Russia military woes in Ukraine are no laughing matter

Everyone, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from rainy Colorado. It’s been our wettest spring on record, and we’re about to get a half an inch a day, for at least the next three weeks. Sweet! Anyway, last Friday and then over the weekend, we had a lot of interesting statements out of specifically, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. The one that caught the most attention from people is actually pretty funny, and the statement is that, “Russia asserts that it has the world’s second-most powerful military and a number of people believe them. But the … now people are saying that Russia is the second-most powerful military in Ukraine.”
Now, I got a good chuckle out of that one because the Russians are not doing very well and the Ukrainian counter-offensive is clearly deep into shaping operations. Now, before you celebrate Russia’s weakness, a little bit of history. I’m not going to talk about the weapons or reserves or how many tanks the Russians have, because oh my God, they’ve got so many. And so we’ll look back at history. Russia has never been a capital intensive power. It has always relied upon numbers to fight its war and for the weather to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and for distance to inhibit the ability of its foes to function in its territory. What that leaves us with is a country that is both fragile and incredibly strong at the same time, historically speaking. And so when a country will come at the Russians with a technological advantage, especially when it involves movement, they will do great because once you break through the outer perimeter, if you can get fast and loose into Russian core territories, the Russians can barely move within their own territory.
So whether it’s the British at the Crimean War or the French in early 1800s, or the Poles during the Time of Troubles, or the Japanese in 1905, you know, it doesn’t really matter what era of history you’re looking at, you can find easily a major war where the Russians were absolutely crushed. But it’s one thing to de — defeat Russia’s armed formations, and it’s quite another to eliminate Russia as a threat in the long term. One just requires hitting their troop concentrations and their logistics packages. The second requires root and branch ripping up most of the industrial-level infrastructure, and the entirety of the governing structure, over a swath of territory that is the world’s largest national landmass.
So I understand what Blinken is, after here. He’s trying to rally the alliance to give a lot now when it’s going to really make a big difference to the Ukrainians. This is going to be a critical year for them. But on the other side of this, we’re gonna have to deal with either a resurgent Russia or a very, very bitter Russia that still has a few thousand nuclear weapons. We’re at the very beginning still, have a very long process. And even if this goes every way that people who are rooting for the Ukrainians hope and this really is the beginning of the end of the Russian system, belittling them now isn’t going to speed that process along outside of kind of the tactical boosts that it gets from people giving more weapons in the short term.
Anyway, word of warning. I’m still rooting for the Ukrainians here, still hoping, actually, I’m pretty confident that Russia will cease to exist as a country in my lifetime. Love to see that forward loaded, but I’d like to see it without a nucular exchange too. Alright, that’s it for me. Take care.