The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukrainian Strikes Disrupt the Russian Economic Summit || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Just as Russia was kicking off its version of the Davos summit, Ukraine crashed the party with some long-range drone strikes on Saint Petersburg. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan

Good morning, everybody. It's the 3rd of June at 5 a.m. in the Las Ficus Airport. Today's news is that Russia's equivalent of the Davos World Economic Forum is going on right now in St. Petersburg. And just as they were having their opening comments, the air raid sirens went off as Ukraine carried out a new series of long-range drone strikes against refineries, ports, and world storage tanks in the area. This meeting is designed to show to the world that Russia is open for business and there's investments to be done and no matter what is happening with sanctions or the war that Russia can still function. So having the air raids going off during the opening ceremonies was kind of hilarious. And I think we should expect that the St. Petersburg airports are probably going to come under attack specifically the fuel tanks. Something that Ukraine has done more than once in the Moscow region.

And now that you basically have people around the world who, for whatever reason, are still willing to treat with the Russians all in one place, it seems like an obvious way for Ukraine to underline that there really isn't any place within 600 miles of the Ukrainian border that is now safe. Keep in mind that the drones that the Ukrainians are using can regularly penetrate past that 600 mile limit now. We've had strikes as far as about 1,000 miles away, so St. Petersburg is well within range. As to the personalities, there are a number of countries that would like to maintain relations with the Russians but proves feasible. We've got delegations from the sovereign wealth films in the Persian Gulf, for example, Saudi Arabia, gutter, UAE, that sort of thing. It was smaller than they used to be because they know that the Russians have been actively helping the Iranians and the war, and they're kind of cheesed off. So for them being under a drone warning when they're in St. Petersburg just kind of underlines everything that's wrong with their bilateral relationship with the Russian. Russia, which find delicious. And then, of course, you've got all the stooges, people in the West that

for whatever reason have been purchased by the Russian government. Stephen Seagall is there. He has Russian citizenship now. Candice Owens, the freak influencer is there. Anyway, bottom line is, while the Russians have putting on a brave face, it's really difficult for anyone to justify any sort of investment in Russia. What you would normally see is two general tracks for investment. number one direct investments into the Russian energy complex. Now, that has always been a little circumspect because the Russians like to confiscate things, and they were doing that well before the Ukraine war. They basically broke down their own oligarchic class, took away everything from companies like Exxon or BP.

You add the threat of physical destruction because of the war to it, and it's just a really hard sell. The second one is a little bit more flexible. Russia doesn't have a tech manufacturing sector at all. The best semiconductors, say, fab, are something below 90 nanometers, which is, you know, not even washing machine grade logic. So anything that comes from low mid, especially high grade semiconductors, has to be imported. And then all of the services that are necessary to implement that, whether it's a payment system or an inventory system or transport log system, has to be added on top. And so the way that the Russians have posed this Davos is there's a whole, sector, not even a sector, there's 20 years of technological advances that the East Asians and the

North Americans and the Western Europeans have made in integrating all these technologies into their society and Russia's kind of a blank canvas. So if you can bring in the investment that's necessary and especially the skill sets that are necessary to apply something, you can really go anywhere in the economy you want. And there is ongoing interest from countries like Germany and even Brazil, which is now probably more technologically advanced than Russia in doing just that and so those investors are in the room but that assumed there's a degree of rule of one a degree of physical security that's necessary to allow this to happen and nothing undermines that like an air raid siren