The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukraine War Q&A Series: How Long Can This War Last? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

We're wrapping up our Ukraine War Q&A series with the most depressing question yet...how long can this war last? I have three answers for you...the dark, really dark, and truly dark. Full Video and Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ukraine-war-qa-series-6

Finally, and probably the most depressing question of them all, how long could this war last? I mean, no war lasts forever, does it? Let me give you the dark answer, the really dark answer, and then the truly dark answer. So first, the dark answer. This, at the moment, is an issue of mobilization in ammo. The Russian military support system, the military industrial complex is clearly not doing well. So much money has been stolen from the system that it's difficult for the Russian military. Russians to get stuff to the front. And their internal logistical system is trapped. So between

not having as much as they thought they did, between the government being fleeced blind by their own defense minister, Ukrainians interfering with transport systems via drones and sabotage and artillery strikes and general status of disarray of the Russian transport infrastructure, it's an open question how long the Russians can go with us. Now, they do have 70 years of reserves. And you know, whenever we see a 1940s or 50s tank brought out, we're like, ha, ha, ha, look, they're pulling their old shit out. Well, a couple things there. Number one,

they have shit to pull out. The Ukrainians don't. And second, we're seeing this old stuff come out because some of their newer stuff just takes longer to refurbish. If you have a pre-optics tank, getting that back into condition just requires some refurbishment, some more tubing,

maybe running some fresh oil in it, you're good to go. If you've got 1970s, 880s styles optics, you need to now replace those. And that means a much more expensive and lengthy overhaul. You may get a better tank out of it on the back end, but it does take more time and money. So they're bringing out their old stuff first. They still have several million more armored vehicles that they can throw into this. Now, it's a limited quantity. Yes, but, you know, Ukraine is basically limited now to what it captures from the Russians and what the West sends, which brings us to the second point. How much

durability is the logistical chain on the western side. It's not as good as you think. When 1992 happened and the Cold War ended, pretty much every country in Europe started to slim down their defense budgets until we got to the point in 2022 when the defense ministry in Germany was actually appointed by a woman whose goal was to shut down the military completely. And that means that what they do have is either old

or in need of refurbishment or is from a very thin crust of stuff that has been purchased in the last 30 years. Well, most of that thin crust has already been committed either to the militaries of these forces themselves, because now the Russians are on the warpath, nobody wants to completely disarm,

or the stuff has already gone into Ukraine. So you have to build new stuff if you want to send it, and the Ukrainians have to compete with all of these countries who now want to beef up their own military because, you know, the Russians are on the war path. Now, in the case of the United States,

there's a lot deeper, tranche of things to pull from because we spent 20 years in the war on terror, which means we spent 20 years building out our military for a task it wasn't designed for, and we were upgrading our actual, quote, real military assets, you know, our jets and our tanks and everything, at the same time. So the United States has a significant backlog of all of that stuff that we would have used to fight a war back in the 90s and the 80s. We don't use any of it anymore. We actually have to dispose of it. So from a weird point of view, the Ukrainians are doing us a budgetary solid by taking our old stuff off and disposing of it in the Russians' mouths. But even here, limited supply.

So we're trying to spin up artillery creation here. The Europeans are using some of their solidarity funds to buy ammo. But in all cases, you're talking about needing to triple or quadruple our current manufacturing facility for a lot of this equipment, simply to keep with where we are right now. The process has been started, but it's expensive and it's time-consuming, and we're not going to see a real impact, especially on the European side, this calendar year. We're really talking about the second half of 2024 before the Western industrial complex really becomes a meaningful factor in terms of the supply of equipment. Amil will come a little bit earlier. So that's the first kind of really dark side. The second, even darker side, is if you look at history, the Russian.

wars are very rarely quick. You know, everyone thinks of World War I and World War II, which only lasted a few years, as being how wars are fought. And that has been how it is in the industrial age. But if the Russians into a lesser degree the Ukrainians can't maintain an industrial level of output, and this becomes more of a long-term slug match, the Russians have been expanding bit by bit over the last four centuries, and various groups that they have occupied refer to things like the Russian encroachment.

the 200 years war. Ukraine wasn't captured in one lightning conflict. It was captured in a series of conflicts over a century. The same is true for most of Russia's frontiers. It ebbs and flows and ebbs and flows. Remember, the Russians here are trying to seek a more defensible perimeter, and that means going through all of the flat open territories that are near them, and all of Ukraine is open and flat.

So history tells us that this is less a discrete conflict. and more just the normal status of what it's like to be on the Russian borderlands. And then, of course, there's the dark, dark, dark, truly dark possibility, and that's demographics. Ukraine has among the world's worst demographics. You generally have kids when you feel positive about your future, and there hasn't been a lot to be positive out in Ukraine for the last 25 years, and especially since the Russians invaded the Donbos and Crimea in 2014. It has one of the world's lowest birth rates and is an extraordinarily distorted demographic structure

with fewer people in their 40s than their 30s and their 20s than their teens than children. And that was before the war. We now have at any given time at least a million, probably closer to 3 million, Ukrainian men involved in the military conflict or training. And in addition, one third of the population of Ukraine pre-war, so almost 15 million people, are internally displaced or refugees. Finally, most of the refugees, you're talking in excess of 2 million people here most days. I mean, that number fluctuates a lot, are women and minor children?

Well, folks, birth rates don't recover unless the men and women are in the same place. And the longer those women and children are in a third country, the less likely there are to ever come back, and then the Russians are doing damage on their own side. Based on whose numbers you believe somewhere between several thousand and several hundred thousand Ukrainian miners have been kidnapped, sent through what they call filtration camps on the Russian border, and shipped out throughout Russia. The Russians aren't even denying this has happened because they have a minister who's responsible for it has done a number of commercials advertising Ukrainian children by the dozen for mass adoption anywhere that's not close to the Ukrainian border. She specifically wants people in Siberia to pick them up. And the Russians are doing everything they can to destroy any.

data related. They don't keep track of the data at the filtration camps. They destroy any documents the kids have. And so getting these kids back, even if the Russians have outsized victory in the battlefield is going to be a long and maybe impossible slog. Because a 14-year-old was going to remember

enough about Ukraine to maybe with the right access to information and communication be able to issue a call for help. A three-year-old can't. A baby certainly can't. So, what that tells me is no matter how this war shakes out, we are in the final generation of Ukraine. And if the Russians are able to keep

denuding their occupied territories of children, there's not going to be a lot left to fight 10 years from now, much less reconstruct the country over the next generation. And we're already talking about a reconstruction bill that it is in excess of a trillion U.S. So way to end on a high point with that last question. I'll see you guys next time.