Why Russia's Biggest Threat is Actually China

this video was made possible by nebula use the link down in the description to support my channel directly and watch dozens of additional videos in my ongoing modern conflict series Russia and China two countries that are these days more often thought of as close allies but are in reality more like mortal enemies just weeks before the Russian army invaded Ukraine the Russian and Chinese leaders Putin and XI declared during a meeting that their partnership was one that contained no limits in the 12 months now since the Russian invasion began the Chinese have never once condemned the Russians for any of their actions and they have abstained on every critical vote in the United Nations as they did in September when they abstained on the U.N security Council vote to condemn Russia's unilateral annexations of four Ukrainian oblasts senior Chinese officials have openly cited support for Russia's security concerns around NATO enlargement in Eastern Europe while blaming the United States and NATO for dragging the conflict out by supplying the ukrainians with weapons and arms and while Russia has been steadily losing their ability to export oil and gas to Europe the Chinese have stepped in to take some of their place compared to a year go before the war the Chinese are now buying up 60 percent more of their energy resources from Russia providing the Russian war machine with much needed cash to continue fighting their war in Ukraine and to make their growing Alliance even clearer to the West the Russians and Chinese even flew joint patrols adjacent to the Japanese and South Korean Air Defense zones back in May of 2022 precisely when Joe Biden was visiting U.S allies in Asia for the past several years even before the Russians invaded Ukraine Beijing and Moscow have been growing increasingly closer together as the relationship shifts ever closer into something resembling a more formal military Alliance and it's pretty easy to see why they would work so closely together at least for now in a lot of ways a sino-russian Alliance today in the 2020s makes perfect geopolitical sense but it won't make much sense at all after a few more decades you see both Russia and China are authoritarian great Powers who each wish to disrupt and change the status quo in Eurasia to their benefit on eurasia's Western flank Russia isn't satisfied with its position in Security in Eastern Europe for centuries Russia's single most important geopolitical policy has always been to control as much of the Eurasian step as physically possible in the west this huge flat plain begins in Northern Germany and steadily grows in with the further east it goes into Russia to the point where eventually it's thousands of kilometers across and almost impossible for any military to defend against hostile Invaders throughout the Cold War the Russians achieved their greatest territorial control over the Eurasian step in their history extending by their proxies in the Warsaw Pact all the way to where it begins in Germany itself surrounded by the geographic barriers in the Baltic Sea to the North and the Sudan Carpathian Mountains and Black Sea to the South if a Western European Army was going to invade Russia again like NATO it would have to squeeze their tanks through the narrowest point of the plane in Germany where the Russians could concentrate the bulk of their troops in order to plug it but following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s Rush Russia in its current form has watched on as their once complete domination of the plane has eroded away Germany reunified every former Warsaw pack country flipped to joining NATO and even the three former Soviet Baltic republics all joined up with NATO as well Belarus remained loyal to Moscow and that meant that the red lines for Russia ultimately came in Ukraine and Georgia it would place a NATO and American Military presence directly along the greater Caucasus Mountains around which are flatter Coastal strips that can be utilized by an invading Army into the Eurasian step across from these mountains and through the low easy to pass through Coastal entrances it's effectively nothing but flat land all the way to Moscow and immediately across from the mountains is arguably Russia's most sensitive area as well chechnya an ethnically and religiously distinct region that fought two brutal Wars for independence from Russia across the 1990s that claimed the lives of tens of thousands at Great cost the Russians crushed the rebellion in chechnya but the presence of a Pursuit hostile military Alliance immediately across from chechnya would be an inherently risky development for moscow's perspective and then there was Ukraine were Ukraine to have joined NATO it would have cemented NATO and the U.S military's presence across nearly the entirety of the European part of the step theoretically enabling NATO forces to land unopposed in Crimea line up tanks across thousands of kilometers of open flat terrain and transformed Belarus into an impossible to defend Salient surrounded on three flat and exposed sides by NATO territory if you were ruling in Moscow and you perceived that NATO could become a rival and potentially hostile military Alliance in the future and he had the long history of being invaded repeatedly by Western European armies from this direction this situation would understandably make you pretty nervous so Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and occupied about 20 of their territory including abkhazia to plug up the Western Coastal entrance into the Eurasian step while keeping them at NATO at the same time then they invaded Ukraine in 2014 to occupy Crimea and plug up that entrance into the Eurasian step from the Black Sea while also preventing Ukraine from joining NATO and then they invaded the rest of Ukraine in 2022 in an attempt to fully push their Geographic defenses against NATO back to the gap between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea opposite of Romania and Poland so Russia is attempting to push back against what they perceive as U.S and nato encirclement in Eastern Europe at precisely the same time that China is attempting to push back against what they also perceive as U.S encirclement of them in the indo-pacific over here on eurasia's Eastern flank China's single greatest geopolitical objectives are finishing the Chinese Civil War once and for all by finally resting control over Taiwan through either diplomacy or Warfare while ensuring that their flows of energy resources necessary to continue fueling their ravenous industrial economy continues unabated but just as Russia feels over in their theater in Eastern Europe across the European Plain China feels that the U.S is the most major obstacle standing in the way of their objectives as well Taiwan itself is classified as a major non-nato Ally of Washington's while the United States maintains an ambiguous policy on Taiwanese defense were China to eventually reject diplomacy and choose the sword it would certainly face a Taiwan armed and equipped with Advanced American weapons and would potentially face a United States and allied military response itself meanwhile nearby Island States like Japan South Korea and the Philippines are all classified alongside Taiwan as major non-nato allies as well India Japan and Australia are all additional parties alongside the United States to the quadrilateral security dialogue a security dialogue explicitly aimed at countering China while Vietnam is considered to be another major potential U.S Ally in the near future the result is the geopolitical containment of China across most of its flanks and the hemming in of Chinese Naval power to its own immediate coastlines on the east Eastern South China Seas China thus perceives itself is growing increasingly encircled by regimes who are more friendly to Washington that will complicate its ultimate objective of seizing control over Taiwan and consequently Beijing maintains multiple territorial disputes that push back against this perception naturally China of course claims the entirety of Taiwan is belonging to itself viewing the island is nothing more than a rebellious province of China temporarily under the control of the Republic of China or Roc the opposing faction to the Communists that they fought against during the Chinese Civil War that mostly came to a conclusion more than 70 years ago when the ROC retreated from the mainland over to Taiwan but never really formally or officially came to an end China's principle fears that if diplomacy ultimately fails and War becomes the only way left to rest control over the island their Maritime Imports of energy resources will be complicated and choked off by the U.S Navy right now more than 70 percent of China's oil and liquefy natural gas Imports all come through a single narrow choke point in the Strait of Malacca if the U.S Navy successfully blocks this choke point during a wartime scenario over Taiwan China's economy and War Machine will each come crashing to a halt and Taiwan will likely remain free under the roc's control to attempt and mitigate that risk a bit China also maintains a large territorial claim to nearly the entirety of the South China Sea almost right up to the entrance of the Strait of Malacca itself in what they call the nine-dash line a claim rooted in China's supposed historical claims to the region rather than any legal basis and which directly clashes with the maritime claims of several other countries simultaneously China also maintains territorial disagreements in the airspace over the East China Sea claiming an air defense Zone that clashes directly with those claimed by Japan South Korea and Taiwan all major U.S allies they also claim a series of small islands that the Japanese currently administer as well and then in the south South China maintains another large series of territorial disputes with India across the Himalayas lands that India currently administers but the China claims As Natural extensions of their provinces in Tibet and xinjiang pushing back against another perceived U.S partner in the region thus Russia and China each feel blocked in their greater geopolitical objectives by the United States and U.S allies but that's not the only reason why their cooperation makes sense they also complement each other's strengths and weaknesses exceptionally well China possesses an enormous population base and a correspondingly capital-itch economy that Rivals even the United States itself in purchasing power parity terms but in terms of Natural Resources China is very poor China's very little of the natural gas or the oil or the minerals within its own borders that it needs to continue fueling its expanding industrial base it has to get most of those resources from abroad which is why so much of China's oil and gas has to be imported from the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Malacca creating China's greatest vulnerability to the United States but Russia is precisely the opposite of China Russia's economy is Tiny in comparison in very Capital poor as of 2023 the entire Russian economy is smaller than that of only New York City or in Chinese terms smaller than just the province of Guangdong Russia has orders of magnitude less Capital than China has and nearly 10 times fewer people but what Russia does have is a vast nearly bottomless supply of the exact resources that China needs Russia has by far the largest reserves of natural gas on the planet and one of the largest reserves of oil and coal as well in addition to vast quantities of valuable minerals a copper lead diamonds and nickel everything that China lacks and even better for both of them most of these vast Russian resources are located over in the Asian part of Russia and Siberia relatively near to China's huge industrial base left on their own alone the Russians have never had the capital nor the population base required to ever be able to exploit these resources in the chronically underdeveloped Russian Far East so far away from Russia's population and economic core over in Eastern Europe but equipped with China's vastly larger capital and Human Resources they actually can China can provide the Russians with the capital they need to continue pushing back against American hegemony in Eastern Europe and expanding their strategic depth of control across the Eurasian step through States like Ukraine and Moldova and then equipped with vast Russian resources coming in over land through pipelines and Railways China can gradually reduce its over dependence on importing resources through the dangerous Strait of Malacca and therefore push back more effectively against American hegemony in the indo-pacific granting them greater strategic flexibility when dealing with finishing the Chinese Civil War and securing Taiwan but that isn't to say that the sino-russian alliance makes sense forever it just kind of makes sense right now because historically speaking China and Russia are far more predisposed to being major Rivals than friends the current cooperation is a pretty major aberration in history Russia itself has had a very long history of conflicts with powers in East Asia dating all the way back to the Mongol conquest of Russia during the 13th century and spanning well into the 20th century with Wars against Japan in 1905 and again in 1945 and for its part China has had a long history of conflict with European powers as well notably during a period that many in China refer to as their Century of humiliation the 110 years between 1839 and 1949 when China was weak divided and fragmented and at the mercy of foreign powers it was during this Century of humiliation that the British seized control over Hong Kong and the Japanese conquered Taiwan in Manchuria according to official Chinese Communist Party Doctrine the century of humiliation ended only in 1949 when the Communists emerged victorious in the Chinese Civil War on the mainland and established the People's Republic but many of the territorial concessions that pre-communist China was forced into making with foreign powers during the century of humiliation remained even after it supposedly ended Taiwan seized from China by Japan back in 1895 remained de facto outside of beijing's control still under the rule of the Communist opponents from the Civil War while Hong Kong remained under British rule for decades until it was finally peacefully returned in 1997. the Chinese Communist Party labeled these treaties that forced China into surrendering land to foreign powers during its Century of humiliation as unequal treaties and it is intensely ironic that one of the most unequal of all the treaties that was forced upon China during the century of humiliation came from their current closest partner the Russians you see back in 1858 the Qing dynasty in China was in the midst of an unprecedented crisis waging A Massive Internal Civil War that would claim the lives of tens of millions of people while simultaneously fighting the second opium war against the British and the French sensing China's weakness the Russian Empire seized the opportunity by lining up tens of thousands of their troops on the then border and demanded that the Qing seat over this huge piece of land that was then known as outer Manchuria or else and so not wanting to open up a third war with the Russians in the north the Qing reluctantly relented and agreed under duress in a treaty in 1860 to surrender over this huge amount of land equivalent to the size of Ukraine without anyone firing a shot then what used to be known as outer Manchuria would eventually become incredibly important to the Russians it's where they founded big cities like habarovsk the largest city today in the entire Russian Far East and Vladivostok the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean and the contemporary home base of the Russian Pacific Fleet including their nuclear-armed submarines without Vladivostok the Russian Navy and submarine nuclear deterrent would be largely incapable of operating anywhere in the Pacific Grand it an enormous strategic importance to Moscow but at the same time the 1860 treaty that surrendered all of this land to Russia under duress locked the Chinese out from being able to directly access the Sea of Japan limiting them instead to just the East and South China Seas perhaps in an alternate timeline where the Russian Conquest never happened the Sea of Japan would have been referred to in Beijing as the North China Sea and for a century and a half since that annexation there have been many Chinese nationalists who have never forgotten what happened and many who have labeled the loss of outer Manchuria as yet another of China's unequal treaties to foreign powers including among them the founder of the People's Republic of China himself Mao Zedong in the 1960s China and the Soviet Union's relationship began to deteriorate significantly over their different interpretations of Marxism leninism in 1964 Mal privately made comments with a delegation from the Japanese Socialist Party that the Russians had unilaterally absorbed absorbed outer Manchuria into their country a century ago and that the issue had still never been resolved his comments were leaked to the public and sparked outrage in Moscow then four years later in 1968 the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in order to put down revolt and published the Brezhnev Doctrine insisting that Moscow reserved the right to topple any other communist government that was strained too far away from the global communist movement as Moscow to find it to Mao the Brezhnev Doctrine appeared to indicate an ideological justification for the Soviets to invade China and overthrow him as well and so he decided to manufacture a crisis along the sino-soviet border in the very far east across the lands that had once been outer Manchuria the boundary between the Soviet Union and China was marked by the Emer and usuri rivers the Soviets insisted that the border between themselves and China were the banks of these rivers on the Chinese side effectively implying that all of the islands within the rivers belonged to the Soviets in their entirety now disagreed with his interpretation and insisted that the boundary instead ran through the midpoint of the rivers meaning that Islands on the Chinese side of that line were in fact Chinese the matter came to a boiling point in March of 1969 over an island the Chinese claimed on their side of the river as shenbao in which the Soviets claimed within their River as damansky for weeks hundreds of Chinese and Soviet troops battled against each other for control over the island with dozens getting killed on both sides and hundreds more wounded the world's two biggest communist countries fired over ten thousand rounds of artillery at each other and were approaching the brink of full-scale nuclear war according to numerous Insider reports the Soviet High command at the time was terrified of a greater war with China Mao was claiming that the issue was over the islands in the river but that seemed far too insignificant the Chinese had well over one and a half million soldiers deployed near to their border with the Soviet Far East compared to only 350 000 soldiers over on the Soviet side Mao had made private comments just a few years previously effectively labeling the 1860 Russian annexation of outer Manchuria as an unequal treaty and the big fear in Moscow at the time was that he was preparing to retake all of it a few Soviet bureaucrats even argued that the only way for the country to stop the vastly numerically Superior Chinese forces from seizing the area would be by deploying nuclear weapons against them luckily it never came to that and the crisis gradually died down but the Border remained theoretically in dispute between them all the way until it was formally demarcated in 1991 but just because they both finally legally agreed on the border in 1991 doesn't mean that they will always legally agree on it forever especially from the perspective of paranoid planners in the Kremlin after all Russia itself agreed on the internationally recognized borders with Ukraine through multiple treaties in 1994 in 1997 only to then a couple decades later renege on those treaties based on their supposedly historical rather than legal claims to Ukrainian territories like Crimea and the Don bass Russia invaded and then conquered large swaths of Ukrainian territory based on their supposed historical claims to those territory opening up the Pandora's box of China hypothetically doing the very same thing with their historical claims to Outer Manchuria at some point in the distant future but the historical strains over outer Manchuria are far from the only place of Divergence between Moscow and Beijing after the Soviet Union collapsed five new countries emerged in Central Asia after centuries of domination from Moscow and over the decades since then most of them have moved away from Russia and gotten closer to China China has spent the years here carefully cultivating its Belton Road initiative which seeks to restore the ancient Silk Road trade routes running across Central Asia the region is Rich in hydrocarbon resources like oil and gas that the ever hungry and resource poor Chinese economy needs to keep itself running with Chinese backing pipelines for oil and gas were all built from hydrocarbon rich countries like turmenistan Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan that all now flow East towards China from these three countries China now Imports around 15 percent of its entire Natural Gas demand greatly helping Beijing and overcoming its heavy Reliance on more vulnerable liquefying natural gas Imports coming in from sea through the Malacca Strait and at the same time China Is Now by far the largest customer of turkmenistans and uzbekistan's natural gas supplies two countries that used to be ruled from Moscow that now directly and massively compete with Russia for the growing natural gas trade in China the only big Market left for the Russians to sell to now that their Market in Europe has largely shut them out over the war in Ukraine with its massive and still growing capital and Industrial base China has also overtaken Russia in terms of trade volumes with all of the Central Asian States since the collapse of the Soviet Union consequently all of the Central Asian states have a viable and more attractive economic alternative to Russia these days and that's largely why three of them took menisand Uzbekistan and Tajikistan never joined on with Russia's Eurasian economic Union basically moscow's version of the European Union consisting of former Soviet States instead they all three more heavily participate with China's belt and Road initiative this is complicated for Russia Geographic control over Central Asia has been an imperative foreign policy goal of moscow's for centuries because it contains yet another of the most major historical Invasion routes into the flat Eurasian step the pretty easy to travel across flat Gap that runs through Modern Uzbekistan in between the Hostile karakum desert in the west and the Towering tianchon mountains in the East but Russia also needs to accommodate China's growing interests in the region because after the collapse of the Soviet Union China's objectives in Central Asia span far beyond simply acquiring the Region's Rich hydrocarbons China also wanted to stabilize their turbulent xinjiang Province a region racked by internal violence and instability fueled by ethnic and religious differences from the majority Han Chinese government by the early 2010s the instability in xinjiang had reached a boiling point and the Chinese Communist Party decided to respond with harsh repression sometime around 2012 the Chinese people's armed police established a permanent presence just across from their Border in Tajikistan along the tajik side of the wakan corridor the narrow strip of Afghanistan that just reaches out and barely touches China their objective in doing this was to stop the spread of islamist militants and arms flowing into turbulent xinjiang from Afghanistan and Pakistan but Tajikistan was also a member of the csto military Alliance led by Moscow and they never asked the Russians for permission the fact that a supposed csto member and former Soviet Republic had secretly granted another foreign power access to deploy military base is on its territory was a severe affront to the Russians and a sign of their growing displacement in Central Asia at the hands of the Chinese but for now Russia has little other choice but to accept the new reality in the region and beijing's emerging Supremacy moscow's more important focus is on the perceived fight against the west across the European Plain and losing influence and ground in Central Asia to China appears a price they are willing to pay in order to maintain that Focus but a price they may not be so willing to pay will be on another major point of Divergence between them in the not so distant future one of the greatest macro problems that will be facing China this century is a major shortage of available water China itself is currently home to around 20 percent of the human population but China also only controls around seven percent of the world's available surface fresh water and then to make matters even worse around 80 percent of China's limited Water Supplies are found exclusively in southern China and Tibet the North China plane where big cities like Beijing and Tianjin are located on is one of the most heavily populated locations on the planet with more than 400 million people who call it home and yet the whole plane only has enough local Water Resources to match the water consumption rate in Saudi Arabia a desert country home to less than one tenth of the population all the rest of the North China Plains water supply must come in from other parts of China via pipes and aqueducts or from abroad while the warming effects of climate change throughout the rest of the 21st century will only inevitably make this situation even worse with time in 2022 a record-shattering drought in China saw the lowest levels of rainfall within the Yangtze River Valley since record-keeping began back in 1961. viral pictures and images emerged of China's longest and greatest river running almost completely dry in several of its locations a potential harbinger of China's looming generational Water Crisis still to come but the big problem is is that there aren't many places around China for them to acquire more water from the nearest available sources of vast freshwater resources are to the south in the Himalayan regions of India Nepal and Bhutan all of which China already has fairly adversarial relationships with and which are also located far away from the North China Plain where the water scarcity crisis will be the most severely acute and further India has an even higher population base than China does and is a member of the Quad alongside the United States and most of India will be facing acute water shortages this Century alongside the North China Plain as well India would never sit idly by if China attempted to move in and take over what precious few Water Resources they have available and so the fight here in this direction will be ferocious those facts naturally point the direction of China's water anxieties North into the Russian Far East somewhat luckily for China there is a massive body of easily accessible and underutilized freshwater here very near to their borders Lake by call by volume this is by far the largest lake on the planet with more fresh water available within it than all of the North American Great Lakes combined it alone contains nearly a quarter of the entire Earth's surface fresh water and could sustain the entire global population with drinking water for around 50 years and the Chinese have already been eyeing it in the 2010s a state-owned Chinese company called aquasib began buying up land around the Lake's perimeter and then in 2017 they announced plans to construct a pipeline from it to China that would deliver Water Supplies but the proposal spurred angry protests from the local Russian population who feared that the pipeline would only become the start of a long project to divert the Lake's water away to China through more pipelines still to come the Russian government decided to step in and shut down the whole thing and no water pipelines from the lake Kev so far ever been built but as climate change continues to reduce the water supply for hundreds of millions of people in China's arid North Plane and as China's roaring economy continues to demand ever greater amounts of energy inputs like oil gas and coal China's interest in the vast water and energy resources in the nearby and sparsely populated Russian Far East will inevitably continue to grow today in the 21st century there were only 8 million Russians across the entire Far East half of whom live just within the former chain-controlled outer Manchuria this is in stark contrast to the more than 109 million Chinese who live within just the three Chinese provinces that border the Far East outnumbering the Russians by more than 13 to 1 ratio the Russian Far East is as resource rich as China is poor and is sparsely populated as China is densely populated and the weight of that calculus has always been alarming to Moscow and then only to make matters even worse for moscow's perspective the far east's population has been steadily shrinking with time between 2012 and 2018 the Russian Far East lost more than a hundred thousand people and that was even before the covid-19 pandemic in the war in Ukraine began killing or driving even more people away and restricting Russia's access to Western Capital Putin's Russia has been left with little other choice then but to begin opening up the Far East to Chinese investment in labor which has long been resisted in Russia over concerns misplaced or not of the area becoming demographically dominated by the numerically Superior Chinese for decades these fears remained mostly unfounded as before the invasion of Ukraine there were perhaps as few as only three hundred thousand Chinese migrants in the Russian Far East compared to the more than 8 million Russians but the more and more that Russia has to rely on China to provide capital and labor to develop the resources in the Far East that will be mostly getting exported to China and the more Russia has to shift away from Europe and towards relying on China's cash to keep their government operating the more Russia begins to force itself into becoming China's Junior partner on the world stage a fact that couldn't possibly be lost on Beijing now because Russia is so much more desperate for this relationship than China is it will be firmly up to China to decide the relationship's extent and course so long as they each share a common enemy in the United States with more important front lines to worry about in Eastern Europe in the indo-pacific they are likely to remain closely aligned with Russia just having no other alternative to choose from and China wishing to keep its northern flank secure and continue accessing cheap Russian and Central Asian resources coming in from Overland to help overcome its heavy Reliance on Maritime energy Imports through the Malacca Strait but without the us as a common enemy China and Russia are far more predisposed to being Rivals than friends at the moment China would like to keep Putin's regime in power in the Kremlin because they're basically just giving Beijing everything they want right now they're distracting the United States away from the indo-pacific with a major war in Europe they're giving China free economic rain in Central Asia and they're selling China enormously discounted oil and gas supplies while they're building even more gas pipelines into China to increase the flows further but if that ever stops in the future if Putin gets removed from power and a new government takes over that's less friendly to Beijing then all bets are suddenly off China has cited its historical claims no matter how legally tenuous as a justification for its vast territorial claims in other theaters like in the South China Sea it is always possible in the future that if Beijing finds itself in a position where it is the senior partner in an alliance with a desperate and ostracized Russia where Beijing wields an outsized influence as the number one customer by far of Russia's energy-based economy that Beijing can make certain demands from Russia then Moscow couldn't possibly refuse in this future if the Russians ever decide to stop or slow down the deliveries of energy and Water Resources to China or raise their prices they may find themselves at the mercy of a revisionist China who suddenly decides to invoke their historical claims to Outer Manchuria once again and by proxy perhaps even more of the almost uninhabited Russian Far East Beyond outer Manchuria as well if Russia finds itself in a weakened geopolitical position with a military disgraced by a disastrously failed War a terminal demographic decline that they can't possibly reverse and an economy completely based around selling resources to China and what other answer than yes could they possibly give an aggressive and expansionist China making territorial demands of them a formal alliance with China is a very very dangerous one for this exact reason and it's likely why the Kremlin will continue to sell resources to China and cooperate with them to an extent in the near term but it's also why long-term Cooper operation over the span of decades between them is highly unlikely the historical fault lines around outer Manchuria Russian fears of China's demographic superiority China's displacement of Russian influence in Central Asia and the looming Water Crisis in the North China Plain all Point towards Divergence between Moscow and Beijing in the eventual future and as Russia's war in Ukraine continues to go badly and weakens Russia even further all China has to do is sit by and play the long game as Russia and its resources are forced into shackling itself further and further to Beijing and without a doubt the invasion of Ukraine has certainly been going terribly for the Russians in September of 2022 the Ukrainian Armed Forces quietly built up troops for a surprise counter-offensive against the Russians in the north which was complicated by the fact that they decided to organize it without informing the United States who is providing them with most of their intelligence and supplies nonetheless and to the surprise of nearly everyone 1. the ukrainians quickly saw runaway success after they attacked in a matter of only three weeks the ukrainians smashed through the Russian front lines and retook a Montenegro sized piece of their land back and almost simultaneously the ukrainians launched another dramatic and successful counter-offensive down in the South that saw them manage to recapture the city of hirsan the only Regional capital of any Ukrainian oblast that the Russians were ever able to capture after their initial Invasion these dramatic Ukrainian victories nearly overnight turned the tide of the war decisively against the Russians and it sent shock waves around the world the story of the Ukrainian counter-offensives and how they were actually able to pull it off against all the odds is a fascinating one to hear which is exactly why I produced another full-length video that's about the same length as this one you just watched that covers exactly how these Ukrainian counter offensives played out in real time complete with detailed maps analyzing what the Ukrainian and Russian objectives which were and how the ukrainians were able to outsmart and outmaneuver the Russians ultimately resulting in their Victory but unfortunately 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Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 8,199,967

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know

Id: Iibs7buNwxQ

Length: 36min 20sec (2180 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023