The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Laughing at Russia Won't Solve ALL of Ukraine's Problems || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

While in Helsinki, Secretary of State Blinken got some chuckles from the crowd (and me) when he said, "The Kremlin often claimed it had the second strongest military in the world, and many believed it. Today, many see Russia's military as the second strongest in Ukraine." Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/laughing-at-russia-wont-solve-all-of-ukraines-problems

Everyone, Peter Zine here coming to you from rainy Colorado. It's been our wettest spring on record, and we're about to get a half an inch of day for at least the next three weeks. So, we. Anyway, last Friday, we went over the weekend. We had a lot of interesting statements out of specifically Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. The one that caught the most attention from people is actually pretty funny. And the statement is that Russia asserts that it has the world's second most powerful military. and a number of people believe them.

But now people are saying that Russia is the second most powerful military in Ukraine. Now, I got a good chuckle out of that one because the Russians are not doing very well, and the Ukrainian counter-offensive is clearly deep into shaping operations. Before you celebrate Russia's weakness, a little bit of history. I'm not going to talk about the weapons or the reserves or how many tanks the Russians have, because, oh my God, they've got so many. And so we'll look back at history. Russia has never been a capital intensive power.

It has always relied upon numbers to fight its war and for the weather to do a lot of the heavy lifting and for distance to inhibit the ability of its foes to function in its territory. What that leaves us with is a country that is both fragile and incredibly strong at the same time. historically speaking and so when a country will come at the Russians with a technological advantage especially what it involves movement they will do great because once you break through the outer perimeter if you can get fast and loosen to Russian core territories the Russians can barely move within their own territory so whether it's the British at the Crimean War or the French in early 1800s or the Poles during the time of troubles or the Japanese

in 1905. It doesn't really matter what era of history you're looking at. You can find easily a major war where the Russians were absolutely crushed. But it's one thing to defeat Russia's armed formations, and it's quite another to eliminate Russia as a threat in the long term. One just requires hitting their troop concentrations and their logistics packages. The second requires root and branch, ripping up much of the industrial level infrastructure and the entirety of the governing structure

over a swath of territory that is the world's largest national landmass. So I understand what Blinken is after here. He's trying to rally the alliance to give a lot now when it's going to really make a big difference to the Ukrainian. This is going to be a critical year for them. But on the other side of this, we're going to have to deal with either a resurgent Russia or a very, very bitter Russia that still has a few thousand nuclear weapons. We're at the very beginning still of a very long process. And even if this goes every way that people who are rooting for the Ukrainians hope,

and this really is the beginning and the end of the Russian system, belittling them now isn't going to speed that process along outside of the kind of the tactical boost that it gets from people giving more weapons in the short term. Anyway, word of warning. I'm still rooting for the Ukrainians here, still hoping, actually I'm pretty confident that Russia will cease to exist as a country in my lifetime. I'd love to see that forward-loaded, but I'd like to see it without a nuclear exchange too. All right, that's it for me. Take care.