The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Ukrainian Counter-Offensive Is Upon Us || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

The Ukrainian counter-offensive is upon us, and there are three main assaults to follow. The first is purely strategic, and the others are a mix of strategic and emotional significance. Full Newsletter and graphic: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-ukrainian-counter-offensive-is-upon-us

Hey everybody. Hello from Colorado. Peter Zeyn here. Today's topic is very straightforward. The Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun. So I'm going to give you an idea of what's going on and why. There are three main assaults. The first one is purely strategic and the other two have a combination of strategic and emotional values. So let's start with the most important one, which is the purely strategic one. Ukrainian forces have crossed in mass of the river, probably closer to NEPRA, which is in central Ukraine, gone down the southern side, eastern side, if you will, of the Nieper River, and are attacking into the province of Zappernicia on a wide bank. It appears that they're doing a lot of probing actions, hitting the front in multiple places,

looking for a place that's weaker that they can then achieve breakthrough. The goal here is to break through the troops and not necessarily do any encircling actions, but drive straight south to the Sea of a Zov. If they can do that, they will have severed the land. bridge through Ukraine proper, from Russia proper, over into the northern access point for Crimea, and basically split the front in two. If they can do that, the Russian position in the Crimean Peninsula becomes completely untenable, because the Ukrainians will then be able to, using their own weapons, not even Western weapons, will be able to take out the rest of the

Kerch Street Bridge. Now, if you remember last year, Kerch, the rail bridge was basically destroyed, but they can still move things on the remaining one span. of the road bridge. And that's how they're trucking in all their supplies for Crimea through the eastern supply route. If that is severed, then Crimea is on its own. It can't grow its own food. It can't supply its own energy.

And then forces from Ukraine will be in too close of proximity for the Russians to even have ships coming and go in on a regular basis. So the whole, what used to be a platform for Russian strategy through the centuries would become a massive, embarrassment and a strategic embroidery because they just couldn't supply their own people. That is proceeding at pace.

It looks like the Russians are holding at least for the moment. There hasn't been a breakthrough that I've been able to detect. What's going to prove critical is the degree to which the conscripts have been pushed into this front by the Russians. As a rule, the Russians use conscripts as reinforcements, which they don't do very good. good at and as human wave attacks as cannon fodder in which they're pretty decent. I mean,

they're disposable from the Russian point of view. But if you use them to hold a position, a defensive position, then they're very likely to break and run. We have not seen that in the 72 hours since the offensive got going. It's too soon to know. But honestly, there's not a lot of good information coming out of there. The Russians, obviously, don't have reporters embedded with them. And the Ukrainians have chosen not to for operational security. So we're not going to know one way or another on this for a few more days probably. If they do break and run, it'll be really loud, so you know, you won't have to come to me to hear it. Okay, that's the first one. The second assault was to be paired with the first one, but it's not going to happen now. It was supposed to be an

amphibious assault across the lower reaches of the NEPA river, followed by a sprint to the Isthmus of land that separates the Crimean Peninsula from mainland Ukraine. If the Ukrainians could have pulled that off, then all of the troops in southern or Ukraine that would have tried to retreat from the Crimea would have been cut off and put into a cauldron, and it would have been a global humiliation for Russian forces. But with the Russian destruction of the Kakova Dam, the lower reaches of the NEPA are simply uncrossable at the moment. Up top, on the reservoir that was above the dam, it's draining very, very quickly. By the time you see this, it'll be about 80% drained already, and the lake bed will be muddy, and the new channel will be unpredictable. In the lower sections,

you're talking about massive flooding, which means that it's, with the current, it's not safe to cross. And as that water then recedes over the next several days, it will again be muddy. And it's going to be at least a month before anyone would be able to cross the river. In addition, the destruction of the dam, that was the last land crossing across the lower ranks of the river. So that's the only place that the Ukrainians could have theoretically gotten vehicles over in any sort of number. So that is now off the table, which brings us to the third one, which is a push east into the Donbos. The Donbos is the part of Ukraine that has the most rail connections, and since the Russians fight by rail, they've actually been able to do fairly well over there for most of the war. Some of the northern sections around Karkov, of course, fell early to a counteroffensive last summer.

But for the Ukrainians to get the Russians out of Donbos, that's going to be some heavy fighting. It's more densely populated. There's more industrial cities. It's going to be more house-to-house, and it's going to be critical for the Ukrainians to take out the rail hubs. Now, they've been doing this with increasing ferocity over the last several weeks, so it's not like the Ukrainians are starting from day one here. But we have not yet seen significant troop movements in that direction. It sounds like it would be a gnarly fight. It would be, but the reason that the Ukrainians are willing to consider it is that this is territory that the Russians captured from them in 2014.

And if here we are a year and a half into the war, the Russians can be proven that they can even lose territory that they've held for 10 years. That, again, falls into that global humiliation category. One of the things that Ukrainians are trying to do here, beyond getting their land back, is try to convince to the international community that the Russians are the losing horse, and so there's no reason to back them. And there's a lot of countries in the developing world who are hedging the bets, hard to blame them. But if the Ukrainians can show that the war is clearly going the other way and get people like Xi Jinping of China to blink and make it that the only people that are still backing the Russians are folks like Daniel Altega in Nicaragua

or Tucker Carlson, then we're in a very different public relations fight here. I still don't think that would make the Russians stop, but getting more and more countries on the other side is something that would allow Ukraine to more easily unlock aid and military support from the world over. So, Zappernica first, the crossing of the NEPA is off. Don Boss will probably see that before long. That's it. You guys take care.