The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Future of Drone Tech: Long-Range Strikes || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Ukraine has ramped up its long-range drone program, allowing it to strike targets up to 1,800 kilometers away. So, what does this mean for Russia and its oil?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4uTg5d5

Hey all, Peter, here. Still in Rome, approaching all the forums. Continuing our open-ended series about the changes of military technology. Now we're going to deal with longer-range drone system, things with an excess of 300 kilometers. The Ukrainians have launched a series of systems over the course of the last roughly 10 weeks that have increased their range upwards of 1,800. kilometers total. So for those of you in metric, that's roughly 900 to a thousand miles. And Moscow was only about 300, 350 miles from the front line. This means that Ukrainians can relatively reliably strike anything that is west of the Urals at this point, and even a few

things opposite the Urals, if they really push it. These things are carrying wearheads that are typically in excess of 100 pounds. They're using them to heavily target not so much military assets directly, but infrastructure related to energy production and transport, pumping stations, refineries, porks, that sort of thing. Now, pre-war, the Russians exported about two and a half million barrels per day of oil and about another million and a half barrels per day of refined product. That is now facing some sphere problems. It's really hard to give you accurate numbers because everything is changing day by day. And the Russians aren't just sitting there. They're repairing things as they go. So let's talk about the technology and then

talk about the impact. So first the technology. Unlike the modified short to medium range drones where it's just a matter, you know, just a matter of putting a couple new pieces of semiconductor to give it a limited decision-making capability, this is a range issue. And so with a range issue, Ukrainians are limited by their industrial base, which they're rapidly building out. We've had the number of drones per day in use roughly quintuple over the course of the last 10 weeks, and there's no reason to expect that to slow. If anything, it's probably going to accelerate. One of the things to keep in mind is because of the Iraq War and America's inability to provide adequate air defense

and missile defense to the Arab states, is we now have a cavalcade of countries in the Middle East and Europe that are providing funding for the Ukrainians to expand their industrial plant all over the place. and that's giving them cash that is necessary to expand industrial plant and buildouts at home. Keep in mind that there are so many startups in Ukraine that are providing drone technology now that the Ukrainians actually ran out of the money to fund them all. That's not a problem anymore. So everybody is in the process of spinning up. And by the time we get to midsummer, we're probably going to be seeing daily strikes

and dozens, if not hundreds of these things, across the length and breadth of Russia regularly, every single day, most likely. In terms of impact, it's hard to get firm numbers on this because everything is a moving target. But, oh, yeah, fun little fact. The Romans had so much marble, they used it for, like, dust boards. Anyway, what this means is that we've had over 80 discrete energy targets across Russia come under sustained attack.

sometimes getting hit three and four times a week. Major ports have gone offline and back online. Tanks are gone. Pumping stations, getting damage, even direct pipe strikes. Probably, there's really no average here, but I would say on average. We're looking at an overall reduction of somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million barrels per day of a combined transport and pumping and port capacity. And that gets well into the danger zone for the Russian system.

The Russian oil complex kind of has two big phases. Down in the southern provinces, you can have some older fields that are basically supplied by water injection. And those you can run on reduced capacity or even shut them down safely and bring them back later. But collectively, that's only about one to maybe 1.2 million barrels per day. Everything else is in permafrost territory. And because of heating and cooling problems, you can't maintain a steady temperature at the production site at the bottom of the well bore in the pipelines, in the pump of stations, everything cracks apart. Or in the case of some things, wax congeals in it, and then you have to replace the infrastructure

completely. We're now on the point where that has to be shut down, at least in part, and that stuff cannot be restarted on anything less than a multi-year time frame. The last time this stuff all got shut down, it was in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, and it took the Russians 20 years to bring it back up to snuff like they had it during the Soviet period. So we are now already today at the beginning of the end of Russia as a country that can even export petroleum or petroleum products at all to its west. And if you keep up this crescendo of attacks throughout the summer, by the end of the year, the Russians really won't be an oil power in the western provinces at all. And that includes most of the western and northwestern Siberian fields as well. That'll just leave what is out on the east side of bureaus, which is a separate infrastructure.

But at the rate the Ukrainians are going, it's entirely possible that that may be in range by the end of summer anyway. So from a war point of view, this is how Russia pays for everything. Oil is the single largest inflow point for the Russian state budget, which funds, of course, the military. Natural gas is kind of like the kicker on the side, but most of the natural gas, a lot of the natural gas has already been shut in because it can't be redirected in the way that liquid oil can be. so the Ukrainians haven't felt the need to go after it. But probably find some reasons in the next few months as energy targets become harder to find because there just won't be all that many left.

And that's Palatine Hill behind me. That's one of the original seven cities of Roman where most of the rich folk lived during the high imperial period. One more detail. We already have reports from several Russian oil officials talking about shut-ins in places like Tuttistan and Bashkiristan, which is where the water recovery basically pumped down water increased well pressure and the oil comes up and you skim the oil off the top,

where that's already been shut down by a significant margin, at least in the high hundreds of thousands of barrels. But we're also getting, that's the stuff you can turn back on. We're also getting some reports of things further north where we are getting some panicked reports about wells that will never come back on at all. So we're already well into this and the Ukrainians aren't letting up, if anything, intensification over the summer.