The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Russian Reach: Geography and Intelligence || PETER ZEIHAN

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

Putin, like the Soviets before him, is clouded by fear of invasion due to Russia's vulnerable geography. Understanding that makes Russia's strategy of expansion and occupation towards defensible borders clearer.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-russian-reach-geography-and-intelligence

Hey everyone, Peter Zion here. You are about to watch a video on a series that I've put together called the Russian Reach, which examines the role of the Russians in manipulating the current White House, as well as the U.S. government in a broader sense. For anyone who signs up for my newsletter, for watching any video, for the remainder of the month, any scent that you would have normally given me for the next three months is going to a medical charity called MedShare. Medchere steps in to help out communities who, through no fault of their own, have temporarily lost the ability to look out for themselves. So, for example, if the Russians are bombing your power grid and the Americans are no longer providing the tactical intelligence so you can anticipate the missile strikes and position your air defense, and the Americans, furthermore, have stopped all financing to help you repair set power grid in the aftermath. Medchair steps in to help hospitals with things like diesel generators.

This QR code will take you directly to the Ukraine page, and that is where all of the donations will be going. Okay, let's look at the world through the Russian eyes. The Russians are from an area, now as Moscow, used to be known as Muscovoi, which is in kind of the northwestern part of the Eurasian steppe. Very cold winters, short summers, generally shitty weather overall, very prone to floods and droughts. They are not a particularly secure ethnicity.

And what they've discovered is there's really nowhere to hide. The forest of northern Russia, which could serve as barriers, do work. That's how they hit out from the Mongols for a while. But it's all pine forest in the upper latitudes. And so basic agriculture is almost impossible. Everywhere else is flat. It's open. The rain is erratic.

It's very difficult to build the pillars of civilization. And most importantly, there's no geographic barrier you can hunker behind, so at least one side is free. So you're completely insecure from all sides in land that is decidedly subpar. The only way that the Russians have discovered that they can achieve any degree of security here is by conquering everyone around. They're basically expanding. They do that. They now have their inner core, which is protected, but they have an outer core that is now occupied hostile minorities. And around that outer core, there's again,

no defensible barrier. So they do it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, until they reach an area that they can block. And so they expand from tiny Muscovoi to something more akin to the territory of the Russian Federation today, or ideally the Soviet Union. I say ideally because the really good barriers that actually do limit external attack are the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Sea, the Carpathian Mountains, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the deserts of Central Asia, and the Tensian Mountains of Central Asia. If, if the Russians can reach those zones, they shrink their outer perimeter. Give me an idea of just how extreme the differences. Modern day Russia, which lost a fair amount of territory and half of its population compared to the Soviet Union,

actually saw its external boundaries get longer. And they're right now about 5,000 miles. in total. If they were able to re-expand to where they were during Soviet times and actually plug the access points between those various barriers, that 5,000 miles would shrink to about 500 miles. That is ultimately what the Russians are fighting for, because of the Eastern Hemisphere's four big regions, the Russians are by far the weakest of the four. You've got Europe, which is densely populated, much better climate can support much denser population patterns. You've got the East Asian Rim, a very similar to Europe in that regard, and so you get the Colossus that is China in whatever form

it happens to be in. And then you've got the areas of the Middle East, which combine kind of the best parts of the Russian space with something new. You've got a lot of oasis cities, you've got little pockets like Missopotamia that can support like European-style density populations, and then surrounded by erids. So what happens with political entities in the Middle East is they dominate a handful of these oasis communities or these breadbaskets, and then they boil out across the deserts because they have mastered long-range military fighting. And so if they can get into the Russian space, they already have the transport technology built in. So the Europeans can dominate on technology and capital and military force.

The Asians can beat the Russians on numbers alone, and the Middle East senators can outmaneuver the Russians. And so the Russians have been invaded 50-odd times in their history. and the only way that they know to protect themselves is to conquer everyone in their neighborhood and then set up a really dense shell around the outer perimeter. The Ukraine war was always going to happen because Ukraine has two things going against it. Number one, it's on the wrong side of that outer shell.

And so the Russians see them as one of those internal ethnic groups that has to be oppressed and turned into cannon fodder. Second, the Ukrainians are up. against parts of that outer shell, most notably the Bessarabian gap that goes into Romania and of course the Polish gap of Poland. So this war was always going to happen. The Russians were always going to try to take Ukraine and Ukraine was never going to be the end of it. Because once Ukraine is subjugated, if Ukraine is subjugated, the Russians then need to push to the next line of countries, which includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Romania, five or which are NATO

countries. So this was always going to go down. But there's another piece of this that is much more relevant to this overall series that we're doing right now. And that's how the Russians manage all of these restive occupied populations. Because basically everyone who's living in the Russian Federation who isn't a nothing Russian is someone who has been conquered because they were in the way or because they were perceived as a threat. And so the Russians basically have this milage of occupied populations that based on whose numbers you're using, using are somewhere between 20 and 40% of the Russian citizenry. And that's before you consider the countries that are on the outside of today's Russian Federation boundaries, like, you know,

say the Latvians, who used to be some of those internal oppressed minorities, but have managed to slip away. Ukraine until recently was fully in that category. Now it's a toss up. Well, the Russians can't occupy them with their military because the military has to be at the frontier. The Russians do not have a good land. They do not have a lot of spare capital to throw around. They can't go for the sort of fast and loose military forces that countries of the Middle East have done in the past. They can't do the technocratic stuff that the Europeans have done in the past. And they no longer have the numbers to do the human waves, endless human waves that they say the Chinese can do. So their military is spoken for. It's there to plug the gaps. And if the gaps fail, all that's left

is partisan warfare. So in order to keep their populations from, doing the partisans in the wrong direction, the Russians maintain what is arguably the world's most advanced and penetrating internal intelligence system. Basically, they shoot through occupied populations with as many agents as they can possibly afford to monitor the population, to spread disinformation, to keep the population turned against itself

and never, never, never allow them to educate against Russian occupation in the first place. makes Russia basically a state that is ruled by terror. And if the Russians happen to not like you for whatever reason, it means that they have this great tool, this intel system, that is great at passing unnoticed among populations, about finding the societal weak points, about turning populations against one another,

and at the end of the day, sewing information that can shape policy. And it's very much in use today. So tomorrow we'll talk about how the Russians see their intel system.