Peter Zeihan

Russia at the moment, with the Shadow Fleet still in play, looks good at the moment.

Euro's crude trading in India is already priced higher than all the international benchmarks because of the demand.

And then, of course, the United States, because we have that clause that allows us to remove ourselves from global energy.

And anything that wrecks Europe and East Asia at the same time will really hurt us from a consumables point of view because our manufacturing hasn't been built out.

But longer term, this is a society-ending event potentially for a lot of countries, but not here.

Outside of Iran, Ukraine is getting a really interesting phase.

Very, very short version.

Starlink was being allowed to be used to guide Russian cruise missiles and drones long-term, allowing them to even hit moving targets.

So you take a Shahed, whether it's a Russian Shahed or an Iranian Shahed, and if you put a portable Starlink on it,

you can guide it in real time all the way to the last second and so the restriction is on straight line flight go away the idea that you can only target something that you've chosen at the time of launch goes away and they were literally hitting moving trains uh with these things um after the ukrainians proved to the world uh using the equipment recovered that starlink was basically actively aiding and embedding in mass murder

Starlink changed some of their policies, and you can no longer use Starlink in the theater in a moving way, and you have to be part of a white list.

And in doing that, they basically gutted the ability of the Russians to communicate to and from and among the front.

And so in the last month, the Ukrainians have been on the offensive throughout many parts of the front and actually captured a lot of territory.

It's kind of underlined how these new technologies are

number one, aren't under government control, they're under private citizen control, and two, their ability to be extended and removed can have massive impacts on strategic decision-making.

The Russian ability to communicate among their forces pre-war was pretty poor, and that's one of the reasons why the first year of the war went so badly, and how the Kyrsten counter-offensive, for example, was so humiliating for them.

They then basically use Starlink wholesale.

They've been using Western platforms to communicate.

And so now that some of those have been removed, they really don't have a fallback plan that is more sophisticated than radio, and radio can be tapped.

So I don't want to suggest that we're seeing a collapse of the front.