The Duran Podcast - Beyond Ceasefire: How Hormuz Crisis Cascades Into Global Recession w/ Stanislav Krapivnik

Episode Date: April 11, 2026

Beyond Ceasefire: How Hormuz Crisis Cascades Into Global Recession w/ Stanislav Krapivnik

All right, Alexander, we are here once again with Stanislav. Stannes, thank you for joining us on the Duran. Where can people follow you work? Always a pleasure. Okay, so on X, they can find me at Stanas Kripimnik. We couldn't get the whole name in. It's too long. We were Russians like our long names.

On YouTube, it's at Mr. Slavic Man, Slavic with a K. on telegram, it's Stasadayabratna is the Russian channel. Stas was there as an English channel and on substack is me, Gerenich. No Instagram accounts, no TikTok. All right. Okay, I will have those links in the description back down below and also as a paint to comment.

Alexandria Stanislav, let's talk about what is happening in the world. What is happening with energy, oil, and gas. Indeed, because we are, I think, in a moment when it's a moment of definition, if I can say, because over the course of this week, the week that we've just had, we had a situation where for a moment it looked as if the war was going to escalate massively. Then the United States announced that there was a two-week ceasefire with Iran. the media in the West and Western officials rushed to say that the Strait of Hormuz was going to be reopened or that the Iranians had agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz. This was not consistent at all with what the Iranians themselves were saying.

Then as the ceasefire supposedly began, we saw that there were differences about the terms, the fighting in Lebanon intensified, with the Israelis resisting all attempts to try and get them to slow down. And of course, the Strait of Hormuz remains firmly under Iranian control, and they continue to insist that ships that pass must pay them a $2 million fee, and that in fact on the first day of the ceasefire, which was Wednesday. The number of ships that passed through the Strait of Hormuz actually fell as compared with what was the case the days before. And there's massive uncertainty in the shipping industry.

Ship owners are very nervous about sending their ships through the Strait of Hormuz. insurance, the London insurance market is refusing to send, allow ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz because they're very worried about what the real situation is and they're worried that the ceasefire might break down entirely. And there's a report in the Financial Times which is speaking now about an absolute rush in the British oil markets to try and buy physical oil at much higher prices than the ones that you are seeing because there's worries about a continued oil shortage. And there's word that unless the situation with the Strait of Hormuz is resolved in a week's time, the situation is going to get much more critical

on the markets as well. So that is the information that I am seeing. It depends on a seeds fire, which is looking more fragile by the day. It depends on negotiations between the United States and Iran. It depends on what the Israelis are doing. And lastly, it ultimately, and finally, depends on what happens with the Strait of Hormuz. No one better to discuss all these topics with than Stanislav. And welcome to us to our channel today. So first of all, what is the overall situation with oil and gas? You said that the situation with gas is even more serious. But what is the overall situation looking like at the moment?

First of all, gentlemen, as we're all Orthodox, today's Good Friday. It's a happy Good Friday. The brightest holiday of the Orthodox or the Christian world is coming up. on Sunday, so Paska. And maybe we'd have some good news. We at least have a ceasefire that lasted to one day. Reality, we had a ceasefire that lasted about four hours because the Israelis are the spoilers.

There are the people in the driver's seat. And Trump, to begin with to understand, Trump likes bombastic statements, particularly when the markets are closed and they were closed for Catholic and Protestant Easter. He makes these big bombastic statements. The markets can't quite react. And when the markets are all in a dizzy and they get back and he does something to get out of it.

So I think he knew that they were going to sign up for some kind of ceasefire because these negotiations didn't happen overnight. He may see statements, I'm going to destroy the sole civilization. Everybody starts screaming, oh, nuclear weapons. Everybody gets very anxious. And then he comes out with, oh, you know, for the next two weeks, we've got a ceasefire. So he gets himself off the hook. And then he'll kick the can down.

the road somehow. Unfortunately, the 10 points, whether he actually read those 10 points, I'm assuming Marco Rubio maybe read those 10 points. I'm assuming. One of those key 10 points, as was written by Sharif, by the way, from Pakistan, was that Iran and the U.S. and their allies, which in the case of Iran would mean Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemen, and Iraq all stand down. And obviously, Israel and the U.S. stand down, which would mean stop massacring people in Lebanon, the Israeli government. And the Israeli government said, hell no. And the opposition to Natanyahu, their biggest criticism was, we weren't at the table and we need to massacre faster. We did more massacres.

We're not massacring hard enough. So that's the Israeli politics. But the Israelis have turned out to be in the driver's seat. And we've seen Marco Rubio come out and said, oh, and Vance, both put away Catholics. And their Catholics as well as Orthodox being butchered in Lebanon, but that doesn't seem to be the problem. And they came out and said, you know, it wasn't really ever part of this whole deal. And the Iranian said it was and now we're back to square run. Whether this holds or not, we live in seat.

But the straits were never really closed to begin with. And oil exports were still going on out of the Gulf. Yes, they dropped precariously, a fact, from about 24. 26 million barrels a day down to about nine. The Iranians, one of the biggest complaints said the U.S. from the beginning was they started exporting more oil than they were exporting before the conflict started. And then, of course, the U.S. takes the sanctions off, which means export even more. I think this is a first in military history where the country you want to attack you on

sanction while attacking them. the Saudis are continuing to export oil into the Red Sea. Of course, that pipeline has been hit, but unless, I'm not sure where they hit it, because I haven't seen the exact details, but unless they hit it in a pumping station, if they just hit it on the pipeline, that's easily repairable. That's a couple days down, the Russian new pipe cut off to, well, even the pipes are connected by phalanches,

so there's only sections of pipe replace a section of pipe with a new pipe. and get everything back up and running. Now, if you take out a pumping station, that's a much more difficult issue. And there are chips that are still leaving with oil, for example, to Pakistan from other suppliers. And what the Iranians have always said was they never closed per se for all oil. They said, go neutral, don't buy in dollars. So I'm assuming euros will still work because they indicated Yan, but basically they were saying don't buy in U.S. dollars.

So if you're buying British pound sterling or you're buying euro, that should apparently still work. And from the American point of view, of course, the straits being closed is actually not a bad thing. Because America doesn't get that much oil. America is the biggest producer of oil of 13.8 million barrels per day. That was last year's high. And that was a high.

It had gone down and they got it back up. How long they can keep that is a good question. but they do still import oil. And no, Venezuela is not the answer right now. Could be a large party answer from the future, but not at this present moment. I'll get to that in a minute. But this becomes a problem for the Europeans. And Trump said, well, you just go and get it, you know, get your own oil,

then punch your way through the straits or a moose. But they wouldn't have to do that. That's the whole problem. It's the Europeans could quite literally go down there and go, we're not going to buy in dollars. We'll buy in euro, we'll buy in rubles or whatever, other currency. Can we pass? Pay them at $2 million toll.

There was, the Iranians had stepped back from reparations because the U.S. would never pay reparations. I am, I have been wrong when I said the U.S. never paid reparation. Apparently, U.S. paid Vietnam reparations like $250 million for four generations or a third generation of mutations and deformalities in the population, plus a three million civilians that killed in the Vietnam War. Not much money for that. But, you know, they're never.

going to pave the reparations to Iran. But this way, Iran gets the reparations without America going insane about it, or American congressman screaming. Because again, it doesn't really hit the U.S. It does hit the overall oil market because it is an added cost. But I don't think it's that much of an added cost to push. I mean, consider how much oil markets have already gone up. You still see a drop if the straits opened up with just a toll. And Iran's now indicating that they're willing to split that toll with Amman. So it makes it kind of. of an international because the straits quite literally go through both of their territorial waters. They don't have to let anyone in. It's their territorial waters. It's not neutral waters.

So they've got that option. And overall, it's not going to be a bigger hit if you can get all the oil going. Now we've got the problem of terminals destroyed, refineries destroyed or damaged. And that's going to have a much longer effect. In fact, the other day the Iranians hit the, I'm going to butcher the name of this. It's in Saudi Arabia. El Jouabili oil facility. It didn't say which one. I think that was a more likely from the looks of it. That was a cleaning facility.

Because once you get the oil out of the ground, you have to clean it. Sorry, because the oil is not such as oil coming out. There's water in there. There's acids in there. Lots of chemicals underground, deep underground. There's sand. All of that has to be filtered out just to get the pure oil. and the pure oil is what shipped.

So all these additional ingredients have to be cleared out. It's a pretty big facility. I was a consultant to one of these facilities up in Northern Sakalinsk that Exxon NeftiGaz, daughter of Exxon Mobile owned. It's not as big as a refinery, but it's still a pretty big facility. But all of this is going to have to take time to repair. And that's oil. And the problem in the world, you know,

If you give it a year or two years, the markets will start to solve themselves because there will be increased production, additional wells. Now, to bring a brand new oil field to economic fruitation, it takes between three to five years. That's from drilling the first wildcat well. I'm not quite sure why they call the wildcat well. Never did find out. But what that means basically is geologists will go,

okay, somewhere in this formation, we've done sonar testing, We kind of know what kind of formation. Somewhere in this formation, there should be oil. We don't know, of course, because unless it's bubbling out, you know, it's not old Jed went hunting and shot the ground, missed the rabbit shot the ground, and oil comes up. There actually used to be kind of in some areas like that. Oil was at the very top of the ground.

You had the lagoons. All those are gone for over 100 years now because they've all been drained for their product. Now you have to actually do drilling. So what you do is you kind of look at the map. You look at the sonar, right? and go, let's drill here. Oh, nothing there. Let's drill there.

And that's called Wildcat drilling. And you're trying to figure out where that actual deposit is. Or even if you hit a deposit where that actual main portion is to have enough pressure. So that's your time lag. Like it or not plus, then you have to build in the infrastructure to bring that oil to market. And for people to be able to work there. So it all takes time. And that's a brand new field, green fielding, a new.

oil field or gas field. Now, the North Sea obviously had the British have been pumping oil out of there for the last, I don't know, 80 years, 90 years, maybe longer. I think it was prior to World War II. Then you can expand on that. You can build on that. It's still going to take a year or two years to get enough platforms out there to expand production.

And there is a limited production there. You could start pumping oil again around the Netherlands. The problem with that is subsidence of the source. soil, which means, you know, you pump it out, seawater comes in, washes out the limestone and the ground underneath, and the ground starts falling, which is one of the reasons the gas and oil production was cut off in those areas. But I guess if you're desperate enough, that is something that can be returned. Russia has north of Archangelsk in the sea. Russia has over a trillion dollars of light sweet crude.

I was a supply chain director in Halliburton for Eurasia when the Russians, Halliburton was supporting Rosneft and Exxon on their first Wildcat well. This was before Obama told him leave. Exxon said, well, let's just finish this one well. It's like fine, finish and then you're leaving. The forced majority are leaving. Well, the first Wildcat well, 2,000 meters under the surface hits light, sweet crude. And that one area was about a billion, about, I think they said, about a hundred

billion dollars worth. And there's at least 10 more locations like that around that. There's about a trillion dollars worth of oil. Exxon lost all 10% of it that was supposed to get off it because force majeure, Obama set out, so they're out. The problem in the north is it's in the sea. So you have only a three week, I'm sorry, a three month drilling window before the sea ice gets so thick that it'll literally crush the legs of the platforms. There's only one Arctic-grade platform. It's owned by Gasprom. There's no others in the world.

And those areas are owned by Rosneft. So to do that, you have to bring your equipment, and you have to, you have a very narrow window, and you have to stage in a place like Murmansk, the winter before and get everything ready. And it's 1,000 kilometers. You have to pull the platform out, too. You can't stage in Arangis because Arangis freezes over.

during the winter, Murmansk, a dozen. It's on the edge of the Gulf Stream or one of the wings of the Gulf Stream. So that could be done. Then there's Venezuela because everyone's, oh, well, we can get out of Venezuela. Well, never mind, Venezuela is heavy sulfur, the crude, which is very thick. The problem in Venezuela is, and this is partially Chavez's and Maduro's fault, partially the American fault, is it can only produce 800,000 barrels if you really push the equipment to the breaking point.

which is already at, you may be able to get a million for a while before you just, you just start having massive problems. That's because those social programs aren't free, and they pulled a lot of the money out of the oil industry that was going for repairs and for renewal of equipment into the social programs. And then the Americans, of course, froze all those assets over too and didn't give them money. So the oil sector was screwed from two ends. So at this point, what Exxon and what Chevron have said, they're looking at three years and about $100 billion to get it up to about $2 million barrels a day. About $300 to $400 billion in at least five years to get it to full capacity, about four or five million barrels a day. It's there, the possibility is there. And you could probably do it faster if you're desperate enough and you bring in a lot of equipment, a lot of people.

but we're not there yet for that kind of desperation. There's other oil fields. There's oil fields south of Alaska. They've been put off for put on hold. Well, not even on hold. They've been banned from being exploited so far anyways. But again, that's three to five years or more in the deep sea. So the crisis, but the crisis is here.

The crisis, it's not coming to crisis already here. So that becomes the problem. And what do you do? Well, we're seeing what's happening. Countries are cutting back. Countries are telling people to stay home. Economies are suffering. We'll have a world recession no matter what.

But the biggest problem is gas. Gas quite literally just dropped 20% of gases off the market. There's no fast alternatives. Even if you switch on Nord Stream, that'll fix a little bit of the hole. But by the way, that's only for a lot. about three to four years until the power of Siberia, too. Pipeline is built through Mongolia, which is going to get very rich off of this, and into China.

And then the whole Yamal gas fields, they're all under contract to China. So either way, at least in the short term, you might get some gas into Europe and Germany anyways, but in the long term, that's still not available to Europe anymore. You'd have to find new gas fields and build them up, and start exploiting them. So that's a problem in any direction.

But what's even worse with gas, gas, I'll tell you, 80% of gas usage in any country, an industrial country, is industry. Very little gas is needed to actually heat homes. In Germany, it was about under 20%. The rest was all industry. It's gone up as a percentage because it's deindustrialized. But the problem is when you deindustrialize to cut gas costs, people lose jobs. And then there's the secondary ripple effect of the companies that service those companies,

the companies that service those employees, they all start to lose money and they all go out of business. And you get this massive unemployment, they can't afford to heat their homes anymore because they don't have paychecks. So the government either has to watch people freeze and probably rebel or they have to do something, set up some kind of programs with what money, you know, that's the problem for politicians. So either way, you get cascade effects. But the worst one, again, is going to be. the lack of food. You're looking, the whole green revolution is built on artificial fertilizers.

That doubled yields. European fields, you're looking, I mean, they're not black earth. Russia is an example, while it produces 40% of the fertilizer sold in the world, for its own usage, it uses about a fourth of what the European Union uses as fertilizer because Russia has black earth. Black Earth is only located basically from western Ukraine through up to thin areas up to Mongolia or up to the Al-Tai Mountains. But it's that step. It's a unique area in the world. Germany has a little bit of them because they were stealing Black Earth during World War II. The German trucks were quite literally when they were heading

back to Germany. The trucks that were supporting the Vermeck. They were loaded up with Black Earth and they were shipping it out. for their own farms. One of those little facts most people I've never heard of, but the fact of World War II. So Russia doesn't need that much because it can continue to produce them, but Europe does. Well, non-Russian Europe does.

So you're probably looking at, you know, you're probably looking at yields having. Plus all these anti-farm in Western Europe anti-farm legislatures. I mean, they're probably very thrilled with this. They're trying to destroy the farm, the agriculture sector, the Netherlands, in France, in Britain. It's idiotic. A conspiracy. Well, maybe it's not a conspiracy. He who controls the food sources, controls the population. So maybe there's something to that, begin to think they may be. But either way, yields are going to be down a lot. And we're going to

start to see that, I think, around June, when the first crops, the early crops, start coming in and they're small. And then you're going to start having panic on the market, serious panic on the market. And at least Europe is rich enough that the middle class and the upper class will still be able to get food. The local classes, I think, may in some countries in Europe have starvation, quite literal starvation. You know, I was talking to friends in have a friend, Lorenzo, he's a political, a politics professor in Italy. You're saying, you know, before this, poor Italian family is already having a hard time feeding themselves to the fourth week of the month. you know, if food prices go up 30, 40%, you're looking at the lower class is quite literally starving. And that's not even talking about places like Africa or Southeast Asia that need a lot more fertilizer and are a lot more precarious positions.

So that's a situation. I mean, the markets will correct themselves with time, but we don't have the time right now. I mean, we're going to have to live through this year one way or the other. So another quick points. Firstly, if we're talking about the attack on the Saudi facility, the Red Sea facility, I heard that it was a pumping station. Now, I don't know that for a fact because I'm not there, but I actually heard that it was in fact a pumping station,

not a pipe. I think that whoever attacks these facilities knows what they are, what is going to hurt and what the damage is. Again, we don't know where to do the damage. I don't know how big the damage was. And, you know, that's just what I have heard. So that's the first thing. The second is this. The Financial Times is saying that if the Strait of Hormuz remains under arrest,

control in the way that it is. And the United States, it seems to be, I mean, there seems to be under a lot of pressure to try and find ways to persuade the Iranians to relax control of it. That put aside all of the supply, the actual underlying supply issues that you've talked about, the psychological effect on the markets, it will be, it will hit home with them in about a week's time that there is not going to be a return to pre-war normality in the global energy markets if the situation continues for a further week. Now, I've never worked in energy markets, but does that seem sensible to you? Does that make sense to you? Because, of course, an event that happens, if it strikes in a week, it has political consequences. We have

local elections in Britain, for example, which are very important. We have the midterms in the United States in November. We have other elections going on in Europe all the time. And by the way, the de-industrialization processes that are happening in Europe are no longer confined to Germany. Britain is de-industrializing now at an exceptional pace. The steel industry has, practically collapsed. I'm hearing stories about problems in the car industry in all sorts of industrial sectors. Things are starting to go south, fast, glass, all sorts of things like this are being affected. And of course, the farm industry in Britain is in very, very deep trouble, especially as the government, the Labour government has been trying to increase taxes on it.

which sounds extraordinary, but that's what they've been trying to do. So is it true that we're going to have a cycle? You know, we have about a week left before the psychological hit of all of this comes through. Honestly, I'm surprised it still hasn't come through. The markets are an interesting place because, you know, people like to say, oh, it's 20% of motion. I think it's more like 50, 60% of motion. If you look at the fundamentals, those market prices should have been much. higher by this point. Now, there is one other, there's two other issues that I didn't mention.

One is Ukraine, because Ukraine is actively trying, Ukraine is actively attacked the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which, by the way, is, one, it's majority owned by Chevron, so they're attacking American interests, as the port facility is actually in Novo-Rasheisk, which is southwestern Russia. But the pipeline comes out of college. Kazakhstan, and it's Kazakhstan oil. And Kazakhstan and the U.S. have lost about $9 billion worth of oil revenues from the pipelines being attacked, from the office buildings being attacked. And there was a Greek, about three weeks ago, there was a Greek vessel that was coming in full of, well, it was empty. It was coming in to fill up, and the Ukrainians attacked it with a drone.

But I guess I didn't want to take sides in the Greco-Turkish conflict. So a week later, they attacked the Turkish tanker full of oil. They had already paid for, by the way, in Turkish territorial waters. And now Ukraine is actively trying to destroy the pumping stations for Turk gas, which feeds Southeast Europe. And, by the way, the Turks are now flat outstating Ukraine as their enemy. Ukraine is trying to destroy Turkey. This is from the Turks nozzling up to Ukraine and feeding them,

even though they're trying to play both sides, they're really more nozzle on the Ukraine, sending in mercenaries, or mercenaries, sending them equipment like Bayrachtars, building them a fleet that they haven't finished yet, sending them armored vehicles, sending them ammunition, and this is what you get. You lay with curves, you get fleas.

And they've got a very bad infestation of fleas. Because not only with the Turkish economy, take a massive hit from not having enough gas, and apparently some of the pumping stations have been damaged. Not only the Turkish economy is going to take a massive hit. Turkey is going to lose a lot of revenue from what it gains from reselling that gas upstream to southeast and central Europe. So now we're looking at Central Europe going bust. So the EU made its bed with the Ukrainians.

The Ukrainians are now doing what the Ukrainians always do. They're going to screw everybody as hard as they can and the Europeans are going to suffer even more. And yet, Brussels continues to give them more money, which is the insanity and trying to remove orbit and replace them with a national trader that's going to do whatever Brussels wants and raise costs inside of Hungary for energy. So that's what one. There is a slight bright point. You can make gas at home if you have coal. It's called coal gas. Cold gas was natural gas.

Most people don't know this. gas has been around used for heating and lighting for about 150 years. But natural gas came into effect after World War II. Before that, you had coal gas. You want to talk about nasty stuff. Because what you do is coal gas is you have a facility. You burn coal at a relatively low, slow burn temperature, and you pump lots and lots of water vapor into the chamber.

The water vapor takes up a lot of the, the gas that comes up from the slow burn of coal, so you get coal gas, and then you pump it downstream and it burns. That's when people had the gas lights inside their houses and the pipe coming up, very, very hazardous for your health and for your home's health, but that used to be the technology,

and then having a gas lamp inside the house with a pipe coming up. And that was usually a localized coal gas facility. The modern technology allows you to drill into the cold basins underground, and you start to borrow it underground, so you don't have an above-ground facility. And you're pumping water, vapor in there, and then you're just pumping out the coal gas. It's not the cheapest thing, but it can be done. And, you know, at the turn of the century prior to World War II, anyways, prior to World War I, there was almost every village and every town had. one of these coal gas stations. Dirty work and the men that fed the coal in there

into the furnaces usually died relatively early from one cancer. But I mean, back then it wasn't particularly automated. But there's a facility. But again, that's still going to take time. But that's one way you can get around doing the natural gas. Go back to the older technologies. Now, England's going to have a problem

because England took the ever-wise move of filling in the coal mines and building estates on top of them. So you have to move a lot of people off and raise the estates and start opening the mines again, which would give a lot of work to people for once. So there's that possibility. But again, that's medium term. That's at least two, three years of preparation and get things done.

There's no fast answer here. It's too late. Fast answer is not to start this war. It would not take two or three years in Britain. It would be more like 10 or 20. The politics of it, the politics of it are absolutely unthinkable. I mean, the level of opposition from some sections of society to doing anything like that, even in conditions of economic crisis and stress, would remain extraordinarily difficult to overcome. So that's a few things to say. Now, just a few things. Let's talk about Ukraine, and maybe we can just talk about where we are, because you're quite right about Turkey and Ukraine. It's a completely unremarked, unreported thing that is happening. Erdogan furiously, he was absolutely furious about this. He called Putin. if you look at the Russian readout, which is very, very carefully worded,

you can get the sort of small hint that Erdogan is now talking about sending the Turkish Navy to work with the Russian Navy to protect all of these energy facilities against the Ukrainians. I gather, I haven't read this, but I gather that the Turkish media are being even more forthright about this. But the incredible thing about all of these Ukrainian attacks on these energy facilities is not just a question of the Europeans continuing to send Ukraine money. Some European politicians, notably Donald Tusk, are still cheering on these attacks. They're saying it's an excellent, it's a great thing that Ukraine is doing this. It's preventing Russia from gaining funds for this energy bonanza that they're getting because of the high energy prices. And if you read parts of the British and European media, they're saying the same thing.

It is extraordinary to me to read all of this. But that is what they're saying. And that does make me wonder about, you know, the overall situation in Ukraine at the moment, that they are so desperate to do this because up to now, they've been very careful not to antagonize Erdogan. And that the Europeans, despite, you know, all sorts of confidence statements about the situation with Ukraine, are obviously getting very worried about the situation in Ukraine altogether. So I'm just wondering what your take on that is. And perhaps you could just give us a very, very brief overview of the situation in Ukraine because that they should be doing this at this particular point in time seems extraordinary. Yes, it does.

You know, you're dealing with, first of all, you're dealing with this modern Ukrainian attitude and someone that's not so modern. of a, my hut is at the edge of the village, which means I don't care if the village burns until the fire gets up to me. And two, you're dealing with everybody owes me. They quite literally have this mentality. And you see it in the quote, refugees.

Some of them are refugees, a lot of them just left. And even when they're rich, they demand that, you know, they get money from the different company or different countries. Everyone owes us because we are. And now you're dealing with a drug-addled leadership in Ukraine that's ever getting more desperate, more angry, and knows that its time is running out. And they're just striking out in any direction to keep themselves on the front of the newspapers. Not very wisely. I mean, look, Ukraine struck three refining facilities, which is always interesting.

All three are EU and NATO countries, and both EU and NATO said, whatever. Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. There were all three facilities are partially fully owned by Luke Oil, which is idiotic on the part because the Drushba pipeline that brings oil into Hungary and Slovakia. They then sold a chunk of that diesel that they were producing along with other products back to Ukraine. So now Ukraine that's been cut off. That was 20% of Ukraine's diesel. And most of that diesel, of course, went to the front lines. So now you got Ukraine having problems with fuel.

on the front lines. And the front lines are moving. The front lines are moving. I'm not even going to go into the scandals going on inside Hungary right now. With Ukrainian money poured into the opposition candidates? And probably would that absolute OK from van der Leyen and her dictatorship, you know, because it keeps their hands kind of clean while working through their Ukrainian and proxies to try to remove Orban. In the north, the Russian army is advancing

steadily in the direction of Sumi. And I think Sumi is going to be the next really big bigger battle coming up. It's not a huge city. It's about $250,000. It's a flat open area again, so it's hard to defend it. The Russian military

has burst into the second line, burst into the second zone of the second line of defense. and is pushing its way through it on a direct route to Sumi and is presently about 12 kilometers from Sumi. So a good day's walk from the edge of Sumi to the Russian lines. So from Sumi, you can hear the artillery report of the artillery on a daily basis at this point.

And Russian drones are operating up and throughout Sumi, taking out Ukrainian assets. Haikov is a much slower move in the north, but Russia has expanded its buffer zone up and down the Harikov border and is now starting to expand further into Haidikov. Eastern Heirkova Oblastia, you need to finish the Battle of Kupinsk. Oh, I think the fourth battle of Kupensk. There's not much left of Kupensk at this point.

Now south of Kupensk, the Russian military, has burst through. Just yesterday, they took 28 square kilometers in the south. So they've cut off, well, they didn't cut off. they secured their own logistics lines into Southeast coupons from Ukrainian attack. And the desperate Ukrainian counteroffensive that grabbed about half of coupons back last year, it's solely being pushed back out out of the area. They could get in there, but they couldn't hold for obvious reasons.

Now, as we walk down the line, it's more or less still the same thing. I mean, about 35, 40% of Konstantinovka has been liberated. The Ukrainians are still pushing a lot of troops into that area. The big questions right now are in Zaporosia. The Ukrainians mounted a lot of desperate counter-offensives, and they had success. I'll give them that. East of the Dobrapolia, Zaporosia, they had success.

They cost them a lot of men. They just throw them away without thinking, about it. Quite a bit of equipment. But they pushed the Russian forces from the first line of defense, so second line defense, but it stopped at that. They ran out of steam. They couldn't get, they couldn't break through Russian defenses.

They reclaimed quite a bit of land, but it's now being pushed back from three different directions. And a counteroffensive that the Ukrainians launched south of Guli, Poyer, or north of Gulli, I'm sorry, that was destroyed right off the bat, rolled back, and then Russia continue to advance. And the Russian forces from that direction are about 14 kilometers outside of Riochava and advancing forward. One thing I missed, they did, and these are PR moves.

I mean, these are absolutely PR moves to get people in, get photos done, see, we're still here, give us some more money. They launched a column into Pakrovsk to try to get to Pakrovsk. There was something around 600 men that were killed. I mean, and the entire, including at least one Abrams that was destroyed. They never got even I don't think even the lead vehicle got to the edge of the city.

They were destroyed by drones. They were, they did a dash. They were discovered well before they got into Russian territory, and they were destroyed by drones, and then the infantry came in and finished off whatever was left. It was hiding. We swept through for prisoners

and equipment and booty. If you want to call it that. And the Ukrainians right now, the south of Zaporosia city where Russia was advancing. They're throwing everything they can. They pushed Russian troops back, Primorsk, and then Russia took it back, and it's a back and forth in that area. But they're throwing everything they can into that area for reserves. And they're still losing. And a lot of these attacks, as hard as it may be for people to understand what you're dealing with as a government there, they're PR stunts. They're throwing away hundreds of guys,

and they've been doing it for the last four years. I think the first one like that was near the Hark of Border. They ran up there, a group of five guys or six guys ran up there, put a border post up, photographed themselves, and then they got all killed because the Russian military found them and they hit them hard. But the photos got out. But then from the drones, you saw them running for their lives

and being mowed down. And they throw people away like that just to get a photograph. and get a headline in the news. I don't think there's ever been a war quite like this. I mean, let this return to the Middle East and to the situation there because we now have these negotiations between the Americans and the Iranians.

Or perhaps we're not, because as of this moment in time, it's very unclear whether there's going to be any negotiations at all. But this is the thing, as I said, that a lot of people, certainly in the financial markets and the energy markets, they seem to have been hoping on because they said to themselves, I've got this war, but if we can find a way to get a truce, that will lead to a negotiation, things will normalize, and that's going to stabilize the whole situation. It now looks as if it may not be that straightforward, and that's heating home.

So quite a lot now rides on this negotiation. Now, there's a very interesting, very interesting comment by Dimitri Medvedev, who talked about the Israeli role in this. He said, this is a game of chess with three players, not two. There's also Israel, which is not playing on the US side. It has no use for a ceasefire, and it has not achieved its objectives. It could very well make its own move, simply sweep all the pieces off the board. That makes the situation highly uncertain.

Actually, I do you think it's uncertain at all. The Israelis are intensifying the situation in Lebanon. The Iranians are basically saying, no move forward unless this stops. The Europeans are telling the Israelis to stop. They are not stopping. They're not going to listen. certainly they're not going to listen to what the Europeans say. What is going to happen?

Are we going to get this negotiation or are we going to see a collapse at the ceasefire? And if we do, well, will all the things that you've been talking about in terms of global energy, will we suddenly see that moment of realisation fully, finally, conclusively hid home that this crisis is here to stay. It's basically my last question, by the way. You know, the Americans could end all this very quickly. Netanyahu, we're leaving. You either come to a negotiation table.

You do, as we've said, or that's it. You're cut off. But that would actually take, you know, backbone, which Trump seems to lack. Pass bombastic statements. He would have to go against his donor class. Though I think if this lasts into the summer, it doesn't have to last

to November. If this goes into the summer, the economic catastrophe, if this lasts into the summer, the economic catastrophe that the U.S. is in, the U.S. is already in technical recession. And no president wants to ever admit recession. They all try to rewrite the books. Biden did that famously too.

There's no recession. We don't see a recession. Until the recession ended up. See, there's no recession. But two quarters of negative growth is a recession. The U.S. has had two-quarters. quarters of negative growth. It's definitely going to have a third quarter of negative growth

for obvious reasons. It's in a recession, whether it becomes a depression or how deep a recession we've yet to live and cease. So as I think this rolls on, the U.S. consumer or the U.S. tax slave is going to get hit very, very hard. They're going to get very, very angry. They already are angry. Trump's lost most of his base. The Maga there left are groupies. They'll follow anything that their cult master says. These are people that gave Trump $30 billion in Trump coins, which are not a financial instrument.

And I am not a financial advisor, but I advise not to buy Trump coins or Melanie coins or any of the other these idiot, idiotic ideas. Yeah, you can just send me the money if you really want to send it to somebody that he's gotten plenty. Or by Duran

memorabilia. yeah, that t-shirts. But yeah, so that's the point. These people are going to suffer, and they're ready, are suffering. So I think sooner or later, even if Trump is not ready to do it, the people around Trump, at least the ones that want to have a career after Trump, are going to start putting a lot of pressure on Trump to do something with the Israelis. And the whole world's putting pressure because the Israelis have now shown themselves

as being the main spoiler for the world heavy recession slash depression. I mean, the atrocities they've committed in just this last month or would put any other country in the Hague and the Hanksman's loose. So this is what we're looking at. And you're absolutely right. But look at the negotiation team from the U.S. side. Okay, Vance. Okay, we'll give you one.

They've got Vance. But then look, look, the other two members are. The two shysters for the, for the, for Jerusalem or Tel Avivis. whatever you want to call the capital, that are considered basically Netanyahu's assets. Kushner and Wilcoff, Wittkov, they're back. The two guys that are the worst people you could choose for negotiations, these gentlemen have zero qualifications as negotiators.

They have zero qualifications in understanding nuclear anything. Outside of the market, the real estate market, and Whitcalf's particularly in New York real estate market, they have no other qualifications. They're not economists. They're not financial gurus. They're not nuclear scientists. They're not military.

They don't have any of the life experience you need to go negotiate a ceasefire or let alone a permanent peace after a war or do any negotiations before this conflict started. But there are the two people there. And I'm sure they will in one way or the other either undermine or override anything, Vance and his people try to push through. So I don't see this. I don't see a success in this. Unfortunately, I'd like to see, you know,

I'd like everybody kissed the cross and buried the sword, especially with Holy Posca coming up, but I don't see that as a possibility. In Israelis, you know, the Israelis launched Operation Eternal Darkness. You know, in the Christian, in the New Testament, eternal darkness is the ephemism for hell. And that's what they've launched on the people of Lebanon.

They're losing on the battlefield. They're losing severely on the battlefield. They've even gone from, we're going to take everything up to the Latakia River and make it northern Israel to. We're just going to do three, four kilometer dead zone because they're massively losing troops. They're having massive morale failure. But in the air, whether by aviation or by missile or rocket fire, yeah, they're genociding the population. And unlike previous times, because, you know, when it comes to Lebanon, the Israelis are always very careful not to, in. involved the other two thirds of the population, because for those who don't know, Lebanon is pretty

evenly split between Christians, Orthodox and Catholics, Sunnis, and Shia. And the president's always a Christian in Lebanon, and they very specifically made to keep a balance. And the Israelis normally, when they were fighting with anybody, they'd fight a Hezbollah, and they wouldn't touch the Christians. And they try to even ally with the Christians, but not now. They are a massacre Christian villages. They're attacking Christian sections of Beirut. They've lost, as the Russian saying goes, they lost the shoreline. They've gone out very far out to see now. There's a very, very, very bleak situations altogether. I mean, the decision to go to war on the 28th of February is opening up all sorts of very, very dark consequences or so.

Yes, yes. Stani Slav, this has been a vast... And everybody said that. If they listened to your show, they would have known that. If they listened to any of the experts, out of it. Everybody said this would happen, and this is exactly what happened. Stanley Slav, thank you for a masterly, masterly presentation of the situation today. It was a pleasure.

We're obviously going to have to discuss this again, probably fairly soon. But thank you for everything that you provided us today. Thank you. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Thank you, Stanis, Slav. Where can people follow your work before you go? Okay, on X at Stanis Krapivnik.

Couldn't get the whole name in. On YouTube at Mr. Slavic, man, Slavic with a K. On Telegram, the Russian channel Stas today Abratna, the English channel, Stas was there, and on Substack at Zmeygarinich. I'm using as a backup for YouTube just in case. All right. Those are linked in the description box down below.

Stato's off. Thank you. Thank you.