The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Russian Evolutions in the Ukraine War || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

We're beginning to see a notable shift in the Russians war strategy in Ukraine. Those large-scale meat assaults are being swapped for small infantry advances and widespread air strikes via drones and missiles to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/russian-evolutions-in-the-ukraine-war

Everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from a humid Colorado afternoon, which almost never happens. Anyway, today we're going to talk about the Ukraine war in where we are at the moment. We've had a significant shift in the approach to the conflict by the Russians. Too soon to say it's going to be successful, but it's different enough that it is worth exploring. Instead of doing what they call mass meat assaults, where you basically have will throw wave after wave after wave of humans into a mix, not really carrying how many people get injured or killed, trying to grab specific positions incrementally. We now have a position where the Russians are doing small-scale infiltration, sometimes as few as two people at a time, just moving forward a few yards at a time,

parking for an hour and then continuing doing this all across the front line, while up above we have a change in the air war, where the Russians will not launch just a bunch of drones, dozens, maybe even a couple hundred at the same time, along with some missiles to saturate the air defense of an area and then strike local urban centers, specifically going for power systems, but really any sort of logistics support. It's a very different approach. It is generating results, although very, very, very incremental. I don't want to overplay it. But what is driven the change are a couple of things. Number one,

the Trump administration is now starting to at least in increments provide more military assistance. The European defense industries have been spinning up for the last three years. They're getting more artillery shells in the Ukrainian hands, which is preventing the meat assaults from having any impact. But third and most importantly, we're seeing the Russians dust off an industrial strategy that we have not seen out of the Russians since the 1940s. For those of you who remember your World War II history, you will remember that one of the turning points in the Second World War was when the Russians developed enough industrial plant out of reach of the Luftwaffe, the German strategic bombers, so they could build up all the industrial infrastructure and military capacity that they needed, without having to worry about it getting blown up from the sky. This was called the Ural's strategy. Basically, the Russians under Stalin,

built a series of industrial cities out east of the Ural's well out of range of German aircraft and built their military capacity there and then shipped it into the front. There were obviously other things come into play, Lend-Lease, the invasion of Normandy, the invasion of Sicily and ultimately mainland Italy. All of these combined to defeat the Nazis.

But on the Russian front, it was the Russians getting the ability to build, build their own equipment that really made the difference. We're seeing some version of that now. In the war to this point, most of the drones that the Russians have used have either come from Iran or for China, largely already assembled. Maybe the Russians have plugged in a warhead in the front, but really that was about it. The Russians were relying on industrial capacity on the other side of an international border to keep the flow coming. And so they were using primarily their old Soviet stockpile of equipment, of jeeps, of tanks, of tanks,

of ABCs, of artillery, and so on. Well, three years on, the Russians are running out of their old Soviet largesse. All of the stuff that was easily deployed, things that were built in, say, the late 70s and the 80s were long ago destroyed. They never built enough of the more advanced things that have been built since 1992 to make a strategic difference, and most of that's been destroyed. And then they started going back into their older stocks, weapon systems from, say, the 1940s, 1950s, early 1960s that were just wildly out of date, didn't even have things like optics,

but that meant that putting optics in them was relatively straightforward. So all of a sudden we saw these 1950s tanks coming out with like 1990s optics. All of those have been destroyed. That has left them with equipment that was built in the 70s and early 80s that had optics, but it's crappy Soviet optics and it all has to be ripped out and then replaced. That takes more time per tank. And the end result is just a trickle of equipment that comes in, and they're now burning through that too. Basically, 70 years of Soviet stockpiling is almost gone. And now they're reliant on equipment that is either come in from elsewhere, like, say, artillery shells from North Korea, or this new stuff. The new stuff is very different. The Russian military is an artillery force.

And now that they've lost a lot of their artillery, they're having to reinvent on the fly. and what they're doing is taking that old Ural strategy of building industrial plant behind the urals and marrying it to the drone tech. So we now have multiple facilities in Russia proper that are manufacturing Iranian Shahid drones. Now, Shahid drones are pretty dumb. They're basically dumb, slow-moving, low warhead cruise missiles. And the original ones and the ones that make up even today the bulk of the Russian effort don't even have GPUs.

They're incapable of making decisions in it. any meaningful way. You basically just plug in where you want them to go. Maybe you give them the route to get there and then off they go. Which incidentally means that any time they strike a school, it's automatically a war crime because they had to program that in. Anyway, we're now starting to see a second generation starting to produce, also get produced in Russia, that has some GPUs, jets and chips from Navidia specifically that probably run $600 to $900 a pop. So these are larger drones with bigger warheads, but they also have some primitive decision-making. capability. There's like eight nanometer chips. Far from cutting edge, but an order of magnitude,

better than what they've been using at this point. But the bottom line is these things are not being built in Iran and shipped into Russia for use. They're being built in Russia. And that adds a step of complication to anyone who wants to interrupt the supply chain because it's no longer foreign. The same thing is happening with Chinese equipment. It used to be that the Chinese would ship in more or less fully assembled drones. And then the Russians might make a couple modifications before deploying them. Now the Chinese are shipping in lots of components still, but the Russians are doing most of the assembly in Russia proper, again, outside of the reach of any sort of Ukrainian strike capability. And that means that the Russians are not simply getting more autonomy in their military

industrial complex. They're also getting a bigger feed-through because they're still buying the finished stuff from both China and Iran. So instead of using a few drones a day or a few dozen drones a day. There have been a number of attacks where they're using a few hundred drones a day. And one of the things that they've gotten really good at is not even putting a warhead in some of these things and not putting any advanced chips in some of them. So maybe, maybe as many as two-thirds of the drones that the Russians are firing at targets are actually just decoys that are very, very, very cheap. And so if Ukraine is using their limited air defense to try to clear the skies and they have to deal with literally hundreds of spoofed signals and false targets, more and more of the real things

will get through, and the Russians are now starting to coordinate the timing of these drone assaults with their missile attacks, and the result has been a lot more damage to infrastructure in Ukraine, including civilian infrastructure in urban zones. You combine these with things like, say, glide bombs with the Russians have no shortage of, and you're talking about the Russians being able to completely obliterate what we would traditionally think of as a front line and just make this mess of shifting no man's lands where those incremental one and two guys at a time can move 50 feet at a time and from time to time find a soft spot and get enough numbers forward that they can actually make a more traditional assault. It is way too soon to say that this is going to work.

And of course the Ukrainians will have to adapt to it by making their own changes. But we have seen a significant shift in the way that the Russians are prosecuting the war. And with the technologies involved changing day by day, week by week, month by month, that is absolutely worth noting.