The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukraine Closes the Sea of Azov || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Ukrainian drone attacks have effectively shut down Russia's use of the Sea of Azov, which is a critical export route for southern Russia. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4fxdyih

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from just below Cupid Peak above Loveland Pass. And over here, we have Greys and Tories and Grizzly Mountain. Not going to be able to do those today because we got lightning moving in, boo, but I'm still going to do a video for you guys. I just got back from Yosemite and still catching up and everything that happened. But one of the big things that's happened in the Ukraine war is that the Sea of Izav is now offline. The Sea of Zov is a body of water to the east of the Crimean Peninsula. That's Russian occupied Crimean Peninsula and to the south of Russian occupied lands in southeastern Ukraine. It's a waterway that freezes sometimes in the winter, but the real important thing is that it is the outlet for a huge amount of cargo.

The Russian system is not well set up for shipping cargo. A lot of stuff has to go by rail, but the Russians are literally running out of ball. marrying, so they're hitting the max of what they can do, and they can't replace the cars and the speed that they need to, so they're seeing reductions in throughput. That makes it much more important to ship things by water. The problem is, is that the Russian coast of the Black Sea doesn't have any navigable river outlets. It's somewhat rough and mountainous. And so what happens is you've got an inland waterway, the Volga, that goes near Moscow and snakes through hopulated Russia and empties into the Caspian Sea. Problem is the Caspian Sea is a land-like body of water.

So what the Soviets did is they engineered a series of canals and locks. They go from the lower Volga near the Caspian over some low ridges and get into the Don River system and the Don empties into the Sea of Azov. So in essence, if you're shipping coal or iron ore or especially agricultural products, you get it on to the Volga, you go through a series of locks until you get to that connection, you take the canal over to the Don to Rastavondon, and then you get into the Sea of Azov, and from there you get into the Black Sea and the wider world. Well, while I was gone, the Ukrainians hit over 200 ships in like a week in their first big push and basically shut off the Sea of Azov completely.

So any of the cargo that used to use this waterborne export, which was one of Russia's main ones, the primary one for southern Russia, suddenly has nowhere to go. They can go onto the rails, but the rail system is already overloaded and honestly starting to fall back. So a couple things from this. Number one, we've got a lot of Russian cargo that is now just trapped. It has nowhere to go. And there's really no quick fix here. The Russians have withdrawn a lot of their air defenses from places even like Crimea to put it around Moscow because the Ukrainians have shown that any target that's within roughly 1,000 miles of the front is something that they can hit in force. And that's forcing the Russians to put the air defenses that they have in places where they will serve political purposes.

Because if Moscow came under heavy drone attack every single night for a month, that might shatter the political coalition that holds the Russian system together right now. That's one. Number two, Rastavandan, this is one of the cities, one of the two cities in Belgrade, that serves as nodes for transporting military gear to the front. and it has now lost all of its economic wherewithal. It's now just a military outpost, in effect. This is something that's going to have a huge impact on the Russian economy and ultimately crimp Russia's ability to get stuff to the front because if that river is no longer available,

if the canalsis is no longer available, if the Rousseev is no longer available, then one of the more wealthy cities in Russia just lost everything that made it work except for being a military depot, and you should expect more tax there over and over and over again in the not too distant future. Third, now that the Sea of Azov is offline, next up is the Black Sea.

It's not that much further. The Ukrainians have loads of drones that are capable of taking the war now just across the Crimean Peninsula and into the ocean. And we've already seen dozens of attacks on things like tankers and bulkers, everything that's in the shadow fleet. So look for the Ukrainians over the next couple of months to repeat what they did in the Sea of Azov in the eastern side of the Black Sea because no ships go there really unless they're part of the Shadow Fleet.

No one else wants to dock directly. And it's not like they haven't been warned if they decide they want to try. The only real solution here that the Russians have because air defense isn't going to cut it is to up their attacks on the Ukrainians to the point that it attracts the Ukrainians' ability to do this. But since it's from mobile launch sites with ever-evolving drones and drones that at the moment the Russians haven't figured out, sorry about the wind, drones that at the moment the Russians haven't figured out how to replicate, that's something that undoubtedly can't happen this summer. This is going to be a problem for a year from now or a potential

solution for a year from now. And now we're getting too with you and I've got to stop. So bye.