The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Ukraine War and MedShare Donation Match || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

We've been talking about the Ukraine War for quite a while now, but I still get questions asking why. So, we're looking at the historical significance of this region and what this conflict means for all of us.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-ukraine-war-and-medshare-donation-match

Hey, everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado. A lot of you have had the question, especially folks who just started following the last year, as to why I'm so gung-ho about the war in Ukraine. I've been called a lot of things in my life, but I got to say, Neo-Con hippie, that one takes the cake. Anyway, I thought it would be good to lay out the rationale

for why the Russians are doing what they're doing and why that forces the United States to do what it's doing. So the key thing to remember about the Russian space, is it's not very valuable real estate. It's a lot of wide open with fickle precipitation and particularly harsh winters. So of the space of the Russian Federation, really only about a quarter of it is worth anything, and it is on a per acre basis, probably the least effective grain-growing region on the planet of the major production zones. War, precipitation, hot summers, frigid winters, just not great stuff.

It has never been able to generate the amount of capital from agriculture that is necessary to knit the place together in a meaningful road infrastructure like you would have in a place like Argentina or the United States or Western Europe. And so anything that has to be transported in the Russian system has to be transported by rail. So they've had a decent-ish rail system and no national road system to speak of. Now, the problem is even this relatively poor territory is surrounded by even poorer territory where you can't grow anything. and where the land is completely flat. And so on 50-odd occasions throughout Russian history, someone has charged across that flat and made it all the way into the core territories

that the Russians defined as their homeland. The only way that the Russians ever been able to fight back is by waiting for winter, because whoever the invader was is able to maneuver because they were able to cross these huge distances, whereas the Russians can't even maneuver in their own space. So they basically wait for General Winter to drive the enemy away and the case of the Nazis, that took a few years,

and the case of the Mongols, it took centuries, and you can see the problem. The only way that the Russians have ever discovered that they can fight a war against invaders to prevent that war from ever happening in the first place. And that means preventing the foreign forces from ever actually accessing the interior of the Russian Corps territories. And that means expanding out of their good land

through that kind of empty buffer zone until they reach a series of geographic barriers that you just can't run a pan. hands are through, places like the Polish gap, the best Arabian gap, excuse me, or reaching the Baltic Sea's coast. If they can do that, then they can concentrate their forces on the access points and then use geography to help them instead of being at its whim. This is something that they've been trying to do for basically the last 400 years, ever since the Mongols went home.

And it is something that they achieved in World War II. They've plugged all of the access points. There's nine of them. But then the Soviet system collapsed, and the Russians, because of all these new independent states, it used to be their territories, became independent, and took control of almost all of those access points with them. And most, if not all, of what Russian foreign and strategic policy has done in the last, geez, 25, almost 30 years now. No, 30 years, totally 30 years, has been about reestablishing a Russian footprint in those zones. Ukraine is on the way to two of those access points. And so the Ukraine war isn't the first time that the Russians have launched a war to try to achieve a more secure external border.

It's the night since 1991. This war was always going to happen. And the Russian collapsing demographic picture means it was always going to happen about right now. But the war has definitely evolved in a way that a lot of people, myself included, did not expect. So, if you guys remember back to the Battle of Kiev, in the first week of the war. There was this massive convoy of Russian military vehicles that was about 40 miles long

but had more offensive firepower than the combined total of the entire Ukrainian military at that time. And people like me were like, wow, this is already over. And then less than a weekend, the convoy stopped because the Russians forgot to bring fuel. And shortly thereafter, a lot of the soldiers dismounted from their gear

and started walking back to Belarus because they also forgot. food and we learned very very quickly that the Russians don't simply it's not just that they don't know how to do a combined arms conflict with gland forces tanks infantry artillery rockets and air power it's that they've forgotten the lessons of not just the Soviet period but the czarist period and they don't know how to fight wars at all they were a mob with guns which is a very different proposition now in the first few weeks of the war it's still looked like that was going to be enough.

Because the Ukrainians really didn't have a military to speak of before the invasion happened in February of 21. It's a little chilly. I'm going to turn around. But we also knew if we knew anything about the Russians that their conquering of

Ukraine wasn't going to be the last piece to fall into place to give them what they needed. No, no. Ukraine doesn't actually control these access points. It's just on the way to the two most important ones. And Moldova and Romania, the best Arabian gap, and in Poland, the Polish gap. And so after this war, if the Russians were successful in subjugating Ukraine, they would be back again and again again until they achieved what they see as their national defensive sphere. And by natural I mean ideal.

And that would mean invading a minimum on the western periphery alone, another six countries. Moldova, Romania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And the last five of those six countries are all in NATO. But while you can say what you want about NATO preparedness, real training happens. And there has been integration, especially between the American forces and the Central European forces that would be at risk in a next stage clash. So there was a recognition everywhere in NATO

and every defense ministry of NATO and its allied countries. that the Russians would be coming, and when they did come, they would probably not be able to stand against NATO forces in a regular exchange. Because combined arms, that's what the United States does, and that's what its equipment is geared for and its training is geared for, especially with Allied armies. So if you have a mob from Russia at the end of a thousand-plus-mile supply line crossing the Polish border, where they come against a prepared NATO force,

if the Russians only suffered 1,000-1 casualty ratios, it would probably be a good day for them. But the imperative that they secure this periphery before their population completely collapses hasn't gone anywhere. And if they know they can't do it with conventional weapons, all that's left is nukes. So there was an understanding in the first month of the war

in Washington, in Berlin, in Paris, in Stockholm, in London, and all of them, that this was the battle that NATO was made for. We knew we couldn't allow direct confrontation between NATO forces and Russian forces because we would trigger that massive

escalation and the use of nukes. But we also knew that if Ukraine fell to Russian forces, that they would we would be facing the Russians down. We'd just be facing on a NATO territory. And we would lose Berlin

and Paris and Chicago. So, the decision was made very early that any weapon system that the Ukrainians can prove that they can operate and maintain. That second one is very important. The Germans are very clear in that. Giving them a weapon system that's awesome does nothing if they can only use it once. They have to be able to fix it themselves. Anyway, any weapon system that they prove that they can maintain and use competently they can have and everything else's details. Now there have been a lot of details to work out about the pace of the weapons because remember we're trying to make sure that there's a

battle stays bottled up in Ukraine proper, and the Russians never face so catastrophic of a loss. They have to maintain hope that they can actually win this. If you take that away from them, the nukes will fly. And so it's always an issue of hitting a balance. And we can argue about whether or not the balance has been overly conservative or not. But there remains a deep-seated understanding across the entire alliance and beyond that this is not done, then all of Western civilization is for naught. So it's going to keep happening. On their side of the equation, the Russians have decided that since the Ukrainians were not willing to roll over or just exist as cannon fodder or speed bumps for them, like a lot of other groups have in the 300

years that the Russians have been following this strategy, that they are part of the problem and need to be removed, or at least broken. And that's where you get the rape clinics. That's where you get the recreational torture centers. That's where you get the mass murders. From radio intercepts, we know that there are dozens,

German radio intercepts specifically, that there are dozens of incidents like the mass carnage of Bucha or Kiersen or Isiam that have occurred throughout the occupied territories killing an unknown number of people. and this is where you get the cleansing stations would basically serve as filtration camps and in order to separate the Ukrainians

from their property and their land and ship them off somewhere else and where conservatively tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been shipped into Siberia with Russian cabinet members celebrating that how their documents were destroyed so they can never be returned home. We're talking about easily in excess of 20,000

recorded war. crimes to this point, and the Russians haven't bothered to hide any of it, so it's all documented, or at least everything that is on the western or the northern side of the front line. I'm sure there are more horrors to the south and the east to be discovered. More recently, the Russians have been following a two-part strategy in order to destroy the civilian population. Number one is going after the food production and distribution systems, which was what they did through most of this summer. And then starting the third week of October, they're doing a redux of a strategy that they initially developed back last winter and going after the power grid so that

as many Ukrainians are in the dark and in the cold throughout the Ukrainian winter as possible. I would argue that most Western militaries are doing everything they can with training and the equipping of the Ukrainian forces. If you're a civilian, you want to do something, I'm not going to recommend that anyone goes out and picks up a weapon. You know, people who are going to do that are going to have better sources on how to do that than me. But, what you can do is help out the Ukrainians and help them survive. There's a charity I support called MedShare that provides medical assistance to communities who, through no fault of their own, have lost the ability to look out for themselves. So, for example, if the Russians are going after your power grid, MedShare steps in and helps hospitals with diesel generators, fuel, and surgical kits.

It's a group that I've been supporting for about a year. and for the month of November, I'm going to be doubling every donation that comes in. Keep in mind that this newsletter video log is free, and I never share your data with anyone. So if you happen to come across something, you're like, oh, yeah, I would have paid for that. Don't give me the money, give it to MedShare.

We're putting up the QR code for that here, and it will be attached to the email and the social media channels for which this is distributed. And so for the month of November, up to $40,000 total, I'll be backing, matching every single donation that comes in. I'll continue to support MedShare in the months to come, and we'll see what makes sense with the rest of it.

Anyway, this war, unfortunately, is only now getting started. The Russians have been able to throw almost a million fresh bodies at it without training, so most of them get killed, but they're doing immense damage to the Ukrainian population, and the Ukrainians are literally fighting for all of us. So please pony up and give whatever you support you can and the rest honestly are details. But I'm still going to be providing videos on those details.