The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - A Ukraine-US Deal? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

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everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. A quick one today. Today is the 17th of July. And supposedly Zelensky, the president of Ukraine and Trump, the president of the United States, just had a phone call. And Zelensky said it was all about a drone mega deal. The idea that Kiev will buy some weapons from Washington and Washington will buy some weapons from Kiev. Now, if you go back to the Soviet period, the heart of the aerospace and missile systems in the former Soviet Union was in what is today Ukraine. And in the post-Soviet settlement, the Russians got all of the weapons, but the Ukrainians kept all of the scientists. And so once the Ukraine war began about four years ago, the Russians obviously came in big and strong with all the weapons, and the Ukrainians didn't have much.

But then the Ukrainians started to turn on their old brain trust, train up their younger population, and get into new weapon systems. And they're standing off or to any country as if you put troops in Ukraine, we will share all of the technology. that we have developed with you. And those technologies are pretty robust. So just to pick a few, you've got the Neptune missiles that sank the Russian flagship out in the Black Sea. You've got the rocket drones with a range of just under 1,000 miles. You've got new loitering drones.

You can go further than that. And, of course, this wave of first-person drones that we've seen more and more and more of. But increasingly, we're seeing jet skis with missiles on them that are automated. Basically, they're taking the automation revolution and marrying it to a new type of warfare. and serving as a test bed, because from the point that they actually finish constructing a prototype, it's usually used within a week, and then they immediately start to

iterate. So the speed at which the Ukrainians have been pushing the envelope is really impressive. Their problem is resources. So at the beginning of the Ukraine war, something like 5 to 10% of their weapon systems were actually manufactured in Ukraine. That number is now over 60% in can continues to rise. So if the United States were to get access to that technological suite and the development pipeline, and you marry that to the U.S. industrial plant and the U.S. taxpayer base, well, a lot of really interesting stuff could happen very, very quickly. We're still in early days, but we all know that Trump doesn't like to talk about details. He just wants a deal. So if the Americans are willing to put some money into this,

you're looking at a fairly short turnaround time for a significant overhaul first of the Ukrainian military as the resources come in, and then eventually the American military, as well as these technologies reach the precision, the range, and the ruggedization that the U.S. military demands. How much, how fast? I mean, that is entirely up to the two presidents. But one of the things that Ukrainians were very successful at doing was building out their industrial plant in order to make these new weapons and design these new weapons and test these new weapons. But probably about half of that industrial plant is sitting empty because of a lack of resources, which is where the United States could plug right in.