slow. And the casualties are incredibly high. And more importantly, you have a much higher percentage of casualties that turn into actual fatalities. So best guess is that at this point in the conflict, the Russians have lost between 1 million and 1.4 million men, with somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 of those being dead. 

And the casualty rates have increased from the 750 to 1000 people per day in calendar year 2024, to probably something closer to 1500 to 1600 people by the time we get to the new years of 2025, 2026. I said about I think it’s two years ago now, that if the Russians keep losing men at the rate they are, they’re not going to be able to mount a military force of any size in 6 to 8 years, which, when I said that would have put us at somewhere around 2030, it now appears that that date has been moved forward because the Russians are suffering casualties faster than Russian boys can be born. 

On the Ukrainian side, the situation isn’t exactly great either. Keep in mind that any battle in which the Ukrainians do not inflict at least a 4 to 1 casualty ratio is a battle that probably, in the long run, the Russians have won just because there’s so many more Russians. But the Russians are now getting to a situation where they are running out of people who are not ethnically Russian. 

All of the various ethnicities that make up the Russian Federation, that are not that ethnically Russian, they’re basically running them dry. And the Chechens are almost tapped out at this point, which is something I never thought I would see. Ukraine doesn’t have that kind of problem. Everyone pretty much who’s fighting in the Ukrainian side of the war is Ukrainian. 

So there’s a much stronger nationalism factor going in. And we are seeing the, weapons systems, in the military industrial complexes of the Europeans spinning up, in order to continue providing arms for, the Ukrainians. Keep in mind that the Ukrainians have given, excuse me, keep in mind that the Europeans have given the Ukrainians significantly more military aid, than the United States has. 

And and we’re almost a factor of three more economic aid. So if the Trump administration changes its minds on a few things, obviously, that will affect the war effort one way or another. But the bottom line is that the European military complex is becoming more capable of supporting the war. As the Russian military complex is becoming less capable. 

So we really are seeing this turn into a proper proxy war with the Europeans on one side and the Chinese on the other side. Most of the hardware that is coming into the Russian system now is originated in Chinese factories. And we’re getting this weird little proxy fight between two countries that are two regions that haven’t really been involved in a direct geopolitical conflict. 

That has a lot of impacts in a lot of ways. Number one, the Europeans are much more amenable to talking to the Trump administration about trade sanctions on the Chinese, because their leaderships are now recognizing that they’re in a direct head to head with Beijing. But it’s also leading to a reorganization of how global military technology works. 

The United States, by stepping back, has seen its pace of technological innovation slow considerably because you have a technical revolution happening in Ukraine that the United States, for the most part, is not participating in. But the Europeans are rearming at a pace that is forcing these sorts of changes into their everyday structure, how that will play out in the years ahead. 

Way too soon to tell. But the United States is no longer clearly at the forefront of either drone technology or drone jamming technology. Those are European concerns. Mostly Ukrainian and the Chinese are now getting it on the back side of this, moving from first person drones to something else, things that are getting incrementally more sophisticated. 

How this will play out. So many of the rules of war have changed in the last 24 months. It’s really hard to tell. But the one country that seems to be going out of its way now to not keep pace is the United States.

Sub-Sea Drone Strike on Russian Sub

A submarine rising out of the water

Ukraine claims to have damaged or destroyed a Russian Kilo-class submarine while in the port of Novorossiysk using a subsea drone.

If confirmed, Russia’s last major naval base would be vulnerable to air, surface, and now subsea attacks…not a great look. Russia’s Black Sea naval operations would likely collapse within a year.

But let’s not overstate the power of the subsea drones. While they may be effective for anti-port applications like this one, they won’t be replacing traditional naval warfare tools like torpedoes anytime soon.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Quick one today. The news is that in the last couple of weeks, the Ukrainian government has announced that they have used a new type of drone, a subsea drone, to attack and destroy a Russian submarine, a kilo class in the Russian port of Novorossiysk. the reason I’ve waited so long to comment on this is because the details were vague. 

The Russians have denied that the Russians deny everything and the Ukrainians haven’t provided a lot of evidence. We do have satellite photos now that indicate there was damage on the inside of the port. Whether or not a submarine was hit or sunk is unclear. I would note that if you put a reasonably sized bomb on the outside of a submarine, that submarine is not going to go underwater. 

Or if it does go under water, it will never come back up again. So it doesn’t take much damage to take one of these out for the long term. And the Russians no longer have the capacity to refit them, because that equipment is in Crimea, and Crimea is under regular air drone assault. So if this kilo class sub was even mildly damaged, it’s it’s out. 

A couple things to keep in mind, however. Number one, on the Ukrainian side. The fact that a sea attack happened in November is extraordinarily bad for the Russians. It was one thing when they lost the ability to base their navy out of the Crimea. So they moved back to overseas because it was out of range of air attacks. Then air attacks started, happened regularly earlier this year. Now we not just have a sea attack, but a sub sea attack. 

There are any number of ways that that might have happened. Maybe there was a mothership involved. Maybe it was smuggled into Russia proper, and then the thing was dropped in the water and sent on. But the bottom line is, is that the targeting suite of these drones is very limited. And if it goes underwater, it’s not receiving signals from anyone else unless it’s on a tether. 

And if it’s on a fiber optic tether, you’d have to have another ship nearby, which it’s really stretches the imagination to think that the Russians would be that unaware of things going on in their own immediate waters. Which means that if this is true, what happened was that the sub was at dock when it happened. We do see damage to the dock. 

We do see damage to the booms. And if this is a fundamentally new weapon from the Ukrainians, they’re calling it a sub sea baby. The sea baby is there. Surface drones, then overseas has become completely untenable for any sort of Russian naval or maritime activity. Remember that this is the Russians largest port in the area. It’s their primary oil export point. 

It’s already been hit a couple of times, and it is now the headquarters for the Black Sea Fleet, which means they’ll have to move down the coast to a place called Tusa, which doesn’t have nearly the, cap capability. So we really are talking about the functional end of the entire Russian Sea Fleet within the next 12 months, if this is true. 

Second, other side of the equation, I wouldn’t get too excited about subsea drones, because we don’t have meaningful guidance or decision trees on naval drones at this point. This is much less useful than a modern day torpedo. It would have to be dropped off relatively close to where it’s going. It can’t track an active signature. It can only go to a preprogramed fixed point. 

That doesn’t mean it’s a nothing burger, because anything that can get around detection is something that Ukrainians or really anyone who’s involved in a naval conflict is going to want. But it is not an at sea weapon. It is an anti port weapon. So that is of significance. But in modern naval warfare, it is certainly not a game changer in its current form.