The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - MedShare Donations + Russia Strikes Three Commercial Ships || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Click here to join Patreon and help us donate to MedShare: https://bit.ly/medsharepatreon Already joined the Patreon? You can also donate directly to MedShare here: https://www.medshare.org/ Russia has attacked three civilian ships carrying grain in Ukraine's southwest maritime corridor. This marks Russia's first major attack on commercial shipping, and a significant escalation of this war. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/medshare-donation-russia-strikes-three-commercial-ships

Hey, everybody, Peter Zion here. If you are seeing this, you're about to see a free video. In fact, you're about to see the first of four free videos that we're going to be releasing on the 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th of October. The reason for this is twofold. Number one, we're trying to boost you to get onto our Patreon site, which is a paid subscription. But more importantly, anyone who does sign up 100% of what they pay will be given to a group called MedShare. Medchir provides medical assistance to communities who, through no fault of their own, have temporarily lost the ability to look out for themselves. And if you've been following me for a while, you know that Ukraine is an issue that's near and dear to my heart. But in the near term, there are communities in North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. They're in dire need of assistance. And Medchair's

headquarters are in Atlanta. So they have a pre-existing supply chain. They have pre-position equipment, and they are providing medical assistance in the terms of equipment, evacuation assistance, course, medical services to everyone who is needed in all three of those locations. So again, if you sign up for a Patreon page with all of the current videos, the community forum interaction with me and the ability to grill me personally, all the money that you would normally pay to me between now and the end of the year, we'll be going to support MedShare's services in the hurricane recovery areas. So please, please, please, please, please sign up.

And of course, if you have the ability to donate more, we will be provided. the appropriate information with this email. So, video number one coming, video number two through four, just around the corner. Hey, everybody, Peter Zeyn here coming to you from Colorado with just a quick update. It's the 10th of October, and we just got confirmation that the Russians are attacking civilian shipping with international flags in a corridor to the southwest of Ukraine, ships primarily carrying grain. We have been very, very fortunate in the conflict so far that we haven't had a food crisis. At the very beginning of the war, when the Russians were blockading the entirety of Ukraine's Black Sea coast,

we basically had 3, 4% of global food production fall off market overnight with no replacement. And food prices quickly rose to recent record highs, the highest we've had in 15 years. Since then, we had a political deal between Russia and Ukraine to allow ships to come and go in order to pick up food stuffs. And after that deal collapsed a year later, we then last year had the Ukrainians open up their own grain corridor, which went west from Odessa into Romanian-Bulgarian waters where Russian ships wouldn't dare go. But there was still that thin sliver of territory between Odessa and the maritime border with Romania that was in Ukrainian space, where there was always a concern that the Russians would strike and now they have. Right now, only three ships, right now,

only three attacks. Right now, no ships have been sunk. But this would be the first, time in the war in a meaningful way that the Russians have actually gone after commercial shipping. They had a couple things to keep in mind. Number one, Ukraine does not really have a very good way to get grain out by rail. All the countries that border it to the west are also agricultural exporters. So even if there wasn't a political complication, and there are, these are markets that couldn't absorb it. So you need to go several hundred miles further in order to get to ports in, say, Germany or Croatia, in order to get the grain out, and those ports are already being used by other exporters. So you get snarled in addition to the fact that the rail lines

are insufficient to the task, in addition to the fact that they use a different rail gauge. So really, it's by sea or really not at all. Second, while we have had some changes in the insurance regime of maritime shipping in the last several years, still, the bottom line is we haven't really lost a insured ship in the Ukraine war yet. And we don't know how insurers are going to adjust policies. If you would ask me before the war started, it would have been pretty dramatic where we hadn't lost a ship in like 25 years. And so if a ship had been taken down that had a policy, basically no one would be able to offer a policy anymore. And all ships would be completely uninsured in the area that assumes there's not a cascade through the financial system.

Now that they've had a couple of years to kind of prepare for this moment, we really don't know what companies like Lloyds of London are going to do, but we're going to find out really, really fast. So stay tuned. And if this gets bigger than it is right now, I'll definitely be telling you more.