The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - New Russian Tactics: Glide Bombs and Double-Tap || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

The Russians are employing some new tactics in Ukraine's Eastern front that are adding to their ever-growing list of war crimes committed throughout this conflict. We're looking at glide bombs targeting civilian infrastructure and Russia's 'double-tap' method. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/new-russian-tactics-glide-bombs-and-double-tap

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado, where it's 70 degrees in snowy, because mountains. Today, we're doing a quick update on what's going on on Ukraine, specifically on the eastern front, where the Russians are beginning to use a couple new tactics at large scale. They definitely fall into the category of war crimes, but so many things that the Russians do these days are, just to remind everyone that there are over 10,000 documented war crimes committed by the Russians. in the conflict so far, we hit that number well over a year ago, and that's kind of the number where I stopped paying attention

because it's clear that's just war crimes for war crimes sake at this point. Anyway, these two new ones kind of fall to that category as well. The first one is the use of their new glide bombs, Fab 1500s, Fab 1,000s, 5,000s, basically weapons that have a metric ton or more of explosive power in sending multiples of them, into specific pieces of civilian infrastructure like water treatment plants and electricity generating facilities with the intent of simply reducing urban populations beyond the ability to have industrial level technologies. If the Russians keep this up and they certainly have the weaponry to do it,

they will be able to make large sections of Ukraine uninhabitable for the population densities that are there now. The populations around Kharkiv, which is the third largest city in the country, are the ones most at the risk, and that's where the Russians have kind of started this shift to just complete obliteration of civilian infrastructure. The second one is something called a double tap, and it's basically you send your missiles into an area where you know there's a civilian population, and then you wait 30 to 90 minutes, and you send another wave of missiles to the same location. So the first is designed to destroy civilian infrastructure and kill people, and the second is designed to target the repair crews and the emergency services personnel

and the aid workers. The idea is if you can just destroy enough of the human capital that allows Ukraine to recover from attacks, then their ability to fight the war might evaporate. Clearly, these are some pretty nasty attacks. The double taps is something that was inspired by Islamic jihad and Hamas and years gone by. For those of you who are Middle East buff, you remember that there were a lot of suicide bombs that matched this double-tap strategy back in the early 2000s. Not more. much to say about these except for that it's really hard to fight back against them. Really, you need to have air superiority and extraordinary air defense and anti-missile coverage

if you're going to prevent these sorts of attacks. And the Russians have proven that they can do these attacks at scale. So the degree to which Ukraine would need external support in order to resist these sorts of assaults is high.