Why Putin’s removal would not change Russia’s course on Ukraine

Hey everyone, Peter Zeihan here. Happy Fourth of July weekend. With it being a national holiday and all that I thought it would be a great time to talk about coos, specifically one of the continents excuse me, one of the questions I get asked most often about events in Ukraine war is when is somebody going to off Putin and the, what’s his name? General. I can’t remember name so many major general works for Ukrainian intelligence keeps throwing out rumors there that Putin has blood cancer and that a coup is imminent. I think he’s had this like five times now in the last three months. Anyway, I can’t tell you whether or not Putin is sick, he’s clearly on some sort of steroids. But that could mean anything. But that doesn’t mean that a successful coup, even if it did happen, would change the war. From the Russian point of view, this is a conflict for their existential survival. Russian territory is flat, it’s open, it’s difficult to defend it’s low value, it’s low, lightly populated, they’ve never been able to generate the capital that’s necessary to build a good rail network. And so their military forces do not fight moving battles very well. We’re seeing that in Ukraine over and over and over, it’s very a slow plodding force wed to rail lines, which means that should have fo ever get fast and loose in the Eurasian territories in the heart of Russia, the Russians are screwed, they’ve lost far more wars than they’ve won because they can’t maneuver their best hope is that the weather will eventually wear the invaders out. That means if the Russians are going to have a foreign defense, it has to be way forward not within their own territories within someone else’s. And not just any territories, a series of very specific corridors. Russian strategy, going back roughly four centuries has been to expand past the Russian flats until you hit a series of geographic barriers that you just can’t run tanks through. So things like the Carpathian Mountains, great buffers, no one’s running a tank over the Carpathians. What you do is you invade, around the Carpathians, you come in from the southwest, or the Bessarabian gap through Poland, or excuse me, through Romania, or Bulgaria, or you come in around the north or the Polish gap through Germany and Poland. So the Russian position is the Russian position always has been to park static forces in those gaps. There are nine of them, the Soviets controlled all nine, when the Soviet system collapsed, they went from nine to one, Ukraine is just unfortunate enough to be on the path to another two. And so getting back to those gaps, it’s what this war has always been about, and why this war was always going to happen. Now, we can’t give the Russians what they want, because those gaps are either on the territory or in between the territories of Russia. And the gaps are 20 odd countries with a combined population of nearly a quarter of a billion considerably larger population than Russia itself. So you know, there’s no way that everyone can be happy here. And the Russians are not focusing on making anyone happy. But that means that even if there was a coup tomorrow, that probably wouldn’t change the position of the Russian government in the war, because this is not Putin’s war, this is a Russian war, this would have happened under any government, and whoever might be willing to take over would probably continue to prosecute the war, just as it has been. Now, does that mean there can’t be a coup for other reasons? Of course not. And Russia is famous for being politically unstable, particularly at the top politically, specifically, the more ossified things become as they are quite right now, it’s very vulnerable to any sort of disruption. There’s only one person however, in Putin’s inner or outer circles, who might have the means and the guts, his name is Igor section. He was a gun runner during the Soviet days, and he, he fears very little, but if there’s one thing that everyone else in the Russian elite agrees upon, is that egos such as a bit of a prick, and so if he did stab Putin in the back with a knife section himself would probably cut him to pieces within 24 hours. So I don’t think that is the coup scenario that most people are hopeful of in the West. Anyway, it’s not something I see is particularly likely likely. And even if it did happen, I don’t think it really changed the facts on the ground at all. All right, that’s it for me everyone have a great Fourth until next time