The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Ukraine War: Just Getting Started

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Perhaps the scariest takeaway from the Ukraine War is that it's just beginning. To fully understand what is at stake here, we must look at Russia's motivators and the possible outcomes.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-ukraine-war-just-getting-started

Hey everybody, hello from Colorado. I thought today would be a great day to underline for everyone what's at stake with the Ukraine War and why the war to this point really is just the very beginning of what's going to be a long, protracted conflict that is going to stretch well beyond Ukraine's borders. All right. With that in your back pocket, let's launch in. This is a map of the Russian space, and that green area is the Russian Wheat Belt. That is the part of Russian. that is worth having where the weather is not so awful, it's still awful, that you can't grow crops. Can't grow much, you get one crop of relatively low quality wheat because the growing season is very short. Summers are very hot and dry and windy, and winters are very cold and dry and windy. If you move to the right, you're in tundra and tegai. That's the blue. If you go to the left, you're in desert.

So north to tundra, south to desert. But what really drives the Russians to drink is the beige. Territories that even by Russian standards are useless, but they're flat and they're open, and you can totally run a Mongol horde through those. So what the Russians have always done is reached out past the green, tried to expand, get buffer space, get past that bays, that area that's useless,

and reach a series of geographic barriers where you can't run a Panzer Division. through it. And then forward position, they're relatively slow moving, relatively low-tech forces in the access points between. During the Soviet period, the Russians controlled all of those access points. It was the safest that the Russians have ever been. And then they lost it all. And what they've been trying to do under Putin and Yelts and both has been to re-expand back to those footprints so that they can plug the gaps, plug the places where the invaders would come, get static footprints, lots of troops right on the border where you can't avoid them, you can't outmaneuver them.

And this has been what they've been trying to do. This is the Kazakh intervention in the Karaba war and the Georgian War and the Donbos War and the Crimean War. This is what it's all been about. Ukraine, unfortunately for the Ukrainians, is not one of these access points. It's on the way to the two most important ones in Romania and Poland. So this war was always going to happen and this was never going to be the end of it the Russians have launched eight military expansions since 1992 this is the ninth and it wasn't going to be the last one eventually they would come for Poland and they would come from Romania so we know that when they do eventually come if they make it past Ukraine they will use every tool that they have and that includes nukes the

Russians feel that they are fighting for their existential existence and because of their demographic collapse, they are. If they fail to capture Warsaw and northeastern Romania the bals, they will shrivel in an open zone, racked by internal disruptions, and interfered with from our outside powers, and over the next decade or three, they will cease to exist as a functional country. Winning here is their only option. And since it's death or winning, every possible tool that they have will come into play. And that includes the nuclear question, when it becomes their only option. If the Russians win in Ukraine, we will have a nuclear exchange.

But if you're Ukrainian, obviously you have a different view on how this should go. What we're looking at here is an old industrial map of industrial assets in the former Soviet system. The box there indicates approximately the Ukrainian borders. And you'll notice that there's a whole cluster of these little industrial circles. just beyond the Ukrainian space. Now, we know if the Russians win in Ukraine where they're coming, but think about what it means if the Ukrainians win, if they succeed in ejecting Russian forces from their entire territory,

the Russians aren't going to stop. Remember, this is for them an existential fight for their survival. They will continue doing cross-border raids until they feel they have an advantage and they can make another try of it. So the only way that the Ukrainians can win and then live in peace afterwards, afterwards is to disrupt logistics that prevent industrial plant in those circles from contributing to a war effort on the Ukrainian border zone. And that means the Ukrainians have to cross the border into Russia proper. Whether they do this with planes and missiles or artillery and rockets or general army, that will be determined by the facts on the ground when this finally happens.

But we're talking about deep strikes in excess of 100 to 200 miles into the Russian space to deliberately. destroy industrial plant and especially connecting infrastructure. So we know now that if the Russians win, we're going to have a nuclear crisis. And if the Ukrainians win, it's the beginning of a long slog that will take years to resolve one way or the other until either Ukraine loses the capacity to function or Russia loses the capacity to function. Russia's never backed down from a war without a series of mass casualty events that were so severe that they've lost the ability to maintain a military position at all. They fight until they can't, especially now considering what is at stake.

This is going to get a lot more intense before it gets resolved. And 2022 was honestly just the warm-up and the skirmishes. Fighting in 2023 is going to be a lot more severe because the Ukrainians are finally getting some real heavy equipment and tanks and the Russians are doing a second mobilization and they're going to have three quarters of a million troops in Ukraine by the end of May. The real war is only now starting.