The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukraine: F-16s, Offensives, and Abject Humiliation || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Ukraine is gearing up for one of its most important offensives to date, but what makes this one so different from the rest? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ukraine-f-16s-offensives-and-abject-humiliation

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Colorado. It appears that we're about to see a major offensive by the Ukrainians. Not in the next couple of days or anything like that. Probably going to be a couple months off. But they're definitely preparing the ground. What's going on is that the Ukrainians are preparing to receive a large allotment of F-16s from NATO countries. And that's right on the heels of a significant arms package, one from Europe, one from the United States. that is allowing the Ukrainians to start to shape the battlefield.

What we've seen in the last few weeks is the Ukrainians becoming much more aggressive, not just turning the Russian assault on Kharkyv and the northeast into a killing ground for Russian troops, not only picking up the pace for some of the counterassaults south of the Nipa River, where there have been some battles where the Russians have suffered 20 to 1 casualty ratios. Those are actually the sideshow. The really big stuff in terms of military strategy is using mid-ranged rockets and missiles to go after Russian aviation assets deep within Russia, in some cases 500 miles from the border, and also throughout the Crimean Peninsula going after anti-aircraft batteries, specifically the S-300s and the more advanced S-400s. The S-400s are considered the best in the world, and at least the last two weeks the Ukrainians have taken out. at least four batteries, one of which had only been up and running for a few days at the point

where it was taken out. What the Ukrainians are doing are trying to deny the Russians as as much air defense as possible before the F-16s arrive, because if the Ukrainians can establish regional air superiority or even just local, just for moments, they can start using some of the training and some of the equipment that the NATO alliance provided them a year and two years ago. If you remember back to the first wave of counter offenses we had in 2022 and into 2023, the Russians really hadn't fortified anything. So the Ukrainians were able to punch in, take out a few specific notes, and then just chop up the Russians and flipping massive casualties and cause massive, not retreats,

routes from places like Kyrson or near Kharkiv. But as the war moved on, the Russians started to take things a little bit more seriously in lay-layer after mines. building these multi-layered defenses that the Ukrainians had to punch through. NATO training for a lot of Ukrainian forces taught them how to use combined arms, basically combined infantry with mounted infantry, with tanks, with helicopters, with missiles, with aircraft, but but the Ukrainians didn't have the equipment to pull that off, most notably the air power. So they'd launched this big assault, but they didn't have air power.

And so the Russians were able to call an artillery strikes because they had maybe not air superiority, but the ability to deny the Ukrainians the skies. And that made these subsequent counteroffensive, basically bogged down, and even after a lot of casualties and a lot of equipment and a lot of time, the Ukrainians only made minimal gains. Well, what the Ukrainian are attempting to do this time is to prepare the battlefield so they don't have that air power problem again

so that the new aircraft, when they do arrive, can operate in a less contested environment. And if that happens, then the U.S. Ukrainians can return the favor, and anytime the Russians try to concentrate forces, they get hit with Ukrainian artillery rather than the other way around. We have seen the Ukrainians basically get better and better at this without air power over the last few weeks, taking out any number of strategic radar systems deep within the Russian space. So if we get to the point in about a month when these F-16s start to arrive, the Ukrainians might actually have regional air superiority over most of the peninsula. insula. And at that point, cutting the remainder of the infrastructure links from Russia proper into the southern front should be pretty easy because there's really only two links left.

You've got the Kerch Bridge itself, which is already damaged. And then you've got a supplementary rail system that goes through occupied Ukraine on the southern coast, which is already within artillery range. What we've been waiting for, to the war this point, is for the Ukrainians to use superior speed, innovation, and reach in order to chop up the Russians' logistical capacity. and basically isolate large pockets of troops and generate the sort of political humiliation that in the past has triggered a Russian climb down or maybe even a collapse of the government. I'm not saying that that's what's going to happen this summer. I'm saying that's what the goal is. And with the way that they are preparing the battle space, it looks like we're going to have some of these decisive conflicts later in this year,

assuming for the moment, of course, the Ukrainians proved to be as adept on the F-16. as they have been on everything else. Still a lot of moving parts, still a lot of unknowns. But we actually do see things building to at least in Crimea a bit of a head. That does not mean that the entirety of the war is over. I mean, hell, even if the Ukrainians were able to completely capture Crimea, Russian logistics going into the Donbos and eastern Ukraine are far more robust. This war is not over.

But if you can trigger a global humiliation in the past, About half of the Russian governments that have collapsed have been because of a major military defeat. And this is the first potential battle of this war that might fall into that category.