The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukraine Targets the CPC in Recent Drone Strikes || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

Ukraine expanded its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure to include facilities tied to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), as well as the shadow fleet of tankers that Russia uses to bypass Western sanctions.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/48vCOC3

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that will be able to allow others to stand on my shoulders to be able to be helped. Join the Fight for Cures. Tell your elected representatives to support American medical research. Visit UnitedforCures.org slash action to send a letter today, paid for by Unified United for Cures Action. Hey, all, Colorado, we got snow finally. A couple things happened over the last few days on the Thanksgiving holidays. We're going to start with Ukraine, all energy-related.

So the Ukrainians obviously have been using heavier weapons and bigger drones and rocket drones and naval drones to attack Russian energy assets across the length and width of all of Western Russia. They've now done a couple of things that are not necessarily unprecedented but added together are going to really challenge what's going on in global energy markets. The first is the port of Novrosizk. Now, Novorosgesk is a major naval base and has been a major Russian loading facility for crude for some time,

and over the weekend the Ukrainians hit it again with some naval drones. But most notably, they hit something called a loading buoy, which is exactly what it sounds like it's an offshore buoy that a tanker comes and docks with and then loads up with crude. But this time, the buoy doesn't belong to the Russian government. It belongs to a group called the CPC, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which is a consortium of international companies that operates the Tenghis superfield on the northeastern coast of the Caspian Sea. Tenghis Chevroles was the original company that founded this dates back to the Soviet periods.

It was the first real foreign direct investment by Western companies in the former Soviet Union. and eventually Chevron became the functional operator along with some Kazakh and some Russian companies. Anyway, CPC is responsible for about 75 to 80% of the total exports of Kazakh oil. But because the pipeline has to go through Russia, because the Russians were just dicks when all of this was being negotiated, the Russians throw a lot of crude into the pipeline as well and sometimes even crowd out Kazakh crude. So the Ukrainians see it as a viable target.

So Tenghis is a big deal. The CPC consortium is a big deal, but Nova Ossesk is really where it's at, because that's not just an export point for Kazakh crude, but a lot of Russian crude as well. And now it's under regular direct attack, specifically CPC aspects. So you're talking about just from CPC, roughly 1.4 million barrels a day is under a degree of threat, and then another million barrels a day of purely Russian crude. So if the Ukrainians can keep this up, and it is kind of the next target in the cross, Hares. That is a significant reduction in potential flows. That's part one. Part two is the Ukrainians deliberately, again, using naval drones, went after a pair of shadow fleet vessels in the Black Sea that

were coming in from Istanbul. They were empty at the time, which is probably the only reason that the Europeans happened to scream bloody murder, because if you actually had an oil spill in the black sea, all of it has to flow through downtown Istanbul on the way to the Mediterranean. It would be a mass. But we now have the Ukrainians actively, deliberately targeting the shadow fleet, which basically means that the between targeting Novosisks on the front end and the shadow fleet on the back end, the entire Black Sea is now a no-go zone for the shadow fleet tankers and for Russian oil experts in general, and we're going to lose somewhere between two and three million barrels a day of flow just from that. That is a big deal in of itself,

But it also brings up the next stage of this. Russian Shadowfleet tankers only depart from three locations near St. Petersburg on the Baltic, near Noveracissk, on the Black, and near Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. One of those is now functionally shut off. The next one to go is going to be the Baltic, and the question will be whether the Ukrainians do that themselves. It is further away. It would be harder to do.

Or whether the Europeans assist, because every tanker that flow out of the St. Petersburg region has to go through EU and NATO members, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, Poland, and Denmark, as well as Norway and Germany. So, you know, if there's any one of those countries that decides to assist the Ukrainians in any meaningful way, whether it's time on target information, intelligence information, targeting, going after themselves, allowing the Ukrainians to fly through the airspace or dock at their ports, whatever it happens to be, Then you're talking about roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of Russian oil exports from a pre-war point of view being gone. And we're now in a position where we can talk about what that's going to look like in just a few months.

Now, the global energy supply is at the moment in oversupply. So losing one, two, maybe even three million barrels a day of Russian crude is not something that's going to break anybody, except for Russia, of course. but once you start talking about the black and the Baltic bean off at the same time we're already up against the upper limit there of how much flow you could probably remove from global systems without everybody like having a seize you combine that with more and more targeting of the shadow fleet itself so that there just aren't tankers available and then we get into some really interesting positions it looks like calendar year 2026 is going to start off with the bang, and I am here for it.

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