The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukraine Pushes Into Russia, Yet Nukes Didn't Fly... || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Ukraine has made a significant push into Russian territory, capturing roughly 1,000 square kilometers within the Kursk province. The Ukrainians also destroyed a handful of bridges that will hinder Russia's logistical support for Belgorod and complicate Russian reinforcement efforts. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ukraine-pushes-into-russia-yet-nukes-didnt-fly

Hey, everybody, Peter Zeyn here, back from my backpacking trip. I'm back in Colorado. And today we are going to talk about the most recent evolutions in the Ukraine war, which are wildly significant. Let's deal with this from issues from least important to most. First of all, going into Russia itself, nobody invades Russia on a whim. I mean, part of the problem that the Russians have always had expanding from Moscow is that there's no logical place to stop this within a thousand miles of them. So the experience. They conquer some minorities. They occupy them. They try to russify them. They turn them a cannon fodder and they throw them in the next line of minorities. And they continue this process over and over and over and over and over until they eventually reach a geographic barrier that they can actually hunker down behind, which is typically like the Baltics, the Carpathians, and the Black Sea. It works until it doesn't. And what we're seeing with Russia right now is that the demographic decline among the Russian ethnicity is so high that within a few years they're going to be having problems occupations. their own populations.

Anyway, anyone who wants to attack Russia has to do that in reverse. And even if you make it all the way to Moscow, that's not all of the Russian Federation's territory. You basically have to go until Russia is broken. And by Russia, I mean the population. We have the possibility of seeing that in the next 10 or 20 years, but we're not there yet. And the encouragement that the Ukrainians have made into Russia proper isn't all that impressive from a territorial point of view.

Basically, in the last two weeks, the Ukrainians have invaded Russia proper. They've taken over about a thousand square kilometers. She's in the province of Kursk. And the question is, why and what is next? Well, the Ukrainian plan seems to be to take a pretty sizable bite out of the territory. They have already destroyed the three permanent bridges that are over the river, Sem, which is a east-west river that cuts through Kursk province. and by doing that, they've made it very difficult for the Russians to reinforce the territories around where this incursion has been.

And we know that the Ukrainians are currently expanding on at least four different axes, northwest, northeast, north and east. And in doing so, they're basically looking to swallow, at least temporarily, about half the province, about 6,000 square miles. give you an idea of scale. The Donbos in the southeast where most of the fighting has been concentrated for the last year and a half in the Ukraine war.

Combined is about 20,000 square miles. So you're talking about an area about a third of that territory and the thousand square kilometers that the Ukrainians have captured so far is greater than the entirety of what the Russian army has achieved in the Donbos in the last 18 months.

So from a Russia point of view, this is a small kind of territory. From a Ukraine war point, point of view, it's a huge amount of territory. And because those bridges are now out, the Russians can only resupply with pontoons. And unlike hard bridges that require some pretty heavy weaponry to take out, pontoons can be taken out by much shorter range things like artillery, and they already are. So the Russian ability to fight back has been relatively limited. The question is how far can this be pushed? Why is it happening? Let's start with the why. I have always identified the

city of Belgarod is one of the cities that the Ukrainians have to neutralize if they're ever going to win this war because it's the tip of the sphere for Russian forces. This is where in the northern theater, all of their armies and all of their artillery are concentrated because it's at the end of the logistical lines. It's a big rail and road hub. Well, if the Ukrainians are capable of basically taking the southern half of Kursk province, they take out most of the infrastructure that feeds into Belgarod. So it neutralizes a city of a million people without actually going into and conquering a city of a million people, which I've got to say is pretty fucking clever if they can pull it off.

And with the bridges now out of the equation, I'd say even on that they are going to be able to pull that off. However, this is like the end of their deployable reserves. The Russian strategy is basically to launch a lot of artillery assaults, send in a huge number of barely trained, if trained at all conscripts to soak up ammo and pin Ukrainian defenders in place and then follow up with more and more and more artillery. It's a very slow grinding process, but because the Russians have a manpower superiority, it is one that has been broadly effective, at least at keeping the Ukrainians from doing things like this.

This took the Ukrainians scraping up the last of their reserve units, along with some advanced units that were training with NATO for future operations. I don't think they've got to a very deep bench beyond this. But they have succeeded in doing what they've always wanted to do in this war, which is trigger war of movement in Kursk in Russian territory, ironically, in a way that they haven't been able to do on their own territory. The counter offenses we've seen from Ukraine and the war so far in the Donbos and near Crimea have basically been hamstrung by Russian defensive lines.

You've got multi-layered lines of tank emplacements, artillery emplacements, and most importantly minefields, so that when the Ukrainians move into these areas and have to start to clear the mines, the Russians are able to call in artillery barrages and the Ukrainians ultimately have to decamp for other locations where they're not going to die. That doesn't apply in Kursk. You've got those defensive lines around Bulgarod, but you don't have them in Kursk. So the Ukrainians have been able to basically locate a battlefield that plays to their strengths rather than the Russian strengths, and they're kicking some serious ass. The problem is they just don't probably have enough men to fully take advantage of it. But neither do the Russians have the men necessary to eject the

Ukrainians. For the last two and a half years, the Russians have spent most of their logistical efforts in building a pipeline of men and material. Basically, they scrape together whatever they may men they can forcibly draft from the population, put guns in their hands and throw them in the front. And to do this in a way that does not trigger a political crisis, they can only do it so fast, they can only do it in so many places. They prefer to go to those occupied minority populations where they think the young men are disposable. And in fact, if they die, that's actually a plus from the Russian point of view, because that means they can't rebel against Russian rule.

But they've basically dragged all the people they can of the appropriate age group out of those zones, and now the cupboard is getting dry. The pipeline isn't simply running low in terms of forces, but in leadership, Putin has basically used every military commander that he has already, that he's even remotely competent. And so he's just assigned one of his former bodyguards to run the operation in Kursk. And you can imagine how well that's going. The Russians also now have 10,000 Ukrainians, including the Ukrainian support echelons,

running around Kursk. And as a rule, the Russians have never attacked an area where they don't enjoy at least a three-to-one manpower superiority. They prefer seven-to-one. and they don't have the forces to put there. So their options are to either partially abandon the Donbos offensive or dig deep into the Russian population. What we've seen them do in the last two weeks is basically mobilize every military force they have left in the country, which is not a lot. And denude the Pacific and the Baltic and the Arctic theaters of what little security personnel remain and throw them into Kursk.

In many cases on trend, they've actually even raided the security forces around their cosmodrome in the Far East. And I got to tell you, if your security force was designed to keep a launch pad safe, it's probably not very good in the face of an Abrams barrel. There's not anything left. They haven't been able to find the 30,000 to 70,000 troops that they need in order to retake Kursk. And with the bridge is gone, they can only approach from the east. So the Ukrainians are having a bit of a heyday at the moment running around in Kru. Kirste dealing with lightly armed and wildly untrained troops that don't even have the benefit of large-scale artillery support.

I don't mean to suggest for a second that the Ukrainians are not taking casualties themselves. It's an active war zone, don't have good data. I would be shocked in an offensive operation of this scale if they're not taking heavy losses, especially in their armor. But the fact remains is that the Ukrainians have found a way relatively on the cheap to play of their strengths to neutralize Belgarod and to change the narrative of the war. Anyway, all of this, all of this collectively pales in significance to the real shift that we've identified as a result of the Kursk operation.

Nukes haven't flown. Throughout this war, the Russians have, at every stage, identified a series of red lines, saying that if you cross this line, we're going to nuke Washington and Warsaw, Berlin and Paris and London and the rest. And at every stage it's turned out to be a bluff. Well, now the Ukrainians have crossed the international border in force. They have castrated the Russian military in the area. There's very little standing in way of them taking even more territory,

and they're about to castrate a city of a million people that used to serve as the primary launching point. And the Russians haven't launched. One of the big concerns in the Western capitals ever since this war, started is, well, they call it escalation management. The idea is we know that the Russians are a major power, but most importantly, we know that the Russians are a major nuclear power. And at some point, the Russians very well and may cook off some nukes because they feel threatened. Well, now we have an incursion that has crossed the international border, and the Russians are broken in the area.

and yet, and yet, and yet, the nukes are still capped. Now, whether this is because the Russians are unwilling or unable is a discussion we can have, and that is a legitimate discussion to have. But the fact remains is that even now the Russians are showing an inability or an unwillingness to go to that level. And that tells me that the conservatism in Western capitals about challenging, the Russians is about to evaporate. Because if the Ukrainians can do this without that sort of counterreaction,

then pretty much every Russian threat to this point is meaningless. Is there eventually a red line where if you step across it, the Russians will pull the trigger? Probably. But we now know it doesn't involve population centers, territory, or cities within a few dozen miles of the wrong side. of Russia's internationally recognized borders. And that ultimately is going to trigger a new sort of offensive operation that has the full support of pretty much every Western country.

That is the biggest title shift in the ward at this point. And that is something we're going to see the consequences of over the next few months.