Putin 'is done' as losses in Ukraine degrade Kremlin's force projection | Peter Zeihan

remember two things number one the Russians never fight short Wars they do short intimidations their Wars are always long because they're always about human waves number two if they do this this is their last war because there aren't enough Russians under age 20 to theoretically repopulate the system so when this is done one way or another Russia is done hello and welcome to front line with me Kau and this time we're joined by geopolitical analyst Peter and Peter is a bestselling author who's just released an updated version of accidental about the shape of the world and where we go next oh we could talk about so much Peter welcome back to front line um let's focus on Ukraine um several possible developments on the political front which are good news for Ukraine the announcement uh this week that the US will send another $ 1.1 billion dollar Patriot missile system defense system uh to Ukraine in the coming days uh that's badly needed isn't it but very good news absolutely uh you need to look at the Patriot system not in terms of what's been going on for the last several months but what's going to be on for the next so the last several months obviously the ukrainians needed more air defense uh the Russians were taking advantage of a lull in uh weapons deliveries to basically hit the Russians with all kinds of air-based uh weapon systems um and obviously it would be relevant to get defense for that but what's really coming up now is the imminent arrival of Western fighter jets most notably the mirages from France and the f-16s from the United States and its allies uh if if if the ukrainians can achieve even just for brief moments local Air superiority than the capacities of the Uranian military excuse me the capacities of the Ukrainian military to launch um offensive changes every offensive that the ukrainians have attempted for the last 12 months has bogged down because they don't have air superiority and if they can't maneuver functionally with armor and um and armored vehicles then they can't move nearly as quickly they can't move in large number and it makes it a lot easier for Russian Artillery to pick them apart well if you can achieve even just for a few hours a certain blanket then the tables turn and the ukrainians can do things like clear mines uh without having to get shot out from artillery and uh you throw a patriot into that you throw the new f-16s into that you combine that with a little bit more liberal restrictions on the ukrainians ability to tar Target objects within Russia proper and you're seeing the ukrainians already starting to use things like the at cams to prep say Crimea by basically taking out something like an S4 an S400 air defense system a day for the last week uh and the Russians only have 50 of those for their entire country so we're changing the shape of the battlefield very quickly you plug a patriot into that process and we can actually have perhaps a meaningful counter offense of this summer interesting that you mentioned those those strikes on uh Russian air defense has and occupied Crimea this week hitting surface to air missile systems it does look like the ukrainians are exploiting a new weakness here doesn't it well the the s400s have always been a bit of a mystery from the American and the NATO point of view because until you're in a hot War you have no idea how well the top-of-the line equipment is going to work well the S400 is supposedly pre-war the most sophisticated anti-missile and anti-aircraft weapon system on the planet much better supposedly than what the Americans could do and now we discover it can't deal with rockets uh so not only is this taking the Russians down several pegs in terms of their own feeling of their invulnerability not only is it reducing the interest of countries like India in getting any weapon systems from the Russians because now they realize they're not all that it's changing the complexion of what is possible because if you can basically in one spot bleed the entire Russian air defense grid then you're not just talking about a change in the Ukraine war you're talking about a change in what Russia is capable of uh and we're still kind of coming to grips with that what that means this is also new so in that light could it be just literally a matter of time until Ukraine can shut down Russia in Crimea cut it off and stop Russia's ability to support the war from there that is definitely the goal even if you don't conquer reconquer re liberate whatever word you want to use uh Crimea it's uh it's military supply basically goes on two routes there's a rail route that is on the mainland that goes through myole which is somewhat vulnerable to Ukrainian assault today and that's the new line that's the backup line and then you've got the primary line which is the kurch straight Bridge which is becoming increasingly vulnerable and I would argue that if the ukrainians wanted to take that out today they could but they're waiting for more military capacity and and when you do that Crimea goes from being a Launchpad for Russian assaults to Simply the most vulnerable part of the Russian land mass and that's a different sort of complex so this summer is going to get really interesting will the ukrainians be able to pull this off don't know every everyone like me who saw this war coming we all made predictions about how this was going to go and we were all wrong and then we got new data and we reassessed and we were all wrong again I'm just trying to highlight where we're seeing things move and where that might take us yeah you say you say this summer could get very interesting the winter could be quite desperate because um president zalinsky is stress the need for more air defenses at the Ukraine recovery conference they've been looking at at trying to build up resilience in the energy infrastructure and and really I mean he's right isn't it because you you can't really talk about resilience before you have the fundamentals in place to protect those systems the the winter is going to be awful it doesn't matter really what happens at this point it's just a question of how much worse does it get uh the Russians have basically taken something called The Fab 1500 dusted It Off from their Cold War storage uh put a Chinese made flight kit on it and have Glide bombed it in and simply destroyed entire power plants the Fab 1500 has roughly a metric ton of explosives in it and it has a blast radius in excess of 3/4 of a kilometer so you're not talking about sending an Iranian drone into a small transformer station something can be repaired in a few hours you're talking about leaving a crater in the ground where a power generation asset used to be and that's basically the entirety of Southern and Eastern Ukraine now so there simply is not enough power the only way that communities that are kind of east of Kiev and southeast of Kiev are going to have electricity the summer as if it's imported from the European Union so it's a question now of transmission now luckily transmission is cheaper to put up the new generation but yes it's going to be a cold winter for all concerned and on other slightly good news the US has now lifted a 10-year ban on the azov Brigade using American weapons over the Neo-Nazi ideology of the group's Founders but the unit is now part of Ukraine's National Guard does that along with the US relaxation on the ban over its weapons being used on Russia itself does that signal a less escalation phobic us do you think is beginnings of that that's a very much to to be determined convers ation um the Russians by my math have now set 34 red lines that the West has tiptoed across and then boldly stepped across uh with the most recent be one being the use of Western military technology to directly strike Russian territory across from the carke border um this is one of those things where if you have a time machine and you could go back six months you know you could say that you know this line and this line and this line were all simply Russian propag and make intended to make the West self detour maybe we could have moved more aggressively I understand why so many people want us to move more aggressively the problem is we only have to be wrong once uh so doing this slowly slowly bit where one country for example the Brits sending the storm Shadows uh to tow across the line before everyone else gets in I fully support that strategy we will never get it perfectly right but the consequences for getting it wrong are horrendous as for the azof Battalion specifically you know this is a group that is um H if they were headquartered anywhere in the western world most of their leadership would probably be in prison but when you talk about Neo-Nazi propaganda and fascist ideology you know we're now in a situation where the the strongest most aggressive most hateful fascists in the world are in the Kremlin and and that blurs the lines for Better or For Worse so you you are in favor of a more cautious approach though are you in terms of what uh when when the West is saying you can or you cannot use your weapons in the certain way that we Supply I I'm pretty good at what I do and I predicted that the war would begin in 2022 back in 2010 I don't have access to the information that is necessary to say that this will work in terms of calling the Russians on a bluff and this won't I'm not going to second guess the people who are in that position I just saying that I understand the caution uh and I think it's prudent Ukraine you mentioned the Mirage Jets and also the f-16s we were waiting for their arrival um Ukraine has also hit one of Russia's Advanced pania S1 air defense systems in luhansk do you think this is in any way a kind of preparation for the arrival of those f-16s is it's like a softening up process do you see it yeah you do absolutely yeah anything that you're seeing that's with has the ukrainians using any weapon system against air defense that's in an active combat zone is absolutely about building that zone so they can establish local superiority we've also seen the ukrainians go after a a radar system that's deep within Russia a couple hundred kilometers um that was designed primarily for ballistic missile defense so you're talking about a strategic asset but it also serves a purpose of detecting aircraft a th000 kilometers away so everything is now game and the better that the ukrainians can break up that system so it's not a unified Network the easier it will be then for them to achieve that all important local superiority in aircraft and those strikes in Russia itself should they increase um how much of a risk does that present to President Putin himself politically Russian politics are quirky on that um it's a strongman system it's always been a strongman system and because Putin specifically rules through the intelligence Services which is a combination of rule of Terror and Rule of infiltration it's probably pretty stable it's just that it's pretty brittle so the Russian government Putin specifically is not vulnerable until the day that they are um looking back along the stretch of History if you look at the year before every ker Revolution there was no reason to think anything was wrong it all boils up very quickly but you have to have a mass trigger so for example the loss in the Crimea War damaged the Zars the loss in the October Revolution triggered the withdrawal from World War I and the collapse of the Zara system uh the Cuban Missile Crisis led to the fall of Cru Chu you have to have that very short sharp painful realization that Russia has lost and lost big and then the underlying population that has been buying into the propaganda realize it's all wrong and then the government turns we're not there yet I don't think the fall of Crimea even would be enough to do that but that is really the only thing that's on the short-term Horizon that would even maybe fall into that category so it would have to be something bigger than that even yes you'd have to have a mass defeat so for example if the ukrainians were able to not simply um cut that rail line those Rail lines going into Crimea but actually Advan to the coast so that Crimea becomes basically a death camp run by Russians where Russians are dying and starving because remember the Russians destroyed the kova dam there's no more irrigation for agriculture and Crimea at all so all the food is imported if you turn that into a very public globally aware place where the Russians are dying in the streets because they can't get food in maybe um if we could just talk a little bit about the state of of Russian forces at the moment figures obtained by the BBC and an independent Russian media Outlet media Zona said that more Russian Fighters had died in the 10-month Battle for bahmut than in the 10-year Afghan War and the min defense here in the UK has put the total number of Russian casualties since the start of the full scale scale Invasion at more than half a million how is Russia Meeting those challenges of replacing its Personnel uh I I can't comment about Avida or AB Baku those those numbers are just too squirely I I don't want to say that they're wrong I think they're in the right realm as for the half a million number I think that's absolutely accurate um keep in mind the Russians had 8 million men in their 20s or at least that's what they started the war with if they've lost a half a million now and a million have fled that still leaves them with six and a half million bodies to throw at this problem and to be perfectly blunt the Russians have yet to fully mobilize most of the people that they've brought in through their draft system have been minorities from ethnically disadvantaged economically disadvantaged areas they haven't really gotten into the core of what the country is capable of that's still ahead of us but at this rate there's no way the Russians can keep this up for another 8 years and I know that sounds like a long time it is but remember two things number one the Russians never fight short Wars they do short intimidations their Wars are always long because they're always about human waves number two if they do this this is their last war because there aren't enough Russians under age 20 to theoretically repopulate the system so when this is done one way another Russia is done you said earlier that you correctly predicted um when this war would start are you then saying it's going to be eight years before it ends like I said everyone who thought they understood how this was going to go has been wronged repeatedly uh this is the most dynamic military conflict we have seen in the world since at least the Crimean conflict in the 1800s because we're dealing with a technological evolution here that is playing against a massive Legacy so you got the Soviet Legacy which is the largest armorment Supply system in the world and more importantly the largest Armament Reserve in the world that's a lot of Hardware to chew through and a lot of inertia when it comes to Innovation on the other side you've got the information technology Revolution that has now the second generation of it is being married to military Affairs and that's where all the drones are coming from so we've got a technological re ution happening in very real time with a lot of outside support on both sides in pushing that technological Frontier forward at the same time there's just this sheer mass of material that has to be blown up uh I don't know how this is going to go and people are coming up with new tactics every few weeks and it's interesting because I was talking to someone this week who was telling me about Innovations uh that the the ukrainians are coming up with that you can actually get a drone or they're working uh on a drone at the moment that can recognize its Target by its Voice using AI um I mean when you talk about this and and if you if you think about the way these kind of Innovations and the fact that you know I think most people who talk to me about say that the ukrainians are actually more Innovative than the Russians in this field so if you can keep the ukrainians going going long enough and Supply them actually they may well be able to turn it and get the in this in this technology race actually turn the tide by by their Innovation if you can keep them supported for long enough to to develop and get things onto the back field that they need I I don't want to rule that out but I would caution you to consider that people thought the same thing about hypersonics the problem with singlepoint attack systems is they don't hold territory they destroy infrastructure they destroy vehicles and that's obviously part of War but that doesn't allow you to win or more importantly hold the terrain the the question here is what are the rules of the old system that's still apply and when I say the old system I'm not talking industrialization I'm talking like Spears and arrows physically holding territory versus what of the newer old system industrialization will hold versus what will hold of the new system and we figure that out as we go I mean there there are very very good reasons why the French the Brits and the Germans all sent observers to America's Civil War because there were new things in play and no one really understood how they fit together uh we're all watching this with huge interest and the implications for the next 40 years are immense um just just to return to to uh how Russians are recruiting their soldiers just briefly um there have been reports this week want to get your perspective on this uh that two retired Sri Lankan generals have been arrested on suspicion of being of having recruited being recruiting agents supplying Russian mercenary groups um that Sri Lankan citizens have been duped into combat roles in Ukraine I mean are those Desperate Measures or is it part of the course things that have been going on the whole time that we've just not seen reported very much in the media I would argue that it's been going on since the first year of the war now whether these two specific generals are responsible for basically rounding people up I don't have the evidence of that one way or the other but remember that a few years ago Sri Lanka suffered a massive economic dislocation and people were desperate to get whatever they could get and the Russians signed a series of deals that would allow Russians to be basically tourists in Sri Lanka uh and that had established a bit of a um a back and forth in which people could move as as well so the idea that there're Sri Lankans fighting in Ukraine that doesn't surprise me at all there are Nigerians fighting Ukraine there are for there are exchange students that the Russians have press ganged into fighting in Ukraine so this is not a new strategy for the Russians they did this extensively during the Cold War as well so we have these weird press gang multinational brigades that the Russians don't advertise that they're using his Canon fod right along the convicts let's talk about the G7 um and the deal to use profits from Frozen Russian assets to provide around $50 billion by way of a loan to Ukraine that's kind of sexy Ukraine can never get too much uh but getting enough right now does look like it might just decide the outcome of the war do you think every little bit helps but to say one thing is going to be decisive when you've got a uh a land war in a front that's over 1500 km long I think is a bit of a stretch uh using the interest from the Frozen Russian inv Investments though honestly that was a stroke of Genius I don't know who came up with that one but I want to buy them a drink because it basically finds a nice little loophole in international law that only pisses off the Russians and nobody else I mean that that that was very well done um whether $50 billion do in one pop and what'll probably be around 10 to 15 billion dollars a year moving on is enough to move the needle I mean it it doesn't hurt but you know if Ukraine wins this they're going to need a trillion dollars US iose not the $50 billion per se but that if they get enough if they get the kind of support they need right now I mean it could make all the difference couldn't it I'm not sure that support is available and I don't think it's a question of will or red lines the United States when it fights a war it fights with reach and precision over volume and the Europeans for the most part have pretended until very recently that war was in the past and so they allowed their military-industrial comp lexes to atrophy we're now in a a conflict that has more similarities with World War I than World War II or Vietnam or even much less the Desert Storm and and that means artillery and that means building up the industrial plant that's necessary to build that artillery and those processes are being developed not just in the United States especially in Europe but it takes time and $50 billion is really useful but it's these things still aren't going to be Prov providing the volume of artillery shells that ukrainians need this year or next year in terms of the G7 that's taking place now the meeting um that's taking place in Italy um I mean they need this deal to show solidarity don't they amongst themselves it's a time of political turmoil for a number of the countries there I don't think well mixing domestic European and international politics is always makes an interesting cocktail but there's not a lot of light among the G seven on these topics and the fact that it was the Canadians who were the first major country to talk about basically confiscating the profits of Russian Investments uh that that really lowers the bar for everyone else because the Canadians are the ones who are basically we don't really contribute too much here except for respect for rule of law and look we found a way to get around that respect so everyone else was like sweet uh uh so that's done and you know any any additional assistance is going to help with solidarity versus the Russian but the issues that the Europeans are having for say The farri Surge they're going to have to deal with those in their own way I'm really not worried about the French uh macron by starting these new El or sorry let me back up the national front did very well in European Union elections and mcon immediately called Snap elections for the parliament which everyone was thought oh he's going to lose everything but now we've got a civil war going on among the French far right so you know you know mcon didn't get into his position by being a dumbass this might work out really well for him if he can actually shatter the political hold and the aura of the far right Germans are a different situation if you had new elections today in Germany uh Schultz would absolutely lose but because of the way their constitution works the way we wrote their constitution uh that's not a a threat he gets to serve out the remainder of the three years of his term he's not going anywhere unless he chooses to leave and that just leaves Italy where it's the ruling party that won the EP elections so all this nashing of teeth we have in Europe about the EP it's really not that big of a deal at this moment until you win in national elections and then prove that you're a little Wackadoo uh everything's okay the Italians have proven they're not Wackadoo the French are containing this Germans have three years you're left they're fine you have a great turn of phrase for these things Peter I love it um just want to to turn to what uh President Biden said at the recent 8th D day commemorations he made this impassion speech about defending and saving democracy and Drew direct parallels between the defense of Europe then and today and he said the world's autocrats are watching he drew direct links with Ukraine uh what do the world's autocrats need to see uh they need to see the Russians not just humbled but destroyed um autoc cracks are by Nature hierarchical systems without a lot of support on the sides and and they are going to cherry-pick whatever information they see not just for their propaganda but for their own internal processing and it takes a really really sharp hit to break through that layer of conscious distorting of reality within your own mind and so a battlefield defeat for the Russians isn't going to change anyone's mind but if you break the Russian system that would Peter Zion it's been great talking to you thank you so much for your time my pleasure you've been watching Frontline for times radio with me Kau if you'd like to support us you can subscribe now or listen to times radio or go to thee times.co.uk my thanks to our producer today Lou Sykes and to you for watching byebye

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Id: QLncvexyDAI

Length: 24min 43sec (1483 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 15 2024