The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Apparently A Cessna and Elbow Grease Is All Ukraine Needs || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

The Ukrainians are getting creative and finding ways to launch longer-range attacks on Russian infrastructure. We've already seen strikes on pipeline nexuses and chemical complexes as deep as Samara and Tatarstan. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/apparently-a-cessna-and-elbow-grease-is-all-ukraine-needs

Hey, everyone, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado, got a fresh dusting overnight, because you know, April. It's April 2nd, and the news in the last three or four days is that the Ukrainians have demonstrated a significantly longer range for weapon systems launched from Ukraine proper. Specifically, the Ukrainians have been able to hit targets with their new drones that are in the locations of Samara and Tartarstan. Now, these are more important than a lot of these pieces of infrastructure that Ukrainies have been hitting with their drone campaign recently. Samara is a major pipeline nexus where a lot of the crude that comes in from southwestern Siberia gets processed or redirected to European or black sea markets. And Tudderstan is even deeper within the Russian Federation in Siberia proper. And it is also a major chemicals and refining complex. So the significance here is pretty strong.

The issue is throughput. The Russians don't have a lot of storage. The country is really big, and most of these systems were built in the imperial age under the Soviets, so they were designed to supply the empire. Well, now that the empire has gone its own way, and most of the former Soviet republics and former Soviet satellite states

are getting their crude and natural gas from somewhere else, the Russians are completely dependent now for income on getting this crude out to the wider world. That means getting to the black in the Baltic Sea because they can't really use the pipes to go into Germany anymore. So when you think of that and then you look at nodes like Samara and Tardistan, we have a problem.

Because if these are interrupted, especially Samara, which is a nexus, then the crude has nowhere to go. There's not a backup system. When these clusters get taken offline for whatever reason, pressure builds up in the pipe back to the wellhead. Now, this could be worse.

The facilities that are in southwestern Siberia, especially places like Todersand and Bashkiristan, it doesn't get so cold there in the winter that the wellheads freeze. But now that the Ukrainians have demonstrated the ability to strike over 1,000 kilometers from their border, it's only a matter of time before they start aiming for targets that are north of Moscow instead of south of Moscow. And if those pipeline nexus go offline, then you're talking about the wellheads in northwestern Siberia actually freezing shut, and a lot of the stuff just goes offline forever because if the wellhead freezes shut, you have to redrill it.

And you can only redrill in the Arctic summer and that only lasts for about three or four months a year. So that's kind of piece one. Piece two is what's going in Todorstan. Tadristan, because it is a combination of producing zone and chemical zone, a lot of these chemicals are what allows the Russian agricultural system to work and a lot of this stuff is exported to China.

So what the Ukrainians are demonstrated, as a capacity to identify targets that move up the value-added chain, not just going after raw crude, not just going after refined product, but even downstream products like chemicals manufacture. So the economic hit to the Russians from this continues to climb. And now it's really just an issue of whether or not the Russians have the capacity of getting meaningful air defense at the hundreds of facilities that they have across European and Western Siberia and Russia in order to stymie these attacks in the first place. because they're clearly not moving fast enough on the front

in order to disrupt these drones launching. And this is a very, very cheap way to do it. These things cost more than, say, the Iranian Shihid drones, but you're still talking about well, well, well, under a million dollars a pop, whereas a refinery that handles 100,000 barrels a day is going to run a cool billion dollars on a good day. So the disruption here is real.

It is getting bigger, and we're getting to the point where it's time to start thinking about what happens when, Russian crude and materials processing goes offline in some form because we're only in the early days of this Ukrainian campaign. And now

that they've found a soft spot, you can guarantee they're going to hit it over and over and over and over. Quick addendum, there is very clear footage coming out of Tatarson of a small passenger plane. Think of something like the size of a system, maybe a little bit bigger, flying and ramming into

a munitions factory that builds drones for the Russian military, specifically the Shahid type that have been causing the Ukrainians so many problems. Now, it's not so much the significance of this attack, because attacking a factory floor with a 50 to 100 pound bomb, you know, let's call it huge, say it's 300 pounds, isn't going to cause enough damage to really take anything offline. The issue is that it got there. It flew over 1,000 kilometers through Russian airspace. That means one of two things. Neither, Number one, the Ukrainians now have kits that they can smuggle into Russia, modify a plane at an airfield within Russia, and launch like that, which would be from an internal security point of view and a technical point of view, just a disaster for the Russians.

Or the Russians have absolutely no anti-aircraft coverage in the core of the country where most of the infrastructure is and most of the people live. No matter what the outcome here is, this is a disaster for the Russians, because there's no doubt that the Ukrainians will be now be doing. at scale because it's clear the Russians can't stop them.