The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Ukraine War & the Battle of Avdiivka || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Arguably the most brutal battle of the Ukraine War is now in its fourth month: the battle of Avdiivka. Let’s take a deep look at its strategic importance for both sides. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-ukraine-war-the-battle-of-avdiivka

Everybody, Peter Zeyn here coming to you from Colorado. I've had a lot of people right in with questions about what's going on in the Ukraine front, specifically what's going on in the battle of Avdivka. This is a battle that's been churning for a few months already, and it's happened in a series of very discrete phases. Basically, this is a spot in southeastern Ukraine that the Russians are trying to capture from Ukraine. And it has some significant strategic implications. If the Russians were able to capture it, they would be able to target a number of logistical hubs that the Ukrainians have been using very heavily in their counteroffensives. So it's not a nothing battle. It's not an ego battle like we saw in Bahamut last year with Russian mercenaries. This is a real fight. And it's a bloody one. It's happened in a number of phases. First, the Russians try to use tanks to capture it.

Then they sent human waves in, which did as well against in place machine guns as it did back in World War I in World War II. when that didn't work they set hundreds of drones and now they're trying these kind of combine armored infantry thrusts lots of bodies it has been the only place that the russians have been attacking and reading between the lines of both russian and government statements and private statements on both sides as well as third party estimates whether it's from turkey china or britain it looks like the ukrainians have been inflicting a five-to-one casualty ratio upon the Russians, which is just horrific. But in terms of equipment, in terms of like tanks and APCs, it's more like 10 to 1. Now, from the Russian point of view, this is not necessarily a disaster.

This is kind of par for the course, not in terms of the numbers, but just kind of the impact of it. Ever since the Russians failed with that initial thunder run to Kiev at the beginning of the war, the Russians have always known that this was going to be a battle of attrition for public support, for numbers of troops, for amount of equipment. And in that, they definitely have the advantage. Even giving the Ukrainians the most positive spin, Ukraine has less than one-third the population of Russia and less than one-eighth of the industrial plant. And in terms of the order of battle that was inherited from the Soviet Union, it's more like a 30-1 ratio. Russia was the primary successor state and it got all the good

stuff, so to speak. And so in any battle of numbers, the Ukrainians are going to have a very, very steep road to hoe here. But from the Russian point of view, this is kind of built in. Russia is in controlled information space, so you don't necessarily have to worry about public uprisings until, you know, until you do, but we're not there yet. And that means they can just keep holding tanks out to refurbish them and sending them in the front without having to necessarily spin up their own military industrial plant to make new tanks, and they're doing that too.

Now, they're certainly burning through them five, ten times as fast as they can bring them on line, but they're starting from a deep well of something like 16, 18,000 tanks at the beginning of the war. They've lost less than 2,000 at this point, so they can keep this going for a very long time. In addition, the Russians have never, ever, ever claimed to be the technological superpower in any age. They have always fought on the numbers, and it has done them well against the Nazis, there were oftentimes battles where they suffered four and five times as many casualties that they still won in the end because they ultimately just had a much deeper bench of people. And so they've never focused on quality over quantity because, as Stalin said, quantity is a quality all its own. And they've known this from the beginning.

So when they see the bad numbers rolling in from places like Avdivka, there's kind of a shrug and they're just, you know, throw in some more meat to the grinder. that doesn't mean there aren't challenges, that doesn't mean there aren't complications, and this is absolutely why the Ukrainians are trying to turn this into a war of movement and a war of logistics. But from the Russians' point of view, this is a very comfortable place to fight a war, even with these sort of horrific numbers. The difference this time around, of course, is that this is the last time they can do this. The bottom fell out of the Russian birth rate back in the 1990s, which means it's already been 25 years since a large crop of people were born. And so they're running out of people in their 20s. They started this war with about 8 million men in this. The Russians started this war with about 8 million men in their 20s.

One million have already been killed or removed from active combat roles because of injuries. And another million have fled the country. So at current pace, the Russians can maintain this for another four or five years, both in terms of equipment and manpower. And that's when things get sketchy. Whether or not Ukraine can last that long, you know, we'll see. It does mean, however, that this is the last war that the Russian can fight up this scale. It just isn't a replacement generation. Now, whether this is good or bad for the Ukrainians, of course, depends upon how you want to look at the situation.

The Ukrainians certainly don't have as many men. They absolutely don't have as much equipment. They're absolutely dependent upon third countries like most of the NATO forces to supply them with the hardware that they need. And in a war of attrition, that's kind of a problem because NATO wasn't designed to fight a war of attrition. It was designed to hold the line against the Soviets for just long enough for the Americans with their technological superiority to cross the Atlantic in force. Well, Ukraine's not a NATO country. And so we're nearing the bottom of the barrel for a lot of the tertiary countries across the NATO alliance. And the Germans never had anything.

So we're starting to get into the stuff that really, really matters in a lot of these secondary countries like Poland or France. And very soon, if NATO doesn't like massively spin up their country, military industrial conflicts themselves, they're going to have a choice between denuding their own stockpiles or supplying the Ukrainians. They'll probably settle for some version of both, but again, as long as the Russians are fighting a war of attrition that they're comfortable with, that's a bit of a problem. But the real issue is the numbers. We talk about the thunder runs of the Russians going down to Kiev failing, but what we've forgotten is that after a couple of amazing successes that Ukrainians had last year, the Ukrainians have not been able to return the

favor. If the Ukrainians cannot turn this into a war of movement and logistics, then it is by default a war of attrition. And if this is a war of attrition, then Avdivka is about the minimum level of success that the Ukrainians need to achieve. Five times as many men, ten times as much equipment, they need to do that a hundred more times to defeat the Russians in a war of attrition. And that is an extremely tall order.