The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The New Ukraine Proxy War || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Russia is rapidly depleting its stock of prewar vehicles and losing soldiers faster than population growth can replace them, thrusting it closer and closer to military exhaustion.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3YTUy5E

Hey, all, Peter Zeyn here coming you from Colorado early in the new year. We've had a lot of information drop out of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Ukrainians, a lot of folks on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine that study the war. And we've seen a few interesting patterns emerge in just the last four months that I think it's worth spending a little time talking about. The short version is we're, to a degree, seeing a de-industrialization of the war effort. specifically on the Russian side of the equation. The Russians started this conflict with a massive advantage in armored vehicles and tanks,

something like 20,000 or so that they had left over from the Soviet period. The Ukrainians had a lot left over as well, but not even a quarter of the amount, probably closer to a tenth, actually, by most measures. But the Russians go through equipment like they go through men. They run it hard and they put it into situations that are perhaps not the best, and their doctrine isn't very good, and everything gets shot up. And that's before you consider the climactic and geographic situation in Ukraine, where for large portions of the year, the area is just really muddy.

And if you put a tank into mud, it doesn't move very well, and it's really easy prey for a drone. And so bit by bit over the war, vehicles have become less important, and drones have become more important. But for the Russians who actually have to bring equipment to the front, vehicles are always going to be more important for them than it is for the Ukrainians. Well, it seems that they've run out.

Pretty much all of their pre-war battle tanks are now gone, and their ability to replenish them. It is something like 2 to 3% of what they had before. They're only able to make a few tanks a month. In addition, things like APCs and armored vehicles, they've pretty much run out of. And now they're even running out of civilian vehicles and things like golf carts to the point that we're actually seeing horse charges

starting to pop up on the front again. because horses are available and cars are not. This has really led to a change in Russian tactics, obviously, because if you don't have the equipment to move your men, you have to move your men differently. And so some of the new strategies that we're seeing on the front is instead of sending 1,000 men or 100 men or 10 men, it's sending two or three men to try to infiltrate a zone,

and you do that with 2 to 3,000 men over the course of a month, and eventually, hopefully you have enough people that have infiltrated the zone that they can make it untenable for the Ukrainians to maintain their positions. Can this work? Yeah, and it's probably was used in places like Kuviansk in the Donbos, but the pace is incredibly slow, and the casualties are incredibly high, and more importantly, you have a much higher percentage of casualties that turn into actual fatalities. So best guess is that at this point in the conflict, the Russians have lost between 1 million and 1.4 million men, with somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 of those being dead.

And the casualty rates have increased from the 750 to 1,000 people per day in calendar year 2024 to probably something closer to 1,500 to 1,600 people by the time we get to the new years of 2025, 2025, 2026. I said about, I think it's two years ago now, that if the Russians keep losing men at the rate they are, They're not going to be able to mount a military force of any size in six to eight years, which when I said that would have put us at somewhere around 2030. It now appears that that date is being moved forward because the Russians are suffering casualties faster than Russian boys can be born. On the Ukrainian side, the situation isn't exactly great either.

Keep in mind that any battle in which the Ukrainians do not inflict at least a four-to-one casualty ratio is a battle that probably in the long run, the Russians have won just because there are so many more Russians. But the Russians are now getting to a situation where they are running out of people who are not ethnically Russian. All of the various ethnicities that make up the Russian Federation that are not, that ethically Russian, they're basically running them dry. And the Chechens are almost tapped out at this point, which is something I never thought I would see. Ukraine doesn't have that kind of problem. Everyone pretty much who's fighting in the Ukrainian side of the war is Ukrainian. so there's a much stronger nationalism factor going in.

And we are seeing the weapon systems and the military industrial complexes of the Europeans spinning up in order to continue providing arms for the Ukrainians. Keep in mind that the Ukrainians have given... Excuse me, keep in mind that the Europeans have given the Ukrainians significantly more military aid than the United States has and almost a factor of three more economic aid. So if the Trump administration changed,

changes its minds on a few things. Obviously, that will affect the war effort one way or another, but the bottom line is that the European military complex is becoming more capable of supporting the war as the Russian military complex is becoming less capable. So we really are seeing this turn into a proper proxy war with the Europeans on one side and the Chinese on the other side. Most of the hardware that is coming into the Russian system now is originated in Chinese factories, and we're getting this weird little proxy fight between two countries. that are two regions that haven't really been involved in a direct geopolitical conflict. That has a lot of impacts in a lot of ways. Number one, the Europeans are much more amenable

to talking to the Trump administration about trade sanctions on the Chinese because their leaderships are now recognizing that they're in a direct head-to-head with Beijing. But it's also leading to a reorganization of how global military technology works. The United States, by stepping back, has seen its pace of technological innovation slow considerably because you have a technical revolution happening in Ukraine that the United States, for the most part, is not participating in, but the Europeans are re-arming at a pace that is forcing these sorts of changes into their everyday structure. How that will play out in the years ahead, way too soon to tell. But the United States is no longer clearly at the forefront of either drone technology or drone jamming technology.

Those are European concerns, mostly Ukrainian, and the Chinese are now getting in on the backside of this, moving from first-person drones to something, things that are getting incrementally more sophisticated. How this will play out, so many of the rules of war have changed in the last 24 months. It's really hard to tell. But the one country that seems to be going out of its way now to not keep pace is the United States.