hey everyone peter zion here coming to you from colorado
we are now in the third week of the ukraine war and i wanted to discuss a little bit
about the limitations that the russians are facing uh back at home economically
and on the battlefield and it all really comes back to the russian demographic
the the russian system has faced a number of serious trials and tribulations over the course
of the last century uh the defeat in world war one gutted a whole generation of young men which then
was insufficient to repopulate in that generation the following generation was good in world war ii
khrushchev uh forced everybody into condos which reduced the birth rate brezhnev presided over
a decade of stagnation which reduced the breath rate and then ultimately with the soviet collapse
in 1989 we entered a decade period where the birth rate halved and the death rate doubled that has
generated a massive demographic bomb within the russian system and there simply are no longer
enough russians remaining to repopulate the country over the course of the next 30 years
so one way or another russia is going to vanish as an ethnicity this century and one of the major
reasons why the putin government decided that now was the time to launch the invasion of ukraine is
if they didn't do it now they were going to lose the capacity to do it at all but there's more
going on here than raw numbers uh a couple things first of all the russian system educationally is
a little bit different from how it is here in the united states so here you go to high school
you go to college you enter the workforce in russia you go to high school after that you get
an apprenticeship rather than university training as a rule and you are an apprentice for five six
years before you then become a skilled craftsman or accountant or whatever it happens to be
now back in the mid 1980s when the bottom really was falling out of the russian system the russians
ceased investing in technical education for everyone if you were connected to the party
you might still be able to get an education but for most people it just stopped it was replaced
with ideological indoctrination which is part of the reason why so many russians today that who are
older look at what's going on ukraine and just see it as par for the course they don't have an
objection to it because they never received kind of the broad spectrum education that you would
get in math and economics and engineering and so on they were literally raised on the propaganda
of the soviet period but also means that the apprenticeship system collapsed and overall
from roughly 1985 to 1995 the russian industrial base just stopped and has never really come back
and so you have a hard cut off about 1985 for the last time russians were educated in large numbers
you play that four to 95 2005 2015 and ultimately 2022 and you're talking about there's been a
35-year gap where no one really was educated now this has a number of implications first
and most importantly it means that the russian workforce is one of the least skilled in the world
during the 1990s when the bottom fell out of the system over 2 million russians emigrated
to the west in order to find greener pastures we're seeing an echo of that now the people
who are able to educate themselves or be hired by foreign companies and so get some sort of skills
are now in the process of fleeing the country it's way too soon to know how many that's going
to be but if by the end of the year it's under a half a million people i would be very surprised
and these people are utterly irreplaceable because they are the technicians who do all the work that
keeps russia running the second problem is in the military because the same sort of
educational collapse occurred there so today's military commanders are nothing like american
commanders that go back to school repeatedly through their careers to learn more about
history or military technology and we're seeing that played out on the battlefield across
ukraine right now it's almost abysmal how badly the russian military seems to be doing and it
kind of reminds me of the iraqi military in the desert storm conflict how it just got
wiped out by the american forces now the russians are playing against somebody who's even worse
than them but as you've been seen in the news fatalities casualties have been extremely high
best guess is that three weeks in the russians have already lost more troops than the united
states did in the entirety of the 20 years that we were in afghanistan and iraq finally
leadership in the late soviet period
starting in roughly 1982 the kgb took over the government uh yuri and drop off mikhail
gorbachev chernienko these were all f kgbers and they were the only people in the country
who really had the full understanding of what was going on putin was one of them
which means that there's a limited cadre to draw from all of the leadership all of the political
elite within russia since the cold war collapsed came from the kgb and were educated before 1985
which means that they probably only have about 150 people total that are capable of meaningful
political leadership that is even remotely competent compare that to the united states
we have an elite of two to three million people and there are any number of ways you can get in
you can come in from business like michael bloomberg you can come in from reality television
like donald trump you can come in from hollywood like ronald reagan you could be a governor
like bill clinton there's a number of routes to national leadership but in russia you're talking
150 people so every time someone gets sick and dies from covet or slips in the shower and falls
on some bullets or ties themselves to a lawn chair and throws themselves in the pool you are talking
about an irreplaceable chunk of talent we really are in russia's witching hour the question is
what they are able to do with their last gasp war this v this wedge is populated russia
it is the part of russia where it's not so cold that your nose will freeze off in early october
late october you're screwed but early october you're fine now this orange color here that's
roughly the population density of eastern nebraska if you melon scoop out lincoln and omaha
so you do have neighbors you will not see them every day that's populated russia on the shoulders
it gets a little less encouraging so same view but this is a combined climate and
economic map so the green that's the russian wheat belt that's where everybody lives
the blue tundra and tagai nobody lives there the yellow desert nobody lives there you technically
could survive in the beige but it's not pleasant all right when the russians look at this map they
really hate what they see because they see a chunk of territory that cannot be defended
they look at it from the point of view of these red hashes these are the physical boundaries
that you can't drive a tank through or the mongolians can't hoard through
from the russian point of view the only way that they can get security i'm saying if they can put
permanent mass formations in these corridors the access points to the russian heartland
when the soviet union existed they controlled all nine of those access points
it was the most secure the russian ethnicity had ever been in its existence
when the soviet union collapsed and we were left with rump russia they went from nine to one
in 2007 when the russians invaded georgia they went from one to two
in 2014 when they took crimea they went from two to three last year with the second nargono
karabaw war with the new troops that are there they went from three to four
they're hoping that the situation in kazakhstan will stabilize to their benefit which would
take them from four to five and if they can take ukraine it's in its entirety they would
go from five to seven there's a method to the madness also means that the russians can't stop
as catherine the great said the only way that russia can protect her borders is to expand them
they're not making that up does that mean they're going to do it this time around i have
no idea this is hardly the first time since 2014 that the russians have chosen to put a hundred
thousand troops on ukraine's borders to dick with them could be but there's nothing to guarantee it
the reason that they haven't moved is because time is really not on their side
oh yeah do we have anyone from texas yeah it's not as big as you think
time is not on their side this is the russian demography and we're assuming here that the
russians are not lying about the numbers and they lie about all their numbers so you know this bulge
down here probably is not as big as it looks because back in 2014 they just found 8 million
children that they didn't have in the previous year's census so but here's the part that really
matters this is the generation that was born in the 1990s and early 2000s the cold war collapse
that's draftable age
yes the russians can probably
take the country with 130 000 troops take ukraine but they can't hold it
you guys know that from the experience in iraq and afghanistan occupying not easy when the
population doesn't want you there it's a country 45 million people that's iraq plus afghanistan
and unlike iraq and afghanistan where the population concentrations were pretty tight
ukraine is farmland
not possible with 130 000 troops you're talking 2 million troops
the russians only have 2 million troops that can play that role and they are irreplaceable
and once they are deployed that is it russia is done it is russia's last war
it's an open question in the united states whether it's better to just let them die over the long
term which they will or lock them down in a war that is endless which it would from the american
point of view these are both equally viable options ukrainians of course have an opinion
bringing this back to the china discussion
russia and belarus are the world's second and fourth largest supplier of phosphates or excuse
me of potash nitrogen fertilizer is disappearing because of what's going on in energy markets
phosphate fertilizer is disappearing because what's going on in china
and if this war happens potash fertilizer globally has a shortage as well
yes rifles are an industrial technology but so is fertilizer and if you remove all three types
of fertilizer at the same time this world is over now the us will be fine we either produce
it ourselves or get stuff we need from canada but the rest of the world the technical term is [ __ ]
this time passing zero seven zero for one four zero
you