Ukrainian drone strikes reveal Russian vulnerabilities

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from outside of Niederlande, Colorado. The news today is that the Ukrainians have taken some long-range drones, excuse me, and throw them in some Russian targets, some of which are over 1,000 miles from the border. The ones that matter the most are is a refining complex in the city of Nitze-Novgorod, which is a couple hundred miles east of Moscow that sits on a major pipeline nexus, they haven’t damaged the pipeline system. And you’re not gonna probably not going to do that in any meaningful way for drones because they can be repaired so quickly. Instead, they went after some small refineries.

Now, if you’re looking for a Hollywood-style explosion, you’re never going to see that in a refinery, there’s a lot of standoff distance, and the stuff that’s flammable is usually not adjacent to other stuff that is flammable. That doesn’t mean you can’t do a significant amount of damage. And in this case, it looks like they were going after some of the fractionating columns, and at least a couple of the storage tanks, fuel storage tanks, at least one hit was significant to the point that it caused a major fire that at the point that I’m recording this, at the point that I’m recording this, about eight hours after the attack is still burning.

Something to keep in mind, Russia is a big ass place. And as the Germans discovered during World War Two, they have to move things further and further and further from the Western periphery, in order to protect it from aerosols. But in the age of drones, this doesn’t matter nearly as much, because these things have ranges in the hundreds of miles. Which means that everything in European Russia, which is where 75 80% of the Russian population live and most of the physical infrastructure is is potentially in range. So while the Ukrainians can’t shut the country down, they can cause enough interruptions to the processing capacity. That and maybe even pumping stations that make it difficult for the Russians turn export income. And the impact of that could be far more than what the West has done with sanctions on the Russians. So far. We’ve seen this with a few port facilities in recent weeks. And now the Ukrainians are demonstrating the capacity to strike deeper and deeper and deeper into Russia. And they have now almost been able to reach Tatarstan, which is the most important nexus point that the Russians have because it sits on the infrastructure that connects European Russia to all of Siberia. And if for whatever reason there’s meaningful damage there, you’re talking about something like a third of Russian oil exports go offline overnight. So that is what’s to watch for in the days ahead. Stay tuned.