ukraine at the start it was a country of 45 million people we are now down to 42.5 million
people it's the biggest movement of people ever recorded in human history wow two and a
half million people in under three weeks that's just unprecedented and we are nowhere near done
because right now the fighting is only happening on less than one-fifth of ukrainian territory wow
yeah ukraine is huge yeah we haven't even gotten to the part of ukraine that before three weeks ago
we considered the pro-western part as a rule it's not perfect but the river the nipper that cuts the
country roughly in half the general understanding was if you're west of that you're pro western and
you consider yourself primarily ukrainian and if you're east of that you're pro-russian you
consider yourself at least a russian speaker what the russians have done in the last eight years and
having this low intensity war in ukraine and the don moss has changed that and everyone in ukraine
is now broadly considering ukrainian and outside of russian tv there's no one in ukraine that is
not resisting in some way i mean this is just an epic turnaround from a national identity point
of view so russia is going to not just have to level the entire place they're going to have to
continually bomb and launch programs the length of the entire country to retain control that's going
to generate at least another 10 million refugees and that's going to require at least a couple
million russian soldiers to occupy the place and that's the vast bulk of the russian military that
includes their draftees so we're not just talking about the best russian troops completely being
locked up we're talking about nearly all russian troops being locked up unless the russians issue a
state of emergency and start drafting anyone under age 50 which is probably where this is going to go
because the russian economy is in free fall anyway so why not this is the middle war so you know
georgia crimea kazakhstan these are all kind of in their back pocket now even control of all of
ukraine doesn't solve the problem on the western front they would in addition need a moldova the
northeastern sliver of romania that's part of the best arabian gap that's how the turks have
often invaded they would also need eastern poland right up into downtown warsaw on the vistala river
that's the polish gap that's where the nazis like to invaded and then they would need
estonia latvia and lithuania in totality because that's how the swedes have gotten in the past
so you're talking about six more countries five which are members of nato obviously that's where
things get very dicey i mean they can probably capture moldova in a long weekend although
looking at the military effectiveness so far maybe i should extend that out to a month yeah spring
break at least yeah yeah but for the other five if ukraine is able to keep the fire lit then the
russians aren't going to have enough conventional forces to do this and the only thing worse than
having a russia that didn't try to do this and just kind of shrivels in time would be a russia
that leapt forward launched the war paid all the prices for the war and still remains strategically
unmoored so there's a point we're going to get to in a few months probably later this year
certainly next year where the russians will have digested ukraine and moldova to their satisfaction
their plan and then they'll have that clash with nato and that's when the nukes become a very real
question right because this is the russia can expand or russia can die catherine the great
quote where they have to control these borders but yeah so what you're saying essentially once they
get to those nato borders they still need to take those nato countries in order to plug those gaps
and they're obviously not able to do that conventionally so they have to resort to nuclear
weapons right think about what the russians did in crimea they started moving in troops it was
apparent that the populations were crucified enough that they were not going to resist
and when talk in the west started coming around about you know going to back dissident forces
like say the crimean tatars who were basically turkish the russians snarled well that will
mean an end to all energy exports from russia into europe at which point angela merkel in one of her
more ignoble moments said crimea is russia's we will have a level of sanctions that will
not approach anything that causes economic pain to either side and we are going to call it there
that is no longer an option so strategic weapons are now on the table for that threat
the russians are going to still win despite all of this they outnumber the ukrainians they've got
better equipment they've got shorter supply lines they don't have to worry about controlling their
borders in order to keep the resources coming they can suck up a huge amount of casualties and
russian society will not rebel remember it wasn't until you had almost a million dead in world war
one that we had any inkling of political problems back in russia we're nowhere close to that
and a lot of russians agree with what putin is doing either for nationalist regions or
for strategic reasons so these reports that we do see about people fleeing russia they are
true there are dissidents they are not going to win so far all of the protests combined
still talking to less than one tenth of one percent of the population that doesn't move
the needle on the dictatorship right yeah that's a good point and so russia is going to win this
and then they're going to have to pacify the country and the question is what level of internal
violence and sabotage are they willing to tolerate in order to move on to the next stage of the war
and that's where things get interesting from the nato point of view yeah because if there's one
thing that was coloring american decision making on all things russian it's that they were maybe
not a pure force but a near pure force and we would have to be very careful how we operated
we would have to be at the top of our game if we weren't going to have horrendous casualties
all of a sudden that logic's gone out the window and we now know that if american
forces and russian forces meet on the field of battle the russian forces will be obliterated
and if that happens the only choice the russians have is between a humiliating strategic withdrawal
to do whatever the americans say or up the ante with nukes and so from the american from the white
house from the dod's point of view this has gotten a lot scarier than we ever thought it would be
because all of a sudden if we can't keep russia locked down in ukraine if we can't
bleed them there till they die if we can't make it out of their reach so that they can then go on and
do the next series of targets then there will be a direct american russian confrontation that we
can't avoid because these are nato allies so the nato strategy the white house strategy now is to
ship every piece of military equipment that we can that doesn't require a static physical resupply or
launching point like a plane so drones are good anti-tank missiles are good stingers are good
anything like that's great send it all because as long as russia is bogged down in a bloodbath in
ukraine they can't go to the next step and that's where the american troops are we have to prevent
that from happening again from the russian point of view this is about national survival right and
can you imagine i mean there's no comparison in the american historical experience for something
like this when it comes to demographic collapse it's never happened to a major power before
so you know the the statistician in me is looking on at this fascination it's like okay well it's
the only country with the worst demography than russia is china what happens there in a few years
because that's not that far off that's within a decade but russia is going to give us some
interesting signposts that we can use to evaluate other countries that are in a similar
demographic decline wow two million troops is bigger than afghanistan and iraq put together
is that true oh we never had more than 110 000 troops in iraq and never more than 95
000 in afghanistan so i'm off by a factor of 20. that's par for the course for this show
yeah an argument there the thing was we don't know what she's going to do because he doesn't know
what he's going to do because he's not getting good information so people are saying you know
putin is talking to the voices in his head there's some truth to that but for the most part there is
a cadre they are intelligent it's just not a lot of people waxy there's no one so predicting what
the chinese are going to do is kind of an exercise in futility i see there's really nothing else that
the russians can give the chinese the chinese have already reverse engineered all their weapons the
pipelines to china are already running at full capacity the rail system is already running
at full capacity the only other way to get more stuff would be if you loaded at a russian western
port say petersburg and overseas which is their shallow porch they're small boats then somewhere
at sea you transfer the cargo from a small vessel to a larger one sail it around africa because you
can't use suez all the way to china so the cost of that the logistics of that getting around
insurance companies and shipping companies they'd have to charter everything themselves ensure
everything themselves and running routes that are four and five times as long as all their other
supply routes are so just the volume of stuff that you might be able to increase to beijing is just
minuscule so all that is left from the chinese point of view is you know how long is russia a
useful distraction away from people ganging up on china because on day one of this war the chinese
were really really excited she's like oh my god this is going to show just how weak the
west is it's going to show how russia can take an entire country and walk away with everything that
had before and that is just so false now and the chinese know that if they try something on taiwan
they are far more vulnerable to the sanction packages that the united states has now led
than the russians are because at the end of the day the chinese still import roughly 80
of their energy and 80 of the inputs that allow them to feed their population
so if you do something like we've done against russia against china not only does the chinese
system collapse in a matter of months they've lost 500 million people from famine within a year
and they now know that so the nationalist chest beating that we've been seeing more and more and
more has gotten very circumspect and they're just focusing on amplifying the russian propaganda on
chinese news stations because they really don't know what else to do because they're seeing
50 years of strategic planning the russians have torched in a month and that's gotta
at this hurt passing zero seven zero four one four zero looking rgb linking via septum
you