The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukrainian Drone Attacks on Russian Container Radars || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Register for the Risk List Webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_joptrlQGTlmEQ-oAiVlcTA#/registration We're looking at the Ukraine War and the increase of drone assaults on Russia. Specifically, we'll be looking at the attacks on container radars used for aircraft and ballistic missile detection. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ukraine-drone-attacks-on-russian-container-radars

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Jeddahua. Today we're talking about something that I'm a little concerned about, but a strategic point of view. But first, I want to tell you about a webinar we've got coming up next week on the 5th of June, where the issues that I really worry about are going to be at front and center. Issues relating to how cocaine can damage the American economic experience, how American politics are at the moment in a position makes it difficult to solve American problems, shortages and electricity and critical material processing and why social media has

unexpectedly and problematically become a national security issue. All that in more on the webinar. But for today it's a double duty of something I worry about plus an update on the Ukraine war. Over the past few weeks the Ukrainians have been launching more and more drone assaults into Russia and they have now struck something called a container radar in Russia at least three times, two different facilities. Container radars are something that allows the Russians to be aware of aircraft within about a 3,000 kilometer range. And since the Ukrainians are about to get American and Western F-16s, the Ukrainians would like to take out those radars as much as they can

before the new aircraft come into play. But that is not the primary purpose for those radars. The primary purpose is for ballistic missile detection. And when it comes to dealing with nuclear weapons, timing is everything. Seconds matter because the flight times are so short. So if the Ukrainians manage to deliberately, of course, take some of these radars offline, it alters the strategic perceptions on both sides of the Atlantic, whether you're in Moscow or Washington,

about what is possible and how much time you have to prepare for something going horribly, vorably wrong. Now, this sort of readjustment of strategic perceptions. This was always going to happen as the technologies involved change. As we've seen with the Ukraine war, as we've seen in Saudi Arabia with Iran, the introduction of drones is changing the strategic calculus in a great many ways. And so we were always going to evolve beyond the mutually assured destruction compact that has kept us safe these last 70 years. The idea is that if both

sides have the weapons and if both sides have the ability to detect the weapons in flight, then there is this paralyzation of any desire to launch the weapons because we all go down together. Well, if you damage the detection methods, then that paralyzation, that deliberate paralyzation, might be weakened and all of a sudden we're in a bit of a looser strategic situation when it comes to the big boy weapons. We're now in a position where the war has evolved to the point that major strategic questions in both Russia and the United States have to be evaluated through a different lens. And it's not clear that we're ready for that on either side. Of course, we're never ready for that on either side. You introduce a new weapon system, everything changes around it,

and we're now seeing the opening stages of a complete readjustment and how we perceive the wider world.