Everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado. A lot of you have had the questions, especially folks who just started following the last year as to why I’m so gung ho about the war in Ukraine. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but I gotta say, new neocon hippie that went no one takes the cake.
Anyway, I thought it’d be good to lay out the rationale for why the Russians are doing what they’re doing and why that forces the United States to do what it’s doing. So the key thing to remember about the Russian space, is it’s not very valuable real estate, it’s a lot of wide open with a fickle precipitation, and particularly harsh winters. So of the space of the Russian Federation, really only about a quarter of it is worth anything at it is on a per acre basis, probably the least effective grain growing region on the planet of the major production zones,
or precipitation, hot summers, frigid winters just not great stuff.
It has never been able to generate the amount of capital from agriculture that is necessary to knit the place together in a meaningful road infrastructure like you would have in a place like Argentina, or the United States or Western Europe. And so anything that has to be transported in the Russian system has to be transported by rail. So we’ve had a decent ish rail system, and no national road system to speak of. Now, the problem is, even this relatively poor territory is surrounded by even poor territory, where you can’t grow anything, and where the layout is completely flat. And so on. 50 Odd occasions throughout Russian history, someone has charged across that flat, and made it all the way into the core territories of the Russians defined as their homeland. The only way that the Russians ever been able to fight back is by waiting for winter, because whoever the invader was, is able to maneuver because they were able to cross these huge distances, whereas the Russians can’t even maneuver in their own space. So the basically wait for general winter to drive the enemy away. And the case of the Nazis that took a few years in the case of the Mongols, it took centuries, and you can see the problem, the only way that the Russians have ever discovered that they can fight a war against invaders to prevent that war from ever happening in the first place. And that means preventing the foreign forces from ever actually accessing the interior of the Russian core territories. And that means expanding out of their good land through that kind of empty buffer zone until they reach a series of geographic barriers that you just can’t run a Panzer, through places like the Polish gap, the Bessarabian gap, excuse me, or reaching the Baltics east coast. If they can do that, then they can concentrate their forces on the access points, and then use geography to help them instead of being at its whim.
This is something that they’ve been trying to do for basically the last 400 years, ever since the Mongols went home.
And it is something that they achieved in World War Two, they’ve plugged all of the access points, there’s nine of them. But then the Soviet system collapsed. And the Russians, because of all these new independent states that used to be their territories, became independent, and took control of almost all of those access points with them. And most, if not all, of what Russian foreign and strategic policy has done in the last, she’s 25, almost 30 years now. No 30 years, totally 30 years, has been about reestablishing the Russian footprint in those zones. Ukraine is one of those is on the way to two of those access points. And so the Ukraine war isn’t the first time that the Russians have launched a war to try to achieve a more secure external border. It’s the night since 1991, this war was always going to happen. And the Russian collapsing demographic picture means it was always going to happen about right now.
But the war has definitely evolved in a way that a lot of people, myself included, did not expect. So you guys remember back to the Battle of Kyiv. In the first week of the war, there was this massive convoy of Russian military vehicles that was about 40 miles long, but had more offensive firepower than the combined total of the entire Ukrainian military at that time. And people like me were like, wow, this is this is already over. And then less than a weekend the convoys stopped because the Russians forgot the burning fuel. And shortly thereafter, the a lot of the soldiers dismounted from their gear and started walking back to Belarus because they also forgot food. And we learned very, very quickly that the Russians don’t simply it’s not just that they don’t know how to do a combined arms conflict with land forces, tanks, infantry, artillery, rockets, and airpower. It’s that they forgotten the lessons of not just the Soviet period, but the czarist period. And they don’t know how to fight wars at all.
They were a mob with guns, which is a very different proposition. Now, in the first few weeks of the war, it still looks like that was going to be enough.
Because the Ukrainians really didn’t have
Have a military to speak of before the invasion happened in February of 21.
Who, it’s a little chilly I’m gonna turn around.
But we also knew if we knew anything about the Russians, that they’re conquering of Ukraine wasn’t going to be the last piece to fall into place to give them what they needed. And no, Ukraine doesn’t actually control these access points. It’s just on the way to the two most important ones. And Moldova and Romania the Bessarabian gap, and in Poland, the Polish gap. And so, after this war, if the Russians were successful in subjugating Ukraine, they would be back again and again again until they achieved what they see as their national defensive sphere. And by natural I mean ideal.
And that would mean invading a minimum on the western periphery alone, another six countries, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And the last five of those six countries are all in NATO.
But while you can say what you want about NATO preparedness, real training happens. And there has been integration, especially between the American forces and the Central European forces, that would be at risk and a next stage clash. So there was a recognition everywhere in NATO in every defense ministry of NATO and its allied countries, that the Russians would be coming. And when they did come,
they would probably not be able to stand against NATO forces, an irregular exchange, because combined arms, that’s what the United States does. And that’s what its equipment is geared for. And its training is geared for, especially with allied armies.
So if you have a mob, from Russia, at the end of 1000, plus mile supply line crossing the Polish border, where they come against a prepared NATO force, if the Russians only suffered 1001, casualty ratios, it would probably be a good day for them. But the imperative that they secure this periphery, before the population completely collapses, hasn’t gone anywhere. And if they know they can’t do it with conventional weapons, all that’s left is nukes. So there was an understanding in the first month of the war in Washington, in Berlin, in Paris, and Stockholm, in London, and all of them that this,
this was the battle that NATO was made for. We knew we couldn’t allow direct confrontation between NATO forces of Russian forces, because we would trigger that massive escalation and the use of nukes. But we also knew that if Ukraine fell to Russian forces, that they would, we wouldn’t be facing the Russians down, we’d just be facing on a NATO territory.
And we would lose
Berlin, and Paris, and Chicago alone. So the decision was made very early, that any weapons system that the Ukrainians can prove that they can operate and maintain that second one is very important. The Germans were very clear in that giving them a weapon system that’s awesome does nothing if they can only use it once they have to be able to fix it themselves. Anyway, any weapons system that they prove they can maintain and use competently, they can have it everything else is details. Now, there have been a lot of details to work out about the pace of the weapons, because remember, we’re trying to make sure that this battle stays bottled up in Ukraine proper. And the Russians have never faced so catastrophic of a loss, they have to maintain hope that they can actually win this.
If you take that away from them, the nukes will fly. And so it’s always an issue of hitting a balance. And we can argue about whether or not the balance has been overly conservative or not. But there remains a deep seated understanding across the entire Alliance and beyond that this is not done, then all of Western civilization is for naught. So it’s gonna keep happening. On their side of the equation, the Russians have decided that since the Ukrainians were not willing to rollover or just exist as cannon fodder or speed bumps for them, like a lot of other groups have in the 300 years that the Russians have been following this strategy, that they are part of the problem that needs to be removed, or at least broken.
And that’s where you get the rape clinics. That’s where you get the recreational torture centers. That’s where you get the mass murderers from radio intercepts, we know that there are dozens, German radio intercepts, specifically the third dozens of incidents like the the mass carnage of Bucha, or KEARSON, or ism that have occurred throughout the occupied territories, killing an unknown number of people and this is where you get the cleansing stations would basically serve as filtration camps. And in order to separate the Ukrainians from their property and their land and ship them off somewhere else. And where conservatively, 10s of 1000s of Ukrainian children have been shipped in
into Siberia, with Russian Cabinet members celebrating that how their documents were destroyed, so they can never be returned home. We’re talking about easily in excess of 20,000 recorded war crimes to this point, and the Russians haven’t bothered to hide any of it. So it’s all documented, or at least everything that is on the western or the northern side of the frontline. I’m sure there are more horrors to the south and the east to be discovered.
More recently, the Russians have been following a two part strategy in order to destroy the civilian population number one is going after the food production and distribution systems, which is what they did through most of the summer. And then starting the third week of October, they’re doing a Redux of a strategy that they initially developed back last winter, and going after the power grid. So that as many Ukrainians are in the dark and in the cold throughout the Ukrainian winter as possible.
I would argue that most most western militaries are doing everything they can with training in the equipping of Ukrainian forces. If you’re a civilian, you want to do something, I’m not going to recommend that anyone goes out and picks up a weapon, you know, people who are going to do that are going to have better sources on how to do that me. But what you can do is help out the Ukrainians to help them survive. There’s a charity I support called Med share that provides medical assistance to communities who through no fault of their own, have lost the ability to look out for themselves. So for example, if the Russians going after your power grid, Medicare steps in and helps hospitals with diesel generators, fuel and surgical kits.
It’s a group that I’ve been supporting for about a year. And for the month of November, I’m going to be doubling every donation that comes in, keep in mind that this newsletter, video log is free. And I never share your data with anyone. So if you happen to come across something you like, oh, yeah, I would have paid for that. Don’t give me the money, give it to med share. And we’re putting up the QR code for that here. And it will be attached to the email and the social media channels for which this is distributed. And so for the month of November, up to $40,000 total, I’ll be backing, matching every single donation that comes in.
I’ll continue to support mid share in the months to come. And we’ll see what makes sense with the rest of it. Anyway, this is Warren fortunately, is only now getting started. The Russians have been able to throw almost a million fresh bodies at it without training. So most of them get killed, but they’re doing immense damage to the Ukrainian population. And the Ukrainians are literally fighting for all of us. So please, pony up and give whatever you support you can and the rest honestly are details called I’m still going to be providing videos on those details.
