Russia's New Crisis Could Be Their Worst One Yet

Right now the war in Ukraine is getting very interesting and things are developing and changing very quickly in a direction that seems very positive for those who support Ukraine. A lot has been happening lately and we are seeing potentially now a shift in strategy that might indicate that we are now reaching the end phases of the war, the beginning of the end. But if we haven't reached the beginning of the end, at least to borrow the words of Winston Churchill in World War II, we have definitely at least reached the end of the beginning, where strategies that have been kind of developing over years are now reaching maturity. Since the beginning of Russia's full scale invasion, which is several years back now, Ukraine has always been very explicit, very clear, and even very public about what their strategy to ultimately defeat Russia was. Where they would engage Russia in a war of attrition, where they would use their defensive advantages to make the war far too costly for Russia to actually advance. And that if Russia was foolish enough to continue trying to advance, they would grow weakened over time and eventually they would be in a weak enough state that Ukraine could hopefully ultimately turn the tide and perhaps even defeat Russia and take their territory back. Early on in the war, a lot of people laughed at this strategy. Ukraine talked about this strategy all the way back in Bakhmut, and people said that Ukraine could never last against Russia for a long enough period of time because Russia is just a much larger country than Ukraine. But over the years, we see that people have probably been proven wrong. And Ukraine, as I said, is now flipping potentially from this war of long dragged out attrition to potentially trying to turn up that attrition to create actual meaningful advantages on the We see Russia struggling from this attrition in several ways. Most explicitly, when we look at the front line, we see Russia struggling from attrition, and that is why they have not been able to make significant advances in several years, and their rate of advance seems to get slower with each passing month, in fact, with each passing day. We see Russia struggling with attrition in their manpower itself, but even more than that in their tanks and armored vehicles, which to this point, they have essentially run out of, at least they don't have enough to actually push forward the front line, and that's largely why they are so stalled. We also see Russian attrition in several other areas. For example, we see Russian attrition when it comes to refineries in terms of the parts needed to repair refineries, where it seems that over many years, Ukraine was striking refineries, trying to get Russia to use up the parts they had, so that at a moment like now, they could turn up the pressure on Russian refineries when they didn't have an ability to quickly recover from that pressure. Kind of draw out your enemy supplies, and once they are out of supplies, then you flip the switch. And it also seems like Ukraine is now using that strategy in another area, which is against Russian air defense. Obviously, none of this is in isolation, it all works together, and when it comes to Russian air defense, I have started to notice something lately that is very, very troubling for Russia. The work behind today's episode was made possible by my sponsor, Incogni. There are a lot of unique problems that come with living in a modern world, and many often come back to the same root. 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They're hitting the same targets again and again and again and again. And what they have done is they have exposed that Russia is far too large of a country to be adequately defended by literally all the air defense in the world. Russia cannot adequately defend their own territory. And Ukraine has added to this pressure by introducing the Flamingo cruise missiles, which are extremely long-range missiles which carry much bigger warheads than the drones can carry. They can cause a lot more destruction, they unlock new categories of targets Ukraine can hit. And combined with Ukraine's long-range strikes on Russian refineries, just the existence of these Flamingo missiles, even if they are not being launched, is forcing Russia to change their air defense strategy and to prioritize air defenses around different targets. Basically, Russia is being forced to abandon large swathes of their country because they know they can only defend certain sections. And Ukraine is now taking advantage of these movements to take out Russian air defenses in a way that we've never seen before. And it was only recently when I was watching some video footage of Ukrainian strikes against Russian air defense systems that I realized how brilliant this is. Ukrainian strikes against Russian air defense systems that were originating from the air. And you might ask, how do you destroy an air defense system from the air? One way to do that is to force these air defense systems to go offline to get in a mode for transit and to be relocated. And now what we see in a lot of video footage is a lot of the air defense systems that Ukraine is destroying are Russian air defense systems that are on the road that are closed up and that are in this mode for transit. And we start to see the real brilliance of what Ukraine is doing, where they are taking advantage of the chaos that they have created against Russia to exponentially ramp up their war of attrition, specifically against Russian air defense systems, which will make Russia unable to defend itself going forward. Now, in case you missed that, I want to state it really clearly. What Ukraine is doing is they are creating the conditions within Russia where they feel forced to relocate air defenses around critical targets. And that movement alone is leaving large swathes of the country more exposed because they don't have air defense. But even in the act of moving air defenses from one spot to another, Ukraine has made the existing Russian air defenses also a lot more vulnerable. And they are able to take advantage of this vulnerability to take out air defense systems that they otherwise may have struggled to hit earlier. And this is only ramping up the gaps in Russian air defenses even more. And it is really causing an exponential impact where Russia has less and less air defenses to defend more and more targets. And with each air defense system that gets taken offline, it becomes easier for Ukraine to sneak through the gaps and destroy each additional air defense system. And as they do this, it is a domino effect. And very soon, Russia will not be able to defend their own skies. Most people are aware of the phrase, getting your foot in the door. And the idea is that if there is a door that's slamming shut, if you can just get your foot in and keep a gap open, you can then push that gap open wider. And the more wide open the gap gets, the easier it is to actually walk through it. That is exactly what is happening to Russian air defense systems right now. Ukraine very much has their foot in the door. They have a wedge in, a wedge that took them a long time, several years of warfare to develop as they slowly ground down Russian air defense systems. But now that gap is wide enough that it is causing exponential impacts and the gap is widening at a faster rate every single day. And Ukraine's ability to take out more air defense systems and widen the gap even more gets greater with each additional strike. That is going to be a very big deal when it comes to how this war ultimately plays out. And it's going to be a big deal in a very specific way that I think Ukraine is actively pursuing right now. What I think Ukraine is doing right now is they are recognizing what Russia ultimately is, which is an empire that is controlled by Moscow, but that gets all of its power from the surrounding territories, gets all of its resources, gets all of its soldiers, etc. And they are recognizing that very soon Russia will not have enough air defense to protect a significant portion of the empire. And as they run lower on air defense, they are going to be more inclined to just protect the heart of the empire, Moscow. They are essentially trying to get the elites of Russia to build a fortress around themselves to protect themselves. But as the elites in Russia do this, which they inevitably will because that is how their psychology works, we see that in every other way they've conducted the war, the people outside of these central regions are going to become more and more aware that their country is abandoning them. They're going to become more and more aware that they're suffering the costs of this war and they're not reaping any benefits from it. And they might even see the war as pointless, but up to this point they haven't suffered any costs from it, so they don't really care either way. But now as they begin to suffer more and more costs, these people will be more willing to actively work against their government or at least not actively support the government. Ukraine is going to make it harder in this way for Russia to get more soldiers for their war. They are going to make it harder for Russia to get more resources to fight their war, and again they're already low on all of these things. And we can see this in the particular way that the air defense movements are playing out, where Ukraine is doing this by hitting refineries, particularly refineries deep within Russia in regions that are already a little bit upset at the Moscow government for several reasons, and they are causing gasoline shortages in these regions. And the central government can't do anything about it, and so instead of solving the problems in the further out regions, they are just trying to protect what they have. And we're going to see this play out more and more and more when it comes to the air defenses being moved from all the Russia and just being centralized around the Russian elite. Ukraine seems to deeply understand the psychology that drives people like Vladimir Putin, which is of course inherently selfish, they don't really care about their people, but they care very deeply about themselves. And whenever they are faced with a choice between protecting their people or protecting themselves, they're always going to choose to protect themselves. And as Ukraine peels off more and more air defenses over time, that means that as the Moscow elites make the decision to protect themselves more, which will be harder to do as they run lower and lower in air defense systems, other critical military targets will become exposed. And the Moscow elites might not want those targets to become exposed, but they kind of have to because they have to choose between letting those targets be exposed or letting themselves be exposed. And so Ukraine is going to be using Russia's large size against it. The fact that a lot of Russian factories, the fact that a lot of Russian logistics hubs are distributed throughout the country in a whole lot of different areas is going to work against Russia. And over time, these will be more vulnerable and Ukraine will progressively be able to take these facilities out. We have already seen Ukraine doing this, it is only going to get worse over time. Now the real kicker here, which makes this such a big deal is that Russian air defense systems cannot be replaced quickly. And that means that as Ukraine makes these strikes, they are making semi-permanent changes on the battlefield. They're making changes that Russia won't be able to rectify, at least not while the war is ongoing. For example, an S-400 air defense system and peacetime conditions can take somewhere between 12 and 18 months to train all the units who are responsible for running that and to actually get it deployed. And so every time Ukraine destroys one of those, it sets Russia back by 12 to 18 months to replace it. And that is far too long. And while it's destroyed, Ukraine is taking out other air defense systems in the process. And so what we realize is that over a prolonged period of time, and again, I said this many times, but Ukraine is playing the long game in the war. Everybody seems to think they're playing the short game, but everything we've seen about their strategy shows that they're playing the long game. Over a prolonged period of time, as Ukraine continues to do this, it is actually somewhat inevitable that Russia will eventually lose their ability to wage war on the Ukrainian front lines. Russia will run out of the ability to deliver troops and supplies to the front line, especially as Ukraine removes Russian air defenses from across Russia and they are now striking factories and logistics hubs, things that they're already doing, that they'll only be able to do at an increased pace. As that happens, Russia will no longer be able to support the front, and that makes it exceedingly more likely that the longer the war goes, Ukraine will eventually be able to create and exploit gaps in the Russian front line. And it is at that point that the war might ultimately end. And at that point, the Russian people will probably be more frustrated with Moscow. The Russian military will probably have less soldiers. The soldiers they do have will be a lot less loyal. And this becomes a very realistic win condition that over time Ukraine can create, and in fact is creating, and in fact has explicitly said from the beginning of the war that this is their strategy. Now, I think Ukraine was clear and upfront early on in the war that this was their strategy because their goal was to get Russia to stop sending troops against them to die. They wanted Russia to know that if you keep sending soldiers, we're going to keep defeating them and eventually we will defeat you. And as far as Ukraine was concerned, if that caused Russia to stop sending soldiers, they were okay with that. But Russia hasn't stopped sending soldiers. They've shown that they're very locked into this war. They're very committed, despite all of these warnings, despite all of this experience over time. And so it seems unlikely that Russia will quit now. They are in it to win it, but it doesn't seem like they can actually win it. Long story short, Ukraine is destroying a lot of Russian air defense systems. Every time they do that, they are creating a permanent change on the battlefield. They are destroying those air defense systems at a more rapid pace. That in turn is allowing them to destroy other types of Russian military targets at a more rapid pace, and things are rapidly accelerating faster and faster towards the end of the war, which is very encouraging. What Ukraine needs now is to not quit, to keep executing their winning strategy, and to show Russia that you don't attack a free people whose homes, whose lives, whose families are at stake. Ukraine is very inspiring, and I'm very grateful to have been able to watch them this far. Now, I'm also grateful to you who've watched this far. If you found this video helpful or useful, please do like the video and subscribe to the channel. Those things are both completely free, but they help me out a lot. And as always, if you want to support the channel more, it's completely voluntary, but I really do appreciate it. There are a number of links in the description by which you can do so. Do consider becoming a patron of the channel or becoming a YouTube channel member if you are a regular viewer. Thanks so much for watching again. I'll see you on the next one.