The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Russians, Russians Everywhere + Final Call For MedShare Fundraiser || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Today is the final day of our MedShare fundraiser! If you join me on Patreon in the month of October, your subscription fees for the rest of the year will be donated to MedShare: https://bit.ly/medsharepatreon When you join the Patreon, you can expect to see the videos and newsletters as soon as they are released, as well as exclusive perks like live Q&A sessions, a community forum, daily news digests, and more! Link: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Russian "diplomats" are being expelled from Poland due to sabotage attempts. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/russians-russians-everywhere-final-call-for-medshare-fundraiser

Happy Halloween, everybody. Final reminder, today is the last day that subscriptions to the newsletter, all the funds from them till the end of the year, will be going to help with MedShare's hurricane relief efforts in North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. So sign up now and know that your money is going to a good cause, and I will see you after this video. Hey, everybody, Peter Zeyn here coming to you from a chilly Colorado morning. It's October 23rd, and the Polish government has basically... kicked out everybody out of the Russian consulate in Poznan, declaring them all persona non grata because of attempted sabotage attempts throughout the country,

most notably in Vorkla, I believe. This is not new. We've had dozens of sabotage efforts across Europe that have pissed off a lot of people. They've gone after rail systems in Sweden and the Czech Republic. They've been accused of arson in the United Kingdom and Germany. We've had a lot going on with Russian efforts to interrupt humanitarian shipments to Ukraine. They can't go after the military shipments. Those are too well guarded, but they go after, say, food and medical supplies.

What's going on here is pretty frustrating, but also kind of not a surprise. When the Ukraine war started, we saw a lot of diplomatic expulsions. And basically, if you are in the five eyes, that's the, American-led intelligence network that includes Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom. You've been tracking Russian intelligence assets for decades. And other countries with good intel systems, most notably France and Sweden, have been doing it as well, the Dutch as well. And so when the war happened, there was a general belief that, you know, we need to get these guys out of the embassies because they had just been stacking up in the embassies doing not necessarily

much sabotage, but espionage. Now that there was an open war, the goal was just to get them out of the country completely. So all the countries that had decent intel systems purged all of the KGB officers and the GRU officers from the embassy ranks, and then turned over the list

of all known agents to all the countries that didn't have good intel systems. And it was something like one third of the diplomats in Germany were actually KGB officers, and because the Germans, A, aren't very good at Intel. B, I'm not sure we want them to be very good in and C had kind of been in this la Ladiah belief that everyone was getting along and the Russians weren't the problem until, of course, the Ukraine war started.

Anyway, so they all get kicked out of all of the NATO countries out of Japan, out of South Korea, out of Taiwan. And then the Russians redeployed them elsewhere in the world. And so the Americans just shared those sames list. The Dutch just shared those sames list with everybody. So there were no countries that they could go to without the host governments now knowing that these people were just intelligence assets. So they've all been redeployed as sabotage assets throughout the world. And it's not just in Europe. Beyond Europe, the place that they're probably most active in is Africa.

One of the reasons we've seen so many coups in Africa these last few years is all these former diplomats, false diplomats, are now actually trying to break governments quite successfully triggering coups. And it's kind of a three-fer that the Russians get out of it. Number one, if you successfully have a coup, you change the strategic orientations. of the country and any Western assistance that was there now gets kicked out. Number two, you deeply destabilize these countries and generate refugee flows, which in the long-term will cause problems for the Europeans. And third, you get a bribe, and especially control over mining assets, most notably gold. Since Russia has been shut out of most financial institutions on a global basis, one of the few ways they can still operate is gold.

And so they basically have groups like Wagner operating gold mines across the Sahel that gold is brought home and purified into ingots. And those ingots are put into planes and the Russians literally flag planes full of gold to places like China to pay for all of their imports. How about the only other country that is worth a specific callout for where these agents, former agents, current agents are being deployed is Mexico. The Mexican government has an on-again, off-again flirtation with anyone who is not the United States. And so when the U.S. comes to them with security recommendations, oftentimes the Mexicans do exactly the opposite. So the only country in the world that we know still has a lot of Russian agents in their embassy is in Mexico City. And for those of you who are familiar with Cold War Spycraft, you will know that this isn't new. the number one overseas office for KGB deployment during the Cold War was Mexico City,

working from the reasonable belief that if you can cause chaos in Mexico City, then you can cause problems for the United States. So we haven't seen the sort of sabotage in Mexico that we've seen in a lot of places because they're working on the espionage angle.