The Duran Podcast - Three Wars: Russia, Iran and Mali Are Reshaping the World w/ Stanislav Krapivnik

Episode Date: May 10, 2026

Three Wars: Russia, Iran and Mali Are Reshaping the World w/ Stanislav Krapivnik

All right, Alexander, we are here with Stanislav. Stanislav, good to have you back on the Duran. Where can people follow your work? Alex, always a pleasure. Okay, so substack is Mey Garnich, which, by the way, is a mythical three-headed dragon in Russian mythology. It was the only cool thing left that wasn't taken on Substack. X is Staniys Karpivnik.

Couldn't fit the whole name in. So on YouTube at Mr. Slavic Man, all one word, Slavic with a K. And then on, let's see, Telegram. Yeah, we saw that. Telegram. Stas today, Abratna, is the Russian channel. Stas was there as the English channel. And there's a little bit different content on those two, depending.

So check them both out. So I think that's everything. Okay. Well, I have the links in the description. box down below. And I will also have them as a pinned comment as well. So definitely check out Stanislav's work. Alexander Stanislav. Let's get into the news. Let's indeed do so. And I what we're going to be very privileged, as always, to talk with Stanislav, and we're particularly privileged today, because we are in the middle of two wars. One war is playing out in the

Middle East. It is between the United States and Iran. We have constant shifts and changes of position, the United States. One day they're trying one thing. Next day, they're trying something else. It's extremely difficult to keep up with the differences and changes that happen from one hour sometimes to the next. The other war, which is the one that's been fought in Ukraine, which we've discussed with Stanislav extensively, also, is the war between the Russians and the Ukrainians, though, of course, the Western powers are very heavily involved and implicated in that war too. And the two wars, to a civilian eye, which is mine, could not be more different. One, as I said, is constant, you know, big actions, flashes, attacks, drama, excitement, and it all stops.

Nothing seems to be resolved. The other war, which is the war which the Russians are fighting, very methodical, very systematic, very incremental, completely different. Now, we have all sorts of personalities. One war seems very personality driven, which is the war between the United States and Iran. The other war, the one in Ukraine, seems to be much more institution driven, in the sense that one gets the sense that it's the general staff, the defense ministry, the groups of forces, the security council at the center of the political system. And again, the feel of it is very, very different. Now, I'd like to discuss all this and to compare these two wars

and to look at where each of them is going. and I cannot imagine anybody better to do that with than Stanislav, who has close familiarity with both militaries in the sense that he served in the one and he has many acquaintances and knowledge of the other. So, firstly, Stanislav, welcome to this program, but secondly, am I right in saying that there is a fundamental difference and it's a difference. of character and that it goes beyond the person of the president of the United States that does seem to be a major difference in the style of war, the way of war, that these two

militaries have. Am I right at this? And then maybe we can unpack this a little bit in a little bit more detail. Alexander, you're absolutely right. I would add, I would slightly correct you, there isn't two wars, there's three wars. Because what's been flying under radar, and I've done I'm about to put out a big article in the Russian media on it and I've done an update on this is the war in Africa, which is an extension. You could call an extension, but it's a very different war.

It's not just Mali, it's also Niger. They've been attacked. Niger was attacked first. Mali was invaded by 12,000 separatists and Islamic jihadists with American and French backing on the one side and lots of Ukrainians because they've also published photos of themselves,

training and holding Islamic jihadist flags, because they like to do that. You know, they like to brag. On the other side is the Russian military. And this is, granted, it's a former, a lot of these guys are former Wagner, but the Russian African Corps is active duty Russian military. They're all contracted with the Department of Defense,

and they've been upgraded a lot since Wagner. They've had heavy equipment brought in a lot of it. And there's lots of Russian military all over that place. And it's not just two separate powers. Burkina Fasa also sent troops instantly over to Mali to help assist Mali in holding off the invasion. And the Russian troops are in the middle of it. They're the sturgeon on which all the defense has been built. They've been upgrading the Malian military, all the Sahel militaries.

So we're really looking at three theaters already. and they may be growing, especially depending on what happens May 9th. I'll be there on the parade with RT. So if something hits, I'll be there videotape, I guess. You can have it for me if we're all still alive the next day. So there's that. When it comes to military, yes, I'm very close with the Russian military. Actually, when mobilization hit, I requested a military commission as an officer,

had a couple generals backing me, but the military, they turned it down. Well, and you could say, they said we have enough officers for now, is what they came back with. And you could say that, you know, okay, I was a U.S. military officer. Maybe they don't trust me or something like that. But the key here is I have a lot of friends that are retired Soviet and retired Russian military from the 90s officers, all, you know, mid-ranking senior officers, they all wanted to come back, and they were all told the same thing. We have enough officers. Your time hasn't come yet. And the key being your time, and this is in 22, 23. And to read that is, at least if not the political class, then the military

class is already planning for the big war with Europe. They've recognized that there's a very good chance that this is all going to snowball effect into an avalanche that's going to drive war. So the officers that are more experienced, they're keeping them in reserve for when the big mobilization has to hit. It's, you know, military is obviously, every single military in the world that's worth anything, including the U.S. military,

they will gameplay different scenarios. The U.S. military has game plans for every nation, for alien invasions, for zombie apocalypses. And people laugh at that, but what you're really doing is, you're exercising the staffs to think of new, to come from different angles and think of new problems or solutions to problems that you normally wouldn't think. You know, a million zombies are heading your way.

They're not going to stop. What do you do? Okay, what do you plan? You start planning logistics. It's an exercise. It's a mental exercise that can later on be used in different other scenarios that are real-life scenarios or real-life. But the approach between the Russian military and the American military, it is very different on a professional level

in that in the U.S., it's the art of war. And I think that comes more from Klauschwitz and that school of thought, and into the art of war. So what the art of war says is, you learn what the great, you learn what the great military leaders have done, how they've thought,

you try to figure out Napoleon's thinking on a strategic terror theory, tactical level, because it's an art. And in the end, it all depends on the person, more so than on the system. The Russian approach is the science of war. There's full academies for this. It's, yes, the individual commander is important. Yes, his abilities are very important, but those abilities are built upon a scientific approach. How do you organize logistics? How do you organized defenses. You don't wing it. You actually have a science behind it. What's worked, what hasn't worked. And because of that, the system is less flexible maybe than the Western

system or the American system. But it's very quick at learning lessons. You survive any kind of setback. You learn from that setback. You dissect it. You do lessons learned, much more so than you do from an American point of view, lessons learned. You look at it at the minimal details of what went wrong and you don't repeat. While from the American side, you may wind up repeating in a slight variation over and over and over again. A prime example is Bora Bora. Or is a Torah Torah. I can't ever remember.

I get those two mixed up. The one in Afghanistan. If you look at what was done when they went after bin Laden in the small mountain range, every single mistake the U.S. military has ever done. before it repeated to and include if anybody has ever seen or read the book we were soldiers once in young and the movie with uh let's see what was in that that was bruce willis uh bruce willis if i remember correctly right yeah i think so which i right uh when the 110th uh i'm 1001st air airborne became 101 first air assault so they were helicopter board and what they did was

they flew a brigade right into the middle of a division of Viet Cong in a valley, and they're surrounded. Mel Gibson. Oh, Mel Gibson. Yep, you're right. You're absolutely right. Mel Gibson. So, and what do they find?

Yes, we have the enemy where we want them. They're all around us. We're surrounded. We can shoot in any direction. They're all in there, but so can they, you know. And that was a catastrophe that barely got saved by the sacrifice of a lot of helicopter pilots and a lot of luck. because the enemy, yeah, first they're a chalk

and then they go, wait a minute. Is that it? Oh, we surround them. They can't get out. They're trapped. Well, the U.S. military did the exact same thing. They repeated every single mistake. 101st airborne or aerosol brings in a brigade

drops it in the middle of the mountains and now they're surrounded by the Mujerijin slash al-Qaeda slash whoever else is up there. Every mistake you would think. that they would have learned because it goes back more to the commander than to the science of it. So, yes, the U.S. is more flexible, but they tend to create a lot of stupid mistakes over and over again because it's not learned as a science, you know, what you do and you don't do. And the Russian approach is much more systematic.

You know, we're supposed to be the low-skilled knuckle-dragging barbarians, according to the Western press, but the Russian approach has always been a very technical, very scientific approach to just about everything. There's a big article which perhaps illustrates this very thing that you just said. I think it was in the New York Times about Russian adaption to drone warfare and how the Russians have gone about reorganizing their drone warfare capabilities and have built up on a huge industry and whole science around the use of. of drones and have done this incredibly fast and done it, upgraded by scale, and the very pragmatic and empirical way in which it's been done, in the sense that you look at what works and that

you just build on it rather than sort of try and conceptualize it ahead. So it seems to me that it plays exactly to the point that you've just made, that this is a structural, a structured, sorry, a structured approach rather than one that looks to try and wing your way through it, and which sort of, you know, tries to find some inspirational, a solution to a problem. You actually sit down, you think, you have obviously the planning staffs to do it, and you approach it in that way. Does this have anything to do with Marxism? I get to ask that straight away because the Soviet systems that we were all talked about,

it was all supposed to be very much based on Marxism and the Soviet Union's approach to war was founded on thinking of people like Engels, or is it a pre-Soviet thing that extends back to the way the Russians have always waged war? I'll answer this right now, but I also want to go back to the drones because I just came back for the Dunboss and it's very important exactly. This is exactly where I was at meeting and seeing issues with the drones. So, okay, so the approach, I know everybody likes to think history in Russia started in 1917. It didn't. It started somewhere in the 800s, the late 800s.

Actually, the written history, pre-Russian history. was way longer than that, the northern Slavs, at least a thousand years before that, according to DNA analysis from the various remains of the Kergon's, R1A, Hopla Group. But this approach started with Peter's Great. So when they started copying, they didn't just blindly copy Western European approaches. They set up committees, just about for everything. And they went about it in a very scientific approach, putting in getting as much information as they could, putting in reports, then reviewing them, and trying to come at this at a technical scientific approach. Sometimes it took a lot longer. Sometimes it didn't work. But the mentality was already

there. So did the Soviets enforce it? Probably did even more so. But this was part of Tsarist Russia. This was part imperial Russia. And it became part of Soviet Russia. And it's part of Soviet Russia. of modern Russia. It's been a traditional approach for the last 350 years, if not longer. And really, if you read some of the history of prior to Peter the Great, that has already these approaches of expert committees, looking at different situations, looking at cannon use that started, I mean, Russia was one of the leading powers in the use of cannons back under Ion Grosnia, even the feared, even the fourth. This is the mid-1500s.

And in fact, that turned several battles against the Mongol, the various Mongol Kaganauts in the south. So this was a very scientific approach that has continued to be used. And drones, well, so I came back Monday evening from the Donbos. And I was visiting several units. I'm not going to say which or they're located, but they are now reorganized as drone battalions and drone regiments. What happened before that is, and still to a degree is, but it's in the stage of transformation reorganization, is everybody had their own drone section.

So every assault company may have like two guys doing drones. a battalion might have, you know, a couple of sections here and they're doing drones and so on and so on. And, you know, there's lots of different drone missions. I'm not talking about strategic level drones, Guarons or any of these larger drones. And though Ukraine is hitting with airplane-type drones deep into Russia, Russia can do the same thing. It's just not doing it because it doesn't need to right now. Because if it needs to go against the European Union, it can build those drones very, very quickly. It's building shorter range drones because it only needs to hit at the moment anyways to the western border of Ukraine.

So that's what the Guaran threes, the Garan twos are being used because it just doesn't need to go any further. And by the way, those drones are now very pilotable at the distances of Adessa and not just at pre-programmed locations. They were taking out Adesan vessels that were trying to flee out of the port and they were zeroing in on them. So it's either artificial intelligence or the new satellite systems or something else that are bouncing a signal off, and they're controlling them in real time to go against moving targets, not just fixed targets that you can put on an internalized map. So, but the small drones, the tactical drones, you have several very different distinct missions involved. You have recon. You have bombing missions where they drop grenades or other explosive instruments.

onto targets. You have the Kamikaze drone missions, which are one-offs. You have resupply missions, so there are drones that drop equipment, food, and so on. So these are very different drone missions, and they use different types of drones, even though they more or less, they kind of look the same, but the guts and the setup are different. The problem is until now, you would have these kinds of orders coming down to every single drone section from whatever commander's there. You know, oh, we need to do this today, tomorrow we need to do this, and 10 minutes later we need to do this. And it requires very different equipment and to some degree different training, obviously. So we put a lot of strain and a lot of inefficiency in the system.

A lot of it had to be repeated over and over again capabilities at all of these units. So now they've gone to a reorganization where they're going now into battalion level and regiment level drone units. where you have dedicated units for resupply. You have dedicated units for kamikaze attacks or bombing mission. You have dedicated reconnaissance units. Because the other thing is these guys, they'll carry these drones with them out into the field. They get as far as they can, particularly if they're using kamikaze drones. You need to get really far ahead.

So they'll carry where they can. So they can't just switch over to reconnaissance that easily because the cameras are totally different. You've got information acquiring packages. on there that are absolutely different. On a kamikaze, whether it's going by fiber optics or whether it's going by a radio signal, you still have minimal camera use because you don't need very, very detailed photos from a height when you're zooming in

on an enemy tank or enemy personnel to destroy them. So it's a different approach. So now you're coming with that organized scientific approach. And the other thing that's interesting is, even though there are major manufacturers in Russia for the FPV, different kind of FPV drones, they have drone laboratories up front. And they, with 3D printers, everything's equipped,

they can come up with whatever drone model that hits their fancy, right? You get a crazy idea, you go back in there, you describe it to the guys sitting behind the printers, they do a 3D model or modify the existing 3D model, they pump one out, you put it together relatively quickly, most everything is printed or soldered on the spot and you go test it. So your turnaround period

becomes much, much faster than having engineers in Moscow or in, you know, some way in Belgrade or wherever else they may be sitting, and I'm not saying they're sitting there, but they could be sitting there or whatever. Other part of Russia they're sitting going, hey, let's make an idea, deal,

then we get shipped it out there, and then we test it because once the enemy sees it, they're going to react and they're going to modify it. And it's a continuous modification run. It's a continuous cycle. So the technology advancement and modification is extremely fast. We're talking very short technology cycles. What's good for now, maybe in six months, it's pointless.

Nobody's using it anymore. It's much faster. It wasn't World War I and World War II. And that was pretty fast technology models. I mean, World War I, you started with the hot air balloons and ended with bombers with four-engine Ilymira. of its bombers bristling with machine guns in every direction, that Germans wouldn't just wouldn't even go up against them,

so they get shot down. You went from that to that in a matter of four years here. The technology cycle is even faster, much faster. So, yes, they're coming out as very scientifically. They're totally reorganizing. There's a huge drive for people. And, you know, the interesting thing is it's a career move. Because not only you're serving the country and defense,

you're building the skill set from design to operation of drones that once peace comes, and hopefully we're still alive and it's not the piece of the grave, or nuclear peace, hopefully, you know, technology moves forward. These people will have very good career opportunities because drones are here to stay in the civilian market, too, for obvious reasons. So, yeah, it's become a very organized, very structured, move forward. I've actually

heard it described that, you know, Rubicon is Russia's leading tech company at the moment. Now, can you just tell us something else about drone warfare? Because there's a certain degree of commentary, which is on the Ukrainian side, by people who are very critical

of Ukraine's way of using battlefield drones, that the Ukrainians over-emphasize killing infantry, killing Russian infantry with their drones, whereas the Russians see drones primarily as useful to disrupt logistics, Ukrainian logistics, and supplies. And I've read many commentaries from various Ukrainian commentators who say that the Russian approach is ultimately far more effective. Did you hear anything about, about that whilst he was there in Dombaas. Yes.

There's several key points here. First of all, Ukraine has to compensate for men and lack of train men. A friend of mine, he used to be in storm infantry. He is now on the cleanup cruise. So, Coupons, by the way, has fallen. He was just in Coupons before he got transferred to a different unit. Coupons has fully fallen. There's a couple of buildings on a very few.

There's a couple of buildings on the very edge, and the forest past Coupons, the Ukrainians are still holding. And they were trying to make up manpower losses and their catastrophic manpower losses with drones to try to hold the Russian infantry in place with drones. And when I say cleanup crews, he went from being a, he got injured when he was in the storm infantry. So they transferred him after he recovered from his injury, trapnel injury. they clean up the corpses. He said, you know, on a static piece of battlefields, just south of coupons, where you'd think that it went back and forth several times,

but you would think that the casualties would be equivalent or something close to equivalent, especially since Russia in the end pushed the Ukrainians out, and the Ukrainians are on defensive, you'd think there'd be a lot more Russian casualties. He said, 10 to 1. It was shocked. I mean, just the Ukrainian casualties,

who just, the corpses were just literally stacked on top of each other. They were just falling in the same places, in the same areas. And they're just, they're cleaning that up. They're 10 to 1. So it's not just the matter of Russia is advancing, even on a more static battlefield. That's what it's hitting. And they're throwing people in, you know, another friend of mine was telling me when he was on defensive positions up in Kursk, not Kursk, I'm sorry, in the Khadikov-Oblest.

They had a two-kilometer open field in front of their positions. Ukrainians would just drop off, and we were discussing how they were moving. So from the way they were moving, it's obvious these guys had zero training. You know, they were told which end of the rifle was the business under the rifle. That's it. Now go scream awry for Ukraine, you know, glory to heroes and go die. And they were just bringing them up in huge numbers. These press gang meet.

I mean, that's all they are to the Ukrainian leadership. And charging them across the two kilometer fields. We barely ever fired on it. The artillery took them all out. they would make it halfway across the field before they would be wiped out. So from that point of view, the Ukrainians, all they have is mass drone warfare. The Russian approach to drone warfare has changed too. And I'll go back to Ukrainian in a second, too, because there's an element that everybody's missing.

One of the reasons why the Ukrainians are acting the way they're acting. The Russian approach has always been, yeah, take out the equipment. Now, the deep equipment hits, the logistic hits, are now done. by the latest generation of Gron drones, which can be piloted, can be either autopileted or piloted by the actual operator somewhere remotely in a different city. They don't have to be anywhere near the base because they're bouncing off the satellites. And they can be used to strike moving targets in 100 kilometers,

150 kilometers out. So you'll get a Garan drone hunting down a truck, for example. You can do that. It's a little expensive, but deep enough, it happens deep enough that you can't get the FPV drones that far in. Russia has usually targeted technology over personnel. But war makes people mean, and it gets a meter. And for a lot of drone operators, the emphasis has changed. They're targeting, unless it's something that's very key, they're now targeting the Ukrainian person.

first and foremost. And that's more of a revenge thing for what the Ukrainians do, especially what the Ukrainians do to civilian population. Now, from the Ukrainian side, ever heard of gamification? The Ukrainian units are literally, you gamify everything. When you play a game on a telephone, these fast games, the key in those games is at least every three to five seconds, something pops up, point, you get awarded some little point, you get that little bit of dopamine rush. And that is the gamification of something. Anything you do, that, you know, that's the design model the last several years, is to get mini dopamine rush. That's what TikTok is based off of, you know, why teenagers get addicted to watching 10 second or 15 second videos that are pointless, but they get

a little dopamine rush. It's gamification. They get the bonus point. Well, the Ukrainian battalions or the Ukrainian drone operators, their units on different levels of their units, from companies to sections up to battalions, they're all on a gamification. They get points per strike. They earn these points as a unit, and then they get swag. They buy, they get, and they literally, they can spend these units at the end of the month on an internet, they order new trikes for themselves or new motorcycles or new other gear and they get it.

They actually will get it. So the motivations, you've got to kill something. So if you've got no military targets, civilians also get your points. Less points, but they get your points. So they will always go after somebody. Look, you know, I did, one second, I did an update.

I haven't put it out yet, but part of my update for yesterday, This is typical on the Russian, on this battlefield. Actually, it's not on the battlefield. This is civilian casualties for yesterday on the Russian side, and this happens every single day. The town of Juchankul, I'm butchering the name. I've got to look it up exactly where it's located.

I think it's in the edge of the caucuses. Five civilians killed. Bryansk, one civilian killed. killed a hit on the house. LaGoff, which is a village in Kursk, two civilians injured, hit on a gas station while they were fuming. Belgrade Oblast, one civilian killed three injured. That's every single day.

They can't find military targets, so they can't approach military targets because they have protection. They go after civilians to earn points so they can get swag. That's a gamification on the Ukrainian side, the psychological gamification of this war. Which is, by the way, why the Ukrainian drone. operators don't get taken as prisoners. I've heard it said that this approach of basically paying operators for the number of kills they achieve, that the other thing it is doing is encouraging massive inflation in terms of the numbers

of soldiers, Russian soldiers, and that they say that they've killed. And that this is one of the factors that is distorting understanding of the West. I mean, is that right? Yes, and then there's the NATO kill tables. Ever heard of the NATO kill tables? Okay. So on a strategic or theater level operation, you have quite literally,

this is hangover from the Cold War where you're supposed to have these gigantic battles. And you're firing thousands of rounds of artillery in the first days on all the fronts So the red horde comes rolling over the valiant NATO defenders. We know the scenarios. You know, it's been gameed all over the place and computer games and television shows and so on. Well, there's no expression back then without drones.

There was no way that you can estimate what you're actually killing. So NATO came up, and the U.S. military has these and used to use them. He came up with kill tables. So you look at the weapon system. say you're firing 155 millimeter howitzers. And you fired, you go across, and it's a table. It's quite literally a table. So you're fighting a infantry brigade, right?

And you fired off 100 rounds in a square kilometer or two square kilometers. You go across 1-5-5 millimeter, how many rounds you fired. And you look what the table tells you, you should have killed 200 infantry, five BMPs and so on. And they quite literally use these tables, at least they used to at the beginning of this conflict, to come up with the death rates of the Russian military. Were they based in any kind of actual factual information

or even to the concept of how this conflict was being filed? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But they were used, and this is why you got these giant wild numbers of 12,000 Russian tanks destroyed by 2024. and, you know, 5,000 30,000 BMPs and other vehicles and so on, they're just pulling this off of the tables.

How many shots do we fire? Okay, so if we fired 300-155-millimeter shots or we fired so many MLRS short-range rockets, now we should have killed this, this, this, and this. And that goes into reporting. We kill this. And quite literally, that's where a lot of the statistics just coming from. It's idiotic. It has absolutely no concrete.

concept in modern warfare, at least the modern warfare as we're seeing it right now, because it was based off of giant kill ratios that should have happened when the entire Red Army with all the Warsaw Pact countries comes rolling over so we can approximate what we've killed. But they were used, and they may still be getting used in some areas. I'm sure they are. Let's go back to the command and control systems and the way in which war is for because of course what you say is actually very interesting that on the one hand you have commanders who are playing Napoleon being exaggerating but that's what they're doing. No, it's not. You're not. And on the other hand, on the other side, you have basically a much more

systematic, almost like a kind of machine war. Now does that explain something which I think a lot the people find very difficult to understand, which is why the Russians are fighting this war in this particular way, why they're not going for particular knockout blows in the kind, you know, grand strategic plans of, you know, the kind of, they're not trying to do an austerlitz, for example. They are taking everything very systematically and very methodically, be, you know, place like Constantine of Gouran and Lehman or wherever. It's unspectacular. It's not dramatic, but it is remorseless.

And it means that when you finally take the territory, once you've consolidated, you keep it. So does this explain one of the differences that in the West, we are always looking for this, you know, grand tactics, this brilliant inspirational general who's going to achieve this. tremendous knockout victory, whereas this isn't what the Russians do at all. If you could just talk to that a bit. Yeah, the problem, if we were going to look at it, honestly, there is no Austrolytes for the last 120 years. Those moments, and one could probably say they started to fade out with the Franco-Prussian

war, because even though the Franco-Prussian War had some very key battles that helped crushed the French army. You know where did the French army fully just collapse. You didn't have, you no longer have Australis, you no longer have Borodino, you don't have these kinds of battles, where you may be wagering the entire future of your entire nation on one battle. Simply put too many men, too long of a front, as we saw in World War I, as we saw, even on the Eastern Front,

which was much, which was relatively a mobile front compared to the West, which is all trench. The Eastern Front was relatively mobile. It still had a lot of trench warfare in it, but it was just too big. World War II, you had major losses like Stalingrad, just as an example. That did not crush the German army.

Curse did not crush the German army. It was a major setback. It was a major loss, but the front continued fighting because it was just too big now. So it's the same thing in here. You know, any one city, any one major victory, but the front is over a thousand, 200 kilometers long.

And even if a portion of the front collapses and starts retreating, doesn't mean everybody starts retreating. Communications themselves, by the time you find out that, oh, they're retreating up north where, you know, somewhere around Heidekov and we're sitting down in Zaporosia, oh, it's been three days. Well, we're still holding our own because we're not being surrounded. So it's a whole different scale.

Absolutely whole different scale. Naval battles could still be something of that sort. I guess. I'm not a naval officer. I've read naval history and some strategy, but I'm no strategy for naval battles. But on the ground, no, it's impossible now. For countries the size of what we're talking about. Now, if we're talking smaller nations that don't have the larger militaries, yes, one big battle could decide the fate of a small nation. But then again, the frontage is different, the amount of men is different. Everything's different. But even if we look at the Paraguayan war where

almost 50% of manpower was killed. That war was a war of a nutrition. Just to make same fought in the middle of the 19th century just for those who don't know about. Exactly. You know, one of the things that the American and

the Union and the Confederate generals were accused of during the American Civil War is all of them wanted to be Napoleon but none of them had the capability to follow through. So they could defeat their enemy on the battlefield, but they couldn't run them down and destroy them. So the enemies, even though there was very successful, very successful definitive battles that destroyed one or heavily damaged, they never destroyed any armies, heavily damaged one

army, the other did retreat, regroup, and then go at it again. There was never this definitive conquest. Even that really was already going out the window with Napoleon. I mean, the days where, you know, one warlord lined up his 500 or 1,000 men against men at arms and knights against another, and they fought it out, and that could be the end of one kingdom or another, they're dumb. And they're never going to come back on a large scale. So there's that. And that makes a very different approach. But, you know, if you look at these major battles, we can start with Snake Island, which is, there may be some Ukrainians sitting there.

I think none, nobody's sitting there now. It's a very pointless piece of land, but it was a PR battle, and that was being organized by the British versus Kursk and, uh, uh, Zaporosier, Abbotina was organized by the Americans and planned out. But what I mean by organized, I mean, literally it was,

the battle was planned. The Ukrainian generals are just the executive branch. They're the execution portion. They don't make any of the plans. They just follow through on them or, or not follow through on them. And there were a lot of people that were lost on Snake Island. You look at the approaches of the British were playing.

They were just playing with people because it's not their people. And they're not going to be punished if it's a failure. Yeah, let's experiment. So, okay, a couple hundred guys get killed here. A couple hundred guys get killed there. It's not our people. It's not going to really reflect on my career. I'm learning.

And Kursk, if you look at it, same thing. If you look at it from a strategic point of view on a big picture, nobody would have gone into Kirst. Kersk was an idiot move. It was a good PR move at first for a month or so, until the front stabilized. But it was an absolute idiot move. They never took more than 15% of Kersk. Okay, so except for maybe going after a nuclear power plant and committing nuclear terrorism, what good were you going to do?

Those forces weren't capable of even reaching Kirst city. And if you even got that, the most you can hope for is an internal Russian political collapse. and that was like betting on one of these mega lotteries that, you know, that gives you to one in a billion chance of winning, which is basically the same thing. And you pulled up your deep reserve into a kill sack, into a giant kill sack. So anybody looked at it from the side would have gone, no, this is stupid. This is absolutely idiotic. This is not going to get you anywhere, except for a few good PR pictures for a while until it turns bad PR. But it was planned.

It was executed as the swaggered. we're going to march into Russia and we're going to make glory and all that. And it ended as it could never have ended any other way, except the total extermination of the forces that went in there. And they should have pulled out of there when they saw that set. We can't move forward. You know, you put up some blocking forces and you get the hell out. We've raided Russia.

They could have saved some. But no, you know, it was they held to the end and they died in the end. And now Russia is moving on to Sumi, and Sumi is going to be the next big battle. Russian forces in the north of Sumi are less than 10 kilometers outside the city limits. I mean, it's a nice afternoon walk quite literally at this point. And that all goes back to Kursk, because they weakened themselves so much, 80,000 dead, and I don't know how many wounded, that they didn't have a capability of holding off anymore. But Russia is approaching this in a very systematic move for now.

But I'll tell you this. The age, I'm not going to say drones are ever going to leave. They're not going to leave. They're part of the battlefield. But the age of drone prominence may be coming to an end, much quicker to most people understand. There's been a lot of systems, anti-dron systems have come out. Everything from shotgun blasts and net shots down up to lasers, Russia, China, America, because America wound up shooting a party balloon on the Mexican side.

important with a laser. They've got the laser system. You just can't tell the difference between a drone and a party balloon, but which only confirmed they do have the laser systems. Lasers are great. They melt right through these drones in less than a second. But the problem is, is they can only service one target at a time. If you have one target, you're great. If you are being sworn by 30 or 40 drones and coming from a wide area approach, you can't service those targets. And the destruction of one of those lasers is pretty expensive. So everything you've had right now has been point defense systems. You can service one target at time.

With drone warfare, you need an area defense system. And the Chinese have just come up. The only thing that can do this, really, because once you've got, once Russia came up with the fiber optics, and of course Ukraine did copy that, and we see fiber optics being used in Mali, by the way, by the Mali and Army with their drone warfare. units that were set up by Russia. Once you've got that, you cannot block the radio signals. You can't do white noise. You can't jam them because everything's going up that wire. But what you need is an area effect weapon. They can do that. And that's called an electromagnetic pulse. Now,

nuclear weapons, when they explode, the first thing they do is they release an electric magnetic pulse, which is a high energy, high photons. Actually, they're not photons. I'm sorry. Their photons are light. They are, well, it's high energy particles. I can't think their name on the moment, unfortunately. But the high energy particles, they hit electronics and they hit

wires. In fact, by the way, they do great jobs at destroying long distance, high voltage lines. We saw the solar flare back, well, we saw. Our great grandfathers, great grandfathers saw the solar flare in the 1880s that

burned out, mostly most of the communications at time across the northern hemisphere. It was just a solar flare. It does the same thing. It builds up an electric charge on the chips and they burn out. So it doesn't matter, you know, it's a radio signal or it's a fiber optic. Well, the Chinese have come up with this new system. It's a big wave dish.

It's a rectangular, big microwave dish. It's a rectangular, big microwave dish fits on top of a basically a Humvee, sized vehicle. It has the inclination to inclination of minus 5 to 50 degrees. It covers about 180 degrees. So it's an area effect. The radar system that's built in

can spot a cross-section of 0.3 meters by 0.3 meters at 5 kilometers. Surrounding dependent, of course. If you're in a city area or you're in a heavy forest, it would be much less. But the fact is at 0.3 meters is your average

FPV drone. It's something about that flying at five kilometers. It can be picked up. And the whole area is microwave. So, yeah, birds will fall out of the sky. I've seen that happen on microwave dishes, communication dishes. And this is just on a bigger scale. Birds and insects will be dropping, but so will drones. I'm expected that the Chinese have announced that they're field testing it in Chinese

environments, but sooner or later it's going to go into field testing in Russia. That's guaranteed. So if this works as advertised, we could see a very rapid change in the battlefield. I've actually, there was a report on Tass that Alma Santay, you know who they are, obviously, that they've actually been working on what sounded to me exactly the same kind of system. So it looks, I also think that this is coming, actually. Let's look at the other wall. the one in the Persian Gulf, because, I mean, there's lots of people who criticize the Russian War.

They say it's very slow. The advance is very gradual. We have had 40 days of intense fighting in the Persian Gulf, huge expenditure of equipment which has achieved what exactly? I'm asking you this question because it seems to me that this is the contrast. I mean, the one may be slow, but it's purposeful, and it is gradually moving forward. The other has used up apparently half the inventories, because that's what they're saying. What has it actually? Much more. More.

Okay. Okay. Well, tell us. For the PAC 3s, Larry Johnson did a very good job on calculating the PAC 3s. I'm not even sure how many PAC 2s have been used up, but probably a very large quantity of PAC 2, Patriot missiles. Especially the PAC 3s, we're looking about 90%. And the problem is, even though the military industrial complex has promised Trump to triple production, go from 60 missiles to 180 missiles a month, so from maybe 30 targets to 90 targets,

which still wouldn't cover one night in Ukraine. The problem is as rare earth magnets. The purified form of the rare earth, which are all magnetic, are something the U.S. doesn't exactly produce much of. They've set up one plant. They produce an extremely high cost, very small amounts, not enough to feed the military industrial complex. Everything comes from China,

and obviously Bessett's doing his best to make sure the Chinese are as pissed off as humanly possible of the Americans, and Trump doesn't do, does his part two on that. So how are they going to build those? I don't know. That's a big question. What is it accomplished? Well, let's begin with, you know, everybody started with General Millie. The Russians are going to take Kiev in three days. That's where this myth started. Russia was never planning on taking Kiev because Russia made a very big mistake in thinking that it could, it almost succeeded until Johnson showed up. that it could just scare Ukrainians and destroy the Ukrainian potential to invade the Dunbos

and scared them into being neutral. And they almost succeeded. And then Johnson shows up. And we know the history of that. So Russia went, Russian plans went very askew. But they learned. It may be slower than most people. You know, I was one of the people calling that we needed mobilization back in the summer, not in October.

There's a lot of people, a lot of generals are calling we need mobilization now, not to wait. but the political side tried to still negotiate, and then finally came to the conclusion that this isn't going to work, we're losing because we quite literally do not have the manpower to hold the battlefield. We need more menpower. Russia learns systematically and adjust. The U.S. literally came in with, this will be over by the end of the weekend. They were literally, I don't know what the generals were telling.

We know Keenan at least told Trump, because it got leaked in the media, that we do not have the assets, even after they built up the assets because Trump Regime wanted January 16th, not February 28th. They brought in a lot more assets into the theater of operations, but Kenan, it got leaked that we were not going to accomplish anything. We don't have what we need. And that got ignored. Neguuk literally, they bought off on Netanyahu's fairy tale of four days or three days.

We just killed a committee and it all collapses like a house of cards. The West loves the silver bullet approach to everything. We'll kill the werewolf with one silver bullet. It just never works, but they keep trying that, which I guess is the definition of insanity. Same thing under same conditions and expecting different results. But once that didn't work, what's the plan? Well, there is no plan.

We're winging it. And what America always goes back to when it starts winging things is striking civilian population centers, mass casualties as much as possible to try to force the civilians to force the government to surrender. It has never worked. It did not work in firebombing 5 million Germans to death and burning them in every single German city in Germany,

not just Dresden like everybody remembers. It did not work firebombing the Japanese in one air raid on Tokyo. They killed half a million people. It did not work in Yugoslavia, even when they were hitting maternity wards and open-air markets. It didn't work anywhere. It has never worked. People rally around the flag.

They may not like the government, but they know who's killing them, and it's not their government. Nationalism sky rockets at this point. So no matter who you are, it's an internal issue what I don't like about you or the way your policies, but that's the enemy that's trying to kill my kids and my family and my friend. and we're going to go fight them. That's the human mentality. It's always rally around your own, except for very few exceptions.

And that's what they fell back on. But the problem is, is Iran has been getting ready for 20 years. So these, we've downgraded them by 30%, 80%, 90%. You know, Trump said it very correctly. We've decimated them. You may have triple decimated them. So they may be down about 30% for the actual definition of that word.

So maybe you triple decimated. Which means they still have 70% of capabilities fighting. They're buried under mountains, literally under mountains of granite, that you would have to have several nuclear strikes to try to bury. They're inaccessible to the U.S. short of ground troops going in. And the U.S. physically does not have ground troops capable of doing this. Because one of the approaches of all this is called logistics. And logistics for the U.S. is a nightmare.

manufacturing for the U.S. is a nightmare. It cannot manufacture the supplies it needs to keep the people in the battlefield. And two, what we saw in Ukraine is still in effect. Amazingly, it's not just American satellites overhead. Not only do the Iranians have a few satellites of their own, but apparently there's Russian Chinese satellites. And somebody may be leaking targeting information to the Iranians, apparently.

That's hard to believe, I know. The U.S. could get proxied. and that's what we're facing. The U.S. maybe, you know, from the information I've gotten tonight, Trump may be restarting the bombing campaign. He's got a limited amount of missiles left. I don't know what he could do with it, but I don't think they know what to do at this point.

They're lost. They're grasping in anything and everything. Okay, so let's just finish with this question because, of course, there's been a lot of discussion about the state of the war in Ukraine. Very, very quick rundown. What is going on? I mean, I was reading just before we did this program that the Ukrainians are retaking territory and that they're advancing in all sorts of places and that Moscow is in their sights.

I'm not exaggerating. I mean, it's exaggerating slightly. But tell us what's happening. Maybe you could tell us a bit about, because this battle of Konstantinovka, which I noticed, that the media in Britain and the West is very careful to avoid talking about. There's now been an article in Reuters that has finally admitted that there is actually a battle going on there.

But tell us a little bit briefly about where... Oh, there is a battle going on. A little late to the game, but, you know, never mind. No. Yeah, in fact, after this video, I'm taking my shovel. I'm on the next work crew digging anti-tank trenches. to stop the Ukrainians. It's our fifth or sixth line

of anti-tank trenches. We're digging us. We're preparing. Any day now, they'll show up near Moscow. We've been waiting for four years, and they're going to show up, and we'll be fighting them end-to-hand. And then there's reality.

And the reality is much less pleasant for the Ukrainian side. So what we've got, they are taking some areas back in a very limited format in Zaporosia, which they've been counterattacking and getting counterattacked and counterattacking in Zaporosia since, I guess about February when all this started up relatively quickly and back and forth. And they're doing, they're throwing everything they can because once Roryochava falls,

there's really nothing to hold on to Zaporosia Oblast except Zoporja City itself. And that's pretty untainable. So they're doing counterattacks so much as again, but outside of huge losses, So they don't have staying power because they use up so much of their forces to break into some area that then they can't dig in. They don't have the forces to dig in and hold. Now, going north of Zaporosia, Russian forces, there's slow advance up and down in the Danyetsk area, very limited in former Pakrovsk area. For that area, it's relatively limited because most of the area, it's relatively limited because most of the of the fight is in Konstantinovka, and Konstantinovka is more than half in Russian hands, and the Ukrainians, they've been holding off with drones.

They don't have enough personnel. They've tossed everything they had in there. One of the things, by the way, when we go back down to Zaporosia, they gain ground by using their more elite units. The problem is they lose a lot of people in those elite units, so they can't reconstitute them fast enough. And then they pull those units back and they push in the press. The press gang people. And the press gang people, they don't want to fight.

They're not trained. They may not surrender. Surrending is very dangerous. Because, by the way, those Ukrainian drone units also get points for killing their own guys if they're trying to surrender. And some of them quite literally, as they're blocking you, all they do is they over near their guys and wait for somebody to try to surrender to take them out. And or more points that way. It's very cynical. I mean, it's extremely cynical approach.

but they will run. So these guys, one of the Russian forces start approaching with an hand grenade range, they're usually breaking and running for it. And maybe long before that. Because they're not trained, they're not motivated. We've seen photos of the guys that have been taken prisoner during combat operations.

Pretty dangerous to try to surrender during active combat operations, obviously. Everybody's adrenaline is up. And I will tell you, they look like they've come out of concentration camps. Because they're not being fed. The logistics system is broken down, especially for these guys, the press gang guys. I mean, they are starved, their skin and bones, bruised up.

They look like crap. Consider these are your frontline troops. And that says a lot of the state of the military in Ukraine. Now, going back up, Constantinifka is going to fall. But what's even more important is Krasnilman has basically been cut off. They try to do some limited counterattacks inside Krasniquels. to the Uman against Russian forces in Krasnilman, which even if they're successful, again, it's relatively pointless because you're throwing away men, you need on defensive

on very limited tactical objectives on the offensive that you then can't hold anyways. So you may be buying yourself a couple of days or a day or less at the expense of guys that you cannot replace. The main route of supply to Krozenilman is fully under Russian drone and artillery and aviation control. So nothing gets in, nothing gets out for the most part. And then getting across the Oscoil River is pretty difficult. We've seen the Ukrainians claim counterattack, successful counterattacks from Sumi on down with these videos. But if you look at the videos like Sumi, for example, they had some Mirapoya. They had some videos that come out that they've counterattacked

and taken back the village. But then you look at the tree line and there's no leaves on the trees. I just came back from there. It's all green. So these videos came out three days ago. They've retaken it. And you look at the trees. So when did you take those videos about February, or early March when the snow melted off?

There's been very limited snowfall in a lot of those areas. So the trees haven't greened yet. Everything's absolutely green down there. Right now, it's basically almost summertime temperatures already. So you'd see these videos. So it's PR stunts. But the point is, is, so that area is taking.

Kupinz has gone. And the problem for the Ukrainians with Kupinsk, they're still holding on the force and the edges of Kupensk. But that's very limited. They don't have the manpower. Russia is moving. So we're looking at the northeastern section of Kharkov Oblast, or province. So you have the Sierra Lanka River coming down,

and then you have Kupin's on this side. And there's a big river, there's a big water reserve. today, and this is just the east of Khadikov, what the Russian forces are going to do is they're going to break out and they're going to charge across to the water reserve. And that cuts off, fully cuts off northeastern Khadikov-Oblis. And any Ukrainian soldiers in that area are screwed. I mean, they're logistically cut off fully. It'll take a while to clear them out, but unless they're going to try to run and then run 100 kilometers and then swim across swollen River, they're screwed.

You know, they're not getting provisioned. They're barely getting provisioned as it is. They'll be fully cut off. So that area, Russia's array buffered in, in from every direction in that area. I think that area is going to fall relatively quickly now that Coupons has done. Coupons was the lynchpin for that. But that will bring the Russian forces on the east within about 30 kilometers of Hadecov. And Russian forces in the north of Hadecov is now starting to move forward all along the borderline.

But I think the big battle is coming first in Sumi. Russian forces are moving in from the east, but they're still about 30 kilometers away from Sumi in the east. But in the north, they're 10 kilometers out. That's an afternoon walk. That's a light afternoon. That's six miles for the Americans. There may be watching this and are standard system bound. That's not a far walk.

Russia is in the middle of the second line of defensive belts. There is no third line except the city itself. The city is wide open. It's home to about a civilian, in peacetime, it's home to about 250, 300,000 people. It's flat. It's open. But it is a nexus of logistics, including down to Haidqv. So once that's taken, you further cut off Haarikov from the east, logistically wise.

You've limited the amount of bridges and roads that can be taken. And you open up Chernigov next. And after Chenigov is Kiev. Never mind, Kiev coming from across the Russian, from Bronskin to Chernigov. So this could be, it doesn't look like it at first, but this could be a very linchpin operation to take Sumi. And once those areas beyond Sumi are not built up. There are no defensive lines. And the Ukrainians have proven that they have limited scope of what they can bring in the area.

And from the Russian side, it's about a division, division and a half. fighting this battle. If Russia, now to remember this, there are over 350,000 Russian troops in the near reserve. They're being rotated. Battalions are being rotated in for a couple months, get combat experience for a day, back out, reconstituted. But there's over 350,000 troops that are not directly involved in these combat operations. It's two tank armies, basically.

If they get tossed in, tossed in in in large scale, sure, you will take lots of casualties at first as you're breaking through, but the collapse of a front line will more than make up for it. And if this microwave technology is a go, then your big error movements are back. Because once you can suppress drones in an area, you have a, you have five, six of these vehicles driving, you know, taking the birds and the electronic birds out of the sky, because they will, they'll fry birds too. Like I said, it's microwave radiation. But once you've got that and you're taking out drones up front, that changes dynamic totally.

Because that's what all Ukraine has right now is a quote drone wall. They literally have four or five drones for every Russian infantry coming out. Now, the majority of drones don't make targets. They either get shut down or they get or they hit ops. and so on, but there's still quite a more than third that finds their targets. And that's been what has been holding things up. Now, even then, you get the problem of everything's green now. And vegetation, these drones are actually very fragile.

If any of the propellers are taken or damaged, the drone just falls out of the sky. You can't stand in the air. So there's a lot of these options. A lot of I think is writing now, if this Chinese technology, that they've manufactured. And right, Russia's working on, everybody's work out. Chinese have beaten everybody to the punchline, just like they've done, by the way, with photonic cells for AI

that are about a thousand times faster than the best Nvidia chips that can produce, which is a game changer. It's just starting to hit the market. The technology advance in China are very quick, are very, very quick. and it's just not being acknowledged in the West. If this comes in and this works out, this would re-change, rebalance the battlefield back toward large-scale movements.

Starnisla, this has been an absolutely brilliant program. Thank you very much, and I look forward to speaking to you again. Absolutely. Stanislav, before you go, where can people follow your work? Okay, so Substak, Zmei Grimich, on X, it's on at Stanis Kripivnik. Couldn't fit the whole name in.

We Russians love long names. We get smart. We have to learn how to spell our own names. On telegram, it's Stasuday Abratna is the Russian. Stas was there is the English. And on YouTube, it's at Mr. Slavic Man. one word Slavic with a K. All right.

Those links in the description box down below and that's a pin comment. Thank you, Stanislaut.