The Duran Podcast - 500 Locomotives Destroyed, Warehouses Gone; Front Lines Crumble

Episode Date: September 19, 2026

500 Locomotives Destroyed, Warehouses Gone; Front Lines Crumble

All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is going on with Project Ukraine. We continue to get strikes into, Russian strikes, into Kiev, Odessa, Zapparozsche, Trenipro-Pendrovsk, towards the west of Ukraine, the destruction of various bridges. A lot of locomotives. Trains have been destroyed to the point where we have the foreign minister of Ukraine, now asking collective west partners to provide locomotives, even though there are differences with the tracks. But anyway, he's asking the collective us to give him locomotives, to give you great locomotives as well. And we have the continued destruction of warehouses.

There are no more warehouses in Kiev, or at least that's how it looks if you go off of the reports. And many of the videos surfacing, a lot of warehouses have been destroyed. throughout Kiev and in other cities as well. So let's start from there. The military situation, the strikes that continue, drone strikes from Kiev into Russia that also continue. But I get the sense that we're not seeing the thousand drones being launched into Russia. It seems like the number of drones launched into Russia has decreased. We also have the Duma elections taking place over the weekend as well. So where do you want to begin? Well, I think we will begin. be the military situation and I think we will start with the air wall because the war in the sky is

I mean it is continuing at exactly the same level of intensity as always now there was some claims by some people that they saw a you know a holding off by both sides against the other you know over the last couple of days I never saw any sign of that whatsoever the Russians continue to hammer Ukraine with hundreds of drones and hundreds of missiles. I, over that period of the supposed reduction, that was based entirely on claims about numbers of Russian drones provided by the Ukrainians. I think those numbers are extremely unreliable. I think the Russian drone offensive is continuous. It is ongoing. It is happening every day and every night.

And what happens is that every couple of days, the Russians follow up with massive missile strikes. And they aren't just using missile strikes, as you discussed in some programs that you've done recently on your channel. They're now bombing industrial facilities. I mean, these are fighter bombers, you know, with pilots and all that, classically coming along and launching hyper-exambers. high precision bombs against industrial targets.

Now, about 10 days ago, they bombed the Adessa and Husson thermal power plants. Their latest target for precision bombs is the Zatoka Bridge, which is an important, I mean, it's an absolutely key bridge that links Odessa ultimately with Romania and eastern and Europe, in other words, with the EU. It's been a major transit point between Odessa and the EU, and it's used, it's long been used by the EU to send supplies by rail and by road. The interesting thing about the Zatoko Bridge is that, of course, it's a Soviet construction, but it's built across a bay of the Black Sea. So it, to some extent, though on a much smaller scale, obviously, resembles the Crimean Bridge.

Logistically, it is extremely important for Ukraine because southwestern Ukraine, the area around Adessa, the communication lines are all being cut off. And the Zatoka Bridge is as important for those communications as say the Crimean Bridge is for Russian communications with Crimea. The Ukrainians, as we know, made many attempts to damage and destroy the Crimean Bridge. They never succeeded. Now the Russians are coming after the Zatoka Bridge. They are having a lot more success because they're bombing and launching missile strikes at it.

Sooner or later, it will be conclusively and definitively put out of action and damaged beyond hope of repair, at least in peace, until peace comes. But of course, again, this interesting, important fact isn't mentioned I've noticed very much in the media in the West at all. And you're absolutely right to point to the mass destruction of warehouses. I saw a report in, you know, an important magazine. B&E intelligence, which provides economic intelligence, very good economic intelligence, about Eastern Europe and Russia. And it says that, well, the Ukrainian drone offensive against Russian warehouses has damaged

3% of Russia's warehouses. in the Russian offensive against Ukrainian warehouses has demolished between 30 and 60% of Ukraine's warehouses. You see the actual enormous difference. Now, the Russian clan clearly is to destroy all the warehouses, destroy all the transport links, destroy all the energy facilities. because we know that major strikes against the energy system are also coming. And in terms of the transport links, what they're now targeting specifically are the locomotives. They're using drones to do that. These are clearly drones controlled by ground operators.

And the Russians are putting the Rasvet system into service at, speed that has apparently astonished and dismayed the Ukrainians and the Americans. The Razvette system apparently will have full coverage of Ukraine by some point next year, some are saying even as early as the winter. And the attacks on the locomotives then can happen all across the whole of Ukraine, because these require precise guidance. And the point about locomotives is that transport logistics within Ukraine depend mostly on the railway system, as by the way they do in Russia.

And without locomotives, you can't move trains. And exactly as you said, the gauge in Russia and Ukraine is wider. It's imperial Russian gauge. It's wider than in Europe. Europe does not produce locomotives for wider gauge. So Ukraine begging Europe to provide locomotives to replace the 500 that have already been destroyed is bizarre because Europe can't provide them. I mean, they just don't exist in Europe and they're not manufactured in Europe.

I believe the Baltic states used, still in some cases, used wider track, and they presumably also have some locomotives. But the numbers must be very few relative to the 500 locomotives. We hear that the Russians have now destroyed. So, cumulatively, this is already having a major effect. We're getting more and more reports about how the economy is in deep prices. Remember, the black seaports are blockaded with the internal transport system seizing up. This is becoming existential because you can't import goods into the country.

You can't move goods effectively around the country. The refineries are being attacked in Ukraine. So there's now fuel shortages as well. It's more difficult in this part of the world to move goods by road anyway. But that's also going to become more difficult. Two, as fuel shortages increase, this is an absolute catastrophe. And it's happening in real time. The Russians are doing it every day, every week.

It's going to, I think, create a major crisis within Ukraine this winter. And the Europeans know it. And you can see that they have no solution to it. Ukraine begs for air defense missiles. The Americans aren't providing any because their inventories are run down. The Europeans have run down their own inventories. There was a bizarre exchange between Greece and Ukraine, apparently. The Ukrainians, well, they didn't just ask, they pretty much told the Greeks,

give us your air defense missiles. the Mitsotakis government supposedly responded by saying, well, we can do that, but in return, you must reduce your attacks on Greek tankers, which are part of, you know, the so-called shadow fleet and all of that. And apparently the Ukrainians at this, GEN shows how detached from reality this is all becoming, said no, and we're extremely rude. But no air defence. missiles from Europe in any sizable quantities. And now in terms of air defense missiles, they have a rival who is also begging Europe to provide air defense missiles, which is Saudi Arabia, which is also running out of air defense missiles. So there's going to be a competition

between the Saudis and the Europeans and the Ukrainians for who gets the most air defense missiles with the Saudis now also telling the Europeans, the Americans can't give us any. So you must do so. After all, we provide you with your oil. So this is an absolute crisis. And we've never had anything like this before over the course of this war. And I have to say it's reminding me increasingly of the American Air Campaign against Iraq in the run-up to the ground offensive that the Americans launched in Kuwait in 1991.

If you remember, this went on for weeks, and it did massive damage to Iraq's economy and its ability to sustain the war. This is having the same effect, only I think the scale is even bigger. The scale may be bigger. The operation is bigger. The country is bigger. The difficulty of it. to go after, to destroy these facilities in Ukraine is much more complicated than Iraq.

Oh, absolutely. You can talk about a much smaller country. This is a much bigger country. Yeah, with no air defense to begin with. I mean, they didn't have, Iraq didn't have 50 countries behind it. Exactly. Like Ukraine does, including the United States, which is the main factor and the main sponsor of Ukraine. Well, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, This is why it has taken us so long to get to this point. I mean, the Russians, exactly, needed to grind down Ukraine's air defense system. And at the same time, we had to get the West's own inventories of air defense weapons depleted.

So that has happened cumulatively over the years. And then Iran, the war with Iran came along and Tupo charged it. But now we've got to the point where there is no air defense system in Ukraine. to speak of and this is accelerating. Well, Putin also had a year of going back and forth with Trump, dithering around and messing around with Trump about diplomacy or not diplomacy and putting a hold on many of the operations. He was hoping for a diplomatic solution with Trump. So there was a year wasted and during that year it did allow Ukraine, the Europeans to stock

up on drones to get everything moving for the drone campaign. So, I mean, okay. Putin, the Kremlin, has now decided to go all in and to go for a military outcome for this conflict, a military solution. Lavrov had some very strong words the other day. Lavrov has become much more hardline. If you look at him from 2002, 22, 23, look at him now. The evolution is pretty striking. He's gone from a moderate, moderate diplomacy diplomats when it came to Ukraine in the West, a moderate viewpoint, to now becoming a rival hardliner right up there with Medvedev. Absolutely. I mean, Medvedev talks in extraordinarily strong language.

By the way, Medvedev gave an interview in which he explained that. He said that he had been bottling this up for years. He had to accept all kinds of horrible things from the Americans. and the Europeans for years, and he was keeping it within himself. And now finally, he's been able to release it. Well, you can believe that or not. But anyway, that's what Medvedev said. But you're absolutely right.

Lovov is becoming much more forthright. But other members of the Kremlin are too. Patrushchev, Putin's former national security advisor, is also talking very hardline language now. And of course, all the diplomats, all the key people in the foreign ministry, Ryabkov, Mirochkin, all of them. They're talking Mirochnik, sorry. They're talking in exactly the same way.

They're also becoming increasingly hardline in their rhetoric as well. And Ryavkov said that we are no closer to a diplomatic solution of the conflict in Ukraine now than we were a few months ago. In other words, all of this activity with Ratcliffe and Witkoff and Kushner has added nothing to what existed before. Peskhov is also talking in a more hardline fashion. I think he said recently that one of the fundamental problems in negotiations is that there is no agreed, there are no common points about these negotiations. Each party, Ukraine, the United States and Russia has its own ideas, and Russia is not compromising on its own. So there aren't going to be negotiations, or if there are, if there's going to be a resumption of the talks in October, this is going to happen, in my opinion now, not to keep Trump happy, but to keep some of the BRIC states happy.

India, China, Brazil. Modi is now apparently planning a visit to Russia. The Americans, it looks as if they are going to move forward with the Lindsay Graham sanctions bill. But of course, the point about that one is that it's already left the station because at the Riggs summit, the BRIC states publicly issued a statement which basically said they would defy that bill because they regard all those sanctions as illegal. And China has already made it essentially law in China. The Chinese companies are not allowed to let fear of Western sanctions influence them. And I think India is close to come into that decision too. They've decided they have to have Russian oil because there is no.

No alternative. And if the price is 100% tariffs from the United States, well, they'll absorb the blow. And I think they don't believe that Donald Trump who will make that decision anyway is going to do it. So I think that train has already left the station. But the BRIC states have made it clear that they do want to see at least some appearance of negotiations. So, however, reluctantly, I think the Russians might go along with it. But there is no substance in this anymore. There is no prospect of it leading anywhere now.

And it's certainly not going to read to a ceasefire. Why would the BRIC states make that demand? It doesn't make any sense. China, India, they all know what's going on. I mean, the US is coming after them as well, especially China. China knows that the US is coming after it. So why does China mess around with these things? I don't think China is in any sense at all.

I don't think China is in any true sense. I don't think they ever have been, actually. I think the Chinese take a very hard line about this as well. I think they've had some dealings with the Ukrainians, and they didn't go well at all. And I think that they've washed their hands at the matter. India and Brazil are a different story. Brazil is vulnerable because there's an election coming, and Lulu's earned his way out. And then, of course, Brazil might even quick bricks, which.

would actually, I think, strengthen Briggs rather than weaken it. But that's another discussion for another day. The key one is India. And the thing to understand about India is that Modi's party is backed by an important business community in Mumbai, which has always hankered for very close relations with the US. And beyond that, there's also a very strong Indian diaspora in the United States, which has also been strongly advocating for good relations with the United States. So Modi has had to maneuver around these people. And I think we've now reached the point where he can tell them, look, I want peace in Ukraine, just as you did. I want good relations with the Americans just as you do, but the Ukrainians are being possible.

They're not making the obvious concessions they need to make. And in the meantime, in the meantime, we have to buy oil and we have to deepen our relations with the Russians. Because they are the only game in town now. Nobody else is going to supply us with the oil and the fertilizer and all of those things we need. and we have this strong historic relationship with the Russians. We can't afford to risk it. So I think this is really more than anything else, a product of Indian internal developments. What would it tell you if Trump does place 100% sanctions on India, Turkey, China?

We're talking about secondary sanctions because of the Lindsay Graham bill. What if he does do it? Well, I think at that point, we can, conclude very simply that Trump himself and the United States in general have taken leave of their census. They want to wreck the energy market. They want to wreck the energy market. That their goal is indeed to wreck the energy market if they do go ahead with the 100%

secondary sanctions. I know. But I am in the United States now and I've heard people tell me that the higher energy prices are hurting. I heard somebody tell me that they were driving through agriculture. cultural region and the price of diesel there was $7 a gallon, which is crushing. So if they want to do that, if that's their plan, if they want to go all out and do that, firstly, they're not going to stop exports of Russian oil.

So as an objective, it is not going to work. But it is going to deepen the crisis in the global economy. and it is going to make countries like India, Turkey and all the rest reconsider their long-term relations with the United States. It would be a utter folly to do this and given that they're unlikely to impose similar sanctions on China because we know that the Chinese can take reciprocal action which would be devastating.

The fact that India has been sanctioned and China isn't. I think is going to poison relations with India even further. But anyway, I mean, we'll just have to see what they do. I mean, the level of obsession that some people have, including in the United States, about this conflict, is unfathomable. And, you know, they might do it. I mean, I'm not saying they won't do it.

All I'm saying is it would be utter folly to go down that path. But then we've been saying that all the things that the West has been doing have been 40 for years and they still go on and do them. Yeah. Everything that Zelensky asks for, he pretty much gets. He gets, yeah. He would get the Patriots too if you guys had them. Oh, absolutely.

He's now asking, by the way, they just don't have them. Yes, he's now asking for another 50 billion euros on top of all the other money. 27. 27. Then it was 35, now it's 50. It's 35 plus 25. Yeah. It was 35 for his administration, 25 for defense.

and another 50 for 2027. Yes. Plus locomotives. Don't forget the locomotives. I mean, it never stops. And the demands grow all the time. The European Union is again back having internal discussions about ceasing the Russian assets. That's Ursula's dream, apparently.

And they're working on that. Belgium is again making clear. No, there's been a court decision in Belgium, which makes it even more difficult. I would have thought, or rather more, not difficult, but highlights the risks of doing that. It involved a small Russian bank. It doesn't involve the frozen assets and all of that. But it did give some insight into judicial thinking here. So pretty much, who knows, again, the momentum behind this, the momentum of obsessive.

session is so strong that maybe nothing will stop it. Maybe we are going to drive the car right off the edge of the cliff because that's what we've been doing up to now. We've been racing towards the cliff. Maybe we're going to put our foot further on the accelerator and race it, race beyond it. Remember what we said for so many years, these guys don't have a reverse gear? No, they don't. What's going on on on the front line? Right, well, okay, let's... Archev, Oreckov, Dombolipelia, and Lehman, I think of the other places to look at, of course, we have Slaviansk and Kramatorkov. I think Slaviansk is further off in the distance.

Yes. But the Kramatarsk is something we could... Maybe we don't cover it in this video, but over the next couple of weeks, it might become a hot area. It's coming. It's coming fast. Now, everywhere on the front lines, Ukraine is retreated. but they are conducting a counter-offensive in Lehman. I'll counter that in a moment.

Let's start with Zaporosia in the south. Important town there, Oreckhoff, all of the reports, cumulative reports speak of the Ukrainians retreating from O'Rejov or trying to retreat from O'Rejov. O'Rejov is mostly surrounded. It looks as if O'Echov is indeed about to fall. there is an operational crisis for the Ukrainians there. They conducted, by the way, many counter-offensives of the Zaporosia area,

what all of those have done cumulatively is weaken their positions in Zaporosia, reduced their manpower, and now it looks as if Oreck-Ov is going to fall. Some reports say that most of Orejov is already under Russian, control, that the Ukrainians are stuck in the northern outskirts of O'Rejof, because basically there is no easy line to retreat. It's a major defeat, and the fall of O'Rejov not only gives the Russians control of the one remaining town in Zaporosia, which they don't control, apart from the city of Zaporosje itself, but it secures Crimea because the Ukrainians can't realistically threaten Crimea without controlling O'Rejof. I don't think there's any threat to Crimea anyway.

But if you remember the offensive in 2023 that the Ukrainians launched towards Crimea started at O'Rejov. So that will be gone and control of O'Rejov because It's an important, another one of these places where roads and railway lines interconnect. It will disrupt Ukrainian logistics and improve Russian ones. So this is a big event. And once ORECO falls, the battle for the city of Zaporosia will begin, probably in a few months' time. And that will bring the Russians to the central rare area of the near. which I have previously said in many programs would also be a moment of great crisis for Ukraine.

Further north in Donbass there is a cluster of cities south of Kramatoz, Dhrushkivka, Alexeyevva Dhrushkivka and Dombropelia. The Russians apparently are in the process of storming all three. The most important of the three is Dobropelia. Again, reports last night, the night before we make this, say that the Russians have also mostly encircled Dobropelia. That resistance there, Ukrainian resistance there, remains fierce. We're not yet quite at the point where OREHO, we are in OREHO,

but is weakening and that the Ukrainians are super, going to lose Dobropelia. Once they've lost all three of these towns, the only town further left to the north is Kramatosk itself. The Russians already have very strong positions to the east of Kramatosk, and the fall of Dobropelia would mean that the Russians are in a position to encircle Kramatosk from the west as well, cutting off all of the supply lines. Kramatosk is the largest of the fortified cities, the line of fortified cities. It also is the only place, by the way, with an airfield, where aircraft could in theory take off and go from and where drones are launched from.

The fall of Kramatosk would only leave Slaviansk. So further north there is Slaviansk, north of Slaviansk, there is Leman. about what the situation in Lehman, the town itself is, that is still unclear. We have had lots of reports about a Ukrainian counter-offensive in this area. They've been coming out right through September. Just before, a few, a day or so before, we made this process. the Ukrainians began to release some information. It does seem as if they have conducted an offensive in the Lehman area.

I have to say that based on the information they've provided up to now, the results of that counteroffensive up to this time and up to the current state of my knowledge knowledge, do not live up to the claims that have been made about it. There are two rivers in this area. One is the Jerebets River. The other is the Nitreus River. The Russians had crossed and established positions west of both of these rivers. It looks as if they've withdrawn to the east bank of the Nitreus River, that is not a huge deal, but it could be that there will be a further offensive by the Ukrainians here as well. If the Ukrainians launch an offensive in Lehman, it will be exactly the same as the other offensives that the Ukrainians have launched in other places. It will meet heavy losses, a reduction in future ability to do.

defend this region. It will ultimately work against the Ukrainians, just as their offensives in Zaporosia did. And of course, they also have the problem that just to the north in Kharkov region, their positions there are collapsing. There are Ukrainian troops surrounded there in two places. The Russians have captured one of those places. They're about to capture the other. if you look at where the Russians are now located in Kharkov, they would be perfectly positioned once all of these places in Kharkov that have been fought over are under their control to attack the Ukrainians precisely in this area where they're conducting their offensive and to attack them from the rear. So this is an extremely glad idea in my opinion. It's symptomatic

of the kind of military leadership that Ukraine has. They need an offensive somewhere in order to tell the West, look, you've got to go on supporting us. We are still fighting. The offensives lose men. They weaken positions. They set up the stage for the next collapse, but the Ukrainians persist in doing them. I was going to say the same exact thing. I was going to say, you know what, Maybe it's a bad idea. The way we're analyzing it, the way you're analyzing it from a military perspective. Absolutely, it's a terrible, fantastically bad idea. But if you're Zelensky and if you're Beletsky, the NAAZI commander of the, what is it,

the third army corps, I believe is what they're called. Which is the one which is conducting this offensive. Yeah, yeah, right. Beletsky, nasty guy. To put him mildly. Yeah, to put him mildly. Wasn't he the guy that was being held by our? Erdogan in Mario, or was it Broko?

No, it is Brocopenko. Broco Penco. Yeah, that Erdogan screwed over, screwed over Putin and Russia by letting them go. For the upteens time, but never learned. They never learned. Anyway, they continue to trust Erdogan. All right, so, okay, so it'll be good for Beletsky. Yeah.

If he manages to push the Russians back. By the way, the Russians were close to capturing Leman, fully capturing it. So it would be a setback. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely a setback. But Beletsky. would come out looking good because he can say I commanded the Third Army Corps and look what we did. So for him, it would elevate his status, which is something that he's very concerned about.

He's more of a political figure than a military figure. That's my understanding of Beletsky and listening to your analysis of him. He's much more on the political ideology side of things than the military strategy tactical side of things. Yes. So he would look at that as a win and all of his assets. as-off guys would be looking at him with some star power. Yeah.

Right? And for Zelensky, it's absolutely critical for him to go to the U.N., to the U.S. on the 20th to meet with Trump. And to forget about everything else. He's not going to mention everything else that's going on. Harco, for echo. Who cares about all that stuff? Lenzy's going to say, that's a stalemate.

He's going to say, President Trump, that's a stalemate. Look at what we've achieved in Leone. Meeman. So if you just give us another 50 billion and another 3,000 Patriot missiles and Tomahawks and whatever and the Patriot license and another 200 billion, whatever, we'll be able to win this war, and the Europeans are going to back him, and the media's going to back him, and the media is going to report on all of this, and Trump is going to cave. I don't know what Trump can give. I don't know what the U.S. can give because the U.S. doesn't have much to give, but whatever they have, have, whatever they can, they'll empty it out and they'll give it. So they will try to

re-need. For him, it's not important for him. He has to go to the U.S. with a big victory and sell that big victory, knowing that Trump is going to give in. Everyone knows that Trump is going to give in. Exactly. I would add, by the way, just about what you said about the media backing this. The Daily Telegraph has produced a huge video. on this great victorious offensive that the Ukrainians. They'll do movies. They'll do miniseries.

Absolutely. Exactly. And if we're talking about Bieletsky, I mean, he's all about this. I mean, he's conducted offensives before, by the way, often on his own bat. And, I mean, they've never achieved anything long term. But they cumulatively build up the image of Bieletsky as the great. warrior leader of the Azov movement, the one person who had the ideological discipline and the fervor had to take on the Russians and to beat them in actual battle.

And one can see that what he's trying to do, he's trying to position himself as, you know, the key person in Ukrainian politics, not just in Ukraine, but eventually when this is all over if they all have to go to the West, he wants to be the person who is the great hero within the Ukrainian diaspora in the West and who continues to get the support and who's hailed as the one heroic figure that Ukraine truly produced during this war. Yeah, he can get a podcast. He can get a podcast. He can become famous. He can get all kinds of But Ukraine's going to get smashed. They're going to get smashed after all the media hoopla and everything is done and the trip

to the US is done. Those troops in that offensive are going to get smashed by the Russians. And they're going to roll them back as they've done in every single Ukraine counteroffensive. Every single freaking one. The Russians have rolled it back. Yes. Yes. But of course, we won't get films and programs in the West about that.

The Daily Telegraph is not going to produce great videos about, you know, the Ukrainian defeat in how this offensive ended in defeat. So it doesn't matter. I mean, that's, well, actually, of course, it matters a huge amount. But it matters not to the people we're talking about. Yeah. All right. We'll end the video there. The durand.locals.com.

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