The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukraine Strikes Russian Strategic Bombers || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Ukraine just did more to enhance American national security than any country since 1945. Here's what went down...Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ukraine-strikes-russian-strategic-bombers

Hey, Al, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Colorado, where we're about to get a storm. Anyway, it is the first of June. You're going to be seated this tomorrow on Monday the 2nd. And the big news is a few hours ago, the Ukrainians launched what is the most significant strategic attack on Russian territory since at least World War II. What it seems that they did is they took a bunch of trucks, some flatbeds, loaded sheds on top of them and drove them deep into Russia, like thousands of miles into Russia, and then parked them and remotely retracted the roofs and launched over 100 drones and sent them at two airbases

where they took out strategic bombers. By strategic mean long-range bombers, whose primary purpose is to nuke the United States and hit naval convoys that are crossing the Atlantic to support the Europeans in case of a Russian invasion. The tradecraft of this, the defense craft, the audacity of this is immense, and the damage caused was immense. The, simplest report I have seen. The lowest casualty report suggests at least 40 of these long-range aircraft were destroyed. There are some indications that was a lot more than that. It's not just that this is billions of dollars of equipment that it would take the Russians that are literally over a decade to replace. It's the nature of the weapons involved. What the Ukrainians did, not particularly

sophisticated drone. The audacity was getting the drones into target, then launching them from relatively close in. The real importance is what was hit. These weapons can be used. They have been used in order to bomb Ukrainian cities and military sites. There's no doubt there. But not from where they are currently based. The two locations and questions are Irkutsk, which is way out in Siberia, basically further from the Ukrainian border than Miami is from Seattle. And the other one was up in Murmansk, basically at the Arctic Circle. These are not locations that the Russians would be using to do tactical in-theater attacks on Ukraine. These are where you put your bombers when you're getting ready to bomb the United States.

And for those of you who are Russian apologists, the Russians have never stopped getting ready to bomb the United States. So fuck off. Anyway, this is the single biggest strategic achievement for American security since at least 1945. We have never had any ally deliver this sort of blow to someone who is targeting the American homeland and to take out so much military capacity that was designed around hurting the United States than this. So when I think of the political ramifications of this, I have to think of something that Donald Trump said

when he had Zelensky in the White House. You don't have any cards. You can't hurt Russia. That is clearly now false. The question is whether there's someone in the Trump administration who's smart enough to realize what just happened and brave enough to make policy around it when it goes opposite of what's been coming out of the White House for the last few months.

Ukraine just proved in a day that they have what it takes to guarantee American security, and that's probably going to take us some really interesting directions.