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Our great podcasts, visit hartmanmedia.com it is my pleasure to welcome a returning guest back to the show, and that is Peter Zion. You may have seen him. He's out there a lot in the media and on YouTube online and so forth. He is a geopolitical expert. I consider him to be one of the foremost geopolitical experts in the world. Just has some great content and a fantastic way of helping people, people understand these extremely complex issues. He's got a few books out. Peter, how many books do you have now, by the way?

The fourth one comes out in June.

That's what I was going to say. So. So the fourth one coming out in June and that is entitled the End of the World is Just Beginning. And by the way, that title does not relate to the current crisis in Ukraine. But yeah, I asked him to come in early. We have it. We have an interview booked out about two months from now, I believe. And so much is going on in the world. I just thought really important to ask Peter to come back. He was gracious enough to do it. So. Peter, welcome back. How are you doing?

I'm a little stressed and I haven't had much sleep in the last six days, but I'm, other than that, doing well.

I can imagine everybody wants to talk to you right now, so thank you for making time for my audience. You know, I'll just let you take it wherever you want to go. Obviously, we had Russia invade Ukraine just less than a week ago. Just a lot to digest. You know, what. What is the end game? I mean, just there's a million questions. What do you want to tell us?

Well, let me kind of give you the short version of what's going on the battlefield. This will obviously be a little outdated by the time this posts in a few hours, but it gives you an idea of what's going on. There are three major thrusts. The Russians and the Belarusians. Belarus, by the way, no longer exists as a country. It has now been sublimated into Russia. Belarusian and Russian forces have poured south into Kiev. They're in the process of launching their fourth major assault on the city right now. There is a second push that is in the east, going into the city of Krakow. Krakow is a Russian ethnic population, Russian speaker city that has been there, been under regular shelling for the last 12 hours. The Russians apparently have gotten frustrated that they just couldn't just go in and there and have everyone join them. So they're leveling it.

Yeah.

And then there's a big third front in the south where forces from Crimea and forces from the secessionist enclaves in the southeast are joining together at Mariupol. That'll provide a land bridge for Russian forces all the way to Crimea, and then they can push very hard for the commercial capital of Odessa. With the fog of war and everything, it's really hard to say who's going to be successful when. But I would expect that third front to be the most important one for the next few days. Mariupol can't hold out much longer. And after that, all the forces that were dedicated to that will be able to pour towards Odessa. And Odessa doesn't have nearly the capacity, capacity to resist that Kiev and Krakow have. So I can see Odessa falling within a week. And if that happens, the Ukrainians have lost their major port and their primary way of getting large amounts of material in and out of the country, whether that is wheat for exporter, weapons for the war. After that, the Russians will probably do a couple north south thrusts to chop up what's left of the Ukrainian army, and then we segue into the really, really brutal chapter of this.

Wow, that's. That's awful. And tell me what you mean by the really brutal chapter. Do you mean, like, street war?

We're already having that.

Well, I. I mean, I know, but do you mean just more of that after they've sort of conquered the.

The major Ukrainian army is defanged. This becomes a partisan conflict, guerrillas. And there are 45 million people in Ukraine. Russia has not fought a battle on this scale since the Second World War, and they have never fought an occupation war like this with the possible exception of af. But in Afghanistan, you have your population centers, and then there's not a lot else.

Right.

It's desert here, it's farmland. So Ukraine is a forest of small towns and fields. And fighting a partisan war. Well, you know, ask the Russians, because that's how they've defended themselves in the past. So this is going to be a million plus, probably 2 million plus Russian troop occupation in an attempt to pacify this country. And it is going to be long, and it's going to be brutal, and it's going to be bloody.

Wow, that's just awful news to hear all that. But so many elements of this to talk about. Does Putin have a case for doing this at all? Like, is there any shred of a case for him? Listen, and I asked that question from the context of Peter. I hate bullies with a passion, and I consider Russia to be the bully. The population's almost, what, three times the size, obviously, vastly more resources, and the Ukrainians are holding out pretty so far, but it. But it's very early five. Yeah, yeah, I know.

Let me give you the Russian case. I mean, obviously, ethically and morally, there's nothing that the Russians are doing.

Yes.

You know, beyond a.

And by the way, when I asked that question, I'm likening it to the Cuban Missile crisis. So in the early 60s, you know, we didn't want. And, you know, if Ukraine was to join NATO. Right. They don't want missiles on their doorstep. They don't want NATO there. So that's kind of the. I'm giving them a little bit of a. Yeah.

To be perfectly blunt, that argument's bullshit. Because the only way that the Russians can have the degree of security that they say they deserve is if they occupy and deny rights to a population that's larger than their own.

Right.

So the Russian position, which is not insane, is that Russia has been invaded dozens of times in its history. All of the invaders have come through the same nine pathways, breaks in the mountains or between the ocean and a mountain rang. And so the Russian position is we need to physically expand the footprint of our country until we reach those barriers and can plug those gateways. That is the only way we can be safe. But that means, among other things, that Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia don't have a right to exist.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. They want to make the Soviet Union again. Right.

Well, not because it was a world power, although they didn't. They don't mind that, but because the Soviet Union controlled all nine of those gateways, because it controlled all of those territories. But the Soviet Union, when it fell, only had three. Only had 300 million people. Russia Today only has 140 million. And all those other territories combined, you know, that's over 200 million people.

Yeah.

So the only way Russia will stop, the only way that Russia will be satisfied is if they get it all, because they see that as the only way they can be safe.

Who do they think is going to invade them?

Today? No one. But Russian history is replete with examples.

Sure.

So they're not thinking about this moment. They're looking forward because the Russian population is dying out. And if the Russians do not secure their beachheads, their gateways in the next few years, they will lose all military capacity to do so. And so the only thing that is worse from their point of view of doing nothing and just allowing time to take them over is if they try and fail. So if they move out, they get condemned, their economy crashes and they still can't secure those gateways. Then Russia ceases to exist less than a decade after that.

Right, But Japan is a dying country. Their population is. They're going extreme.

They're also an island, and they made a deal with the United States. So you remember a few years ago when Trump was president, he went to the Koreans, the Japanese and the Germans, they said, you need to increase what you're paying for as compensation for the bases by a factor of five. The Germans said flat out, no. And we're still dealing with the fallout from that. One of the reasons why our response to Ukraine has been so limited is Trump destroyed a lot of the intellectual and diplomatic and even physical infrastructure that was necessary. The Koreans dickered over the price, and they're paying the price for that now. The Japanese tipped us, and so Japan is in with the United States, almost as if it was American territory. And if this war had happened five years ago, Japan would not be participating in the sanctions. Instead, they were the third country to sign up. They've realized what they need to do in the long run. They found a security sponsor. They're paying us to remain interested. It's working.

Yeah. Okay, so it's a pay for play deal. Okay, so what is Putin's end game here? Is that it? Did you just describe it?

Well, Ukraine controls one, one and a half of those gateways, so that's specifically what they're after here with a lot of the other interventions in the past, whether it's in Georgia in 2004, Crimea in 2014, Nagorno Karabakh last year, Kazakhstan this January. That allowed the Russians to get boots on the ground in many of these gateways. If they capture Ukraine in its total, they will now or would have access to seven of them. You're getting pretty close to what they consider success.

So what do you think of the response of the Western world? I mean, I've been surprised.

Pleasantly.

Pleasantly. Okay. Like in a good way with the economic sanctions.

Yeah. I mean, none of the sanctions that are in place are enough to whack the Russians up the side of the head and give a second thought. But I am quite pleased that the west is not dead. We haven't been able to get NATO to agree to anything of substance, in my opinion, since 1987. And to have the strictest sanctions in human history in place, to have the Russian central bank shut off from all financial avenues, it can't access dollars or euros or yen or Aussie dollar or Swiss francs, even ones that they own are now beyond them. That is an amazing agreement. Like I said, it's not enough. The only sanction that the Europeans might have been able to do that would have made Putin blink heavily would have been just to say, we will never buy any Russian oil or natural gas ever again.

Could they even do that, though?

Not without a lot of pain. The Russians, based on which country you're talking, on average, it's 40% of their energy needs. And so if you were to get by without 40% of the energy you needed for the next year, your life would look very, very different. So I understand why the Europeans are trying to have their cake and eat it too, but it's not going to last. There is no way. You have a war in a country as large as Ukraine, with as much infrastructure as Ukraine and with the tactics that the Russians are going to have to use. And that energy is still going to flow. So one way or another, this year, probably in the next few weeks, those energy flow are going to shut off anyway.

So can Russia afford to keep this war going for very long? I was reading yesterday that this is a $20 billion a week war for them.

That's not how they think of things. Russians pride themselves to a degree on privation. And the sort of people who would push back against the government are the kind that are eating the imported cheese. They're not the kind of people that are going to pick up a soldier and pick up a weapon and march on Red Square. You're talking about the pro Western elites. The more educ. And those people are now trying to find a way out. And from Putin's point of view, he sees them as a net loss, so that's really not a problem.

Right. But there's.

He sees their departure as a net win. I said that backwards.

Sure. But there's just the harsh economic reality of Russia basically can't buy anything.

Yeah. Russia's economic reality is usually harsh. This is not a shock to them.

Fair enough. But what happens when the money runs out? I mean, it's going to run out. Right.

And life gets tougher. And the money that they've got left, they don't. They can't access it. All the currency reserves, all their foreign currency were out of the country. They can't reach it. All that's left is. I don't have the numbers firmly committed. I think it's about 120 billion in gold that is of no use in domestic management. And then like 60 billion in yuan, which is yuan that the Chinese don't want back. So they're already there, they're already scraping metal.

But what happens when their supplies diminish? I mean, they. Running a war is just a massive supply haul.

All of their weapons supplies are built domestically. It's entirely possible that they will find that they have some components or some weapons systems that they didn't adequately prepare for and that will turn the war into more of a slog. But The Russians have 10 times the army that the Ukrainians do, and so long as no one else launches an invasion of Russia proper or sends regular troops into Ukraine, they will win this.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's inevitable. What about Putin's remark, I think on Sunday about using nukes if anybody interferes?

Well, they feel great. But the Russians have done this off and on for 70 years. And so all the people in the west who make their policies or responsibility, they all perked up. They all looked at it very, very closely and they're like, okay, nothing's really changed. It's just rhetoric. All of the, I think that the term they use is muscle memory. Within the nuclear forces, nothing has moved. This is just Putin being a bit of a prick. It's not something you should ignore, but it's also not something you should overly worry about.

What do you think Putin wants on a personal basis? Is he just an evil tyrant? Is he looking to make a name for himself in a really bad way? Or is he desperate because he knows his time is up? Right.

I think those are the kind of the top three categories here. Okay, he is an evil tyrant. He is a dictator. And now everybody but Tucker Carlson admits it. Even Tulsi Gold, Gabbard and Bernie Sanders have switched sides finally. Second, he is desperate for his country because he realized that demographically they're in collapse and they have very little time left. And yeah, he wants to be remembered as the next Peter the Great or Catherine the Great, somebody who remade the Russian condition and allowed the country to coast on those successes for decades to come. It's our job to make sure he fails at all three.

Are we going to be able to do that? And how the United States will not.

Be intervening directly because Ukraine is not a NATO ally. Also, have you seen the reports of that massive 40 plus mile long convoy coming out of Belarus?

I was thinking that one of our drones could easily take care of, but.

It would take more than one. But that's a, that's Kind of a good example of how the Russians suck at logistics. So if it came to a direct head to head fight between the United States and the Russians, one, our military is brilliant logistics. It's like it's Disneyland. The military, everybody else, and the only thing they're better at is taking a large number of vehicles that are in a line.

Yeah.

So if it did come to a regular war between Russia and the United States, we would wipe the floor with them in terms of the armored warfare and the artillery battle. And then they would feel that they would have no choice but to consider nukes. And so there's no reason to expect the United States to directly intervene. We will play favorites. We are playing favorites. Congress is going to be asked tonight to send at least $6 billion in direct military equipment to the Ukrainians. I figured that'll pass in a matter of seconds. We have sent a whole lot of Javelins, we don't know how many, probably at least 1000 launchers by this. Every country in NATO is sending everything they have. One of the fun things about NATO is that during the Cold War there were different tiers of military equipment because some countries were more advanced. When the Cold War ended, everyone spent 15 years upgrading their equipment and they handed the older stuff to the new allies in Central Europe and Turkey. Now all of those countries have upgraded their equipment and they're sending all their hand me downs to Ukraine. So there's a metric, a butt ton of stuff that's going into Ukraine right now and that is not going to turn the tide of the war. But it means that the Russians will have to pay in blood for every single inch. And once they capture it, they'll be partisans and they'll have to go back and do it again. And the only way the Russians know how to deal with that is to level everything.

That's awful. You know, I've been to Ukraine twice and that was already a struggling country with, with infrastructure problems galore. I guess the one slight positive we can look at is if they receive the funding to rebuild and if Russia doesn't take over, or at least not completely, they'll be replacing things with new stuff. But it's just awful to think of.

And this is just the next phase in what the Russia sees as multi step expansion. They're not done with Ukraine.

It reminds me of the Jimmy Carter era and then Reagan's speech when he, you know, came in and said, you know, since he took over, the Russians did not take one square inch of real estate after that. But during Carter they, they did more moves. Do you think we'll get any help from the Russians themselves? I mean, the anti war protests that are going on in Russia, you know, we've all seen these viral videos of some of the soldiers in Russia, you know, sort of backing down to the Ukrainians, not in a gunfight, but in an argument, in a yelling match. I mean, those soldiers have to have a conscience.

Well, the soldiers are all. Well, most of the soldiers are draftees. So you can imagine how they feel about what's going on right now since they didn't realize that this is what they were going to be in for. For the Russians back in Russia. No. There have been a number of protest movements in Russia over the last several years and they've got progressively smaller. And when I look yesterday at the numbers, there were only about 6,000 Russians total that had been arrested so far nationwide. That's nowhere near enough to gener the sort of activity that Putin's gonna be even the least bit concerned about. The report I heard this morning from Ukraine, which made me perk up a little bit, is that apparently a couple platoons of Russian soldiers surrendered to the Ukrainians and not after a fight. If you get mass desertions among the Russian soldiers, then we're talking about a very different situation. But this is one report that has not been confirmed.

Yeah.

Okay, but if you're going to be looking for hope on the Russian side, it'll be in Ukraine, not in Russia.

Okay. So the other fear that some are talking about is this gives license to China to do what it wants to do with Taiwan.

I'm not worried about that at all. Yeah, no, I think that's a little simplistic. If the United States were to get involved in Ukraine in a real way, that would be the air force, that would be the special forces, that would be the army. If we're going to get involved in Ukraine, it's going to be the navy. It's an island. Yeah. It's just basic military math. I also don't think that the Chinese are itching to go because if the Chinese did, the war would look very different from Ukraine. So in Ukraine, Russia holds all the mid and long term advantages here. More equipment, more men, a self sustaining system at home. China is 100% dependent upon international trade as maintained by the American led globalized order. And if they try to throw a wrench in that, they lose access because we'll just put a couple of destroyers out in the Indian Ocean and cut the energy line. Three months later, the buses stop. Running because they run out of fuel. Three months after that the power goes out. And less than a year after that they lose 500 million people to famine because agriculture is an internationalized trade based system and all the inputs that allow them to grow their food are not from China.

Yeah, and the communists are, are out.

Okay, well that's a topic for another day.

Okay, fair enough. It's a long topic. Talk about the economic side of this. You know, I think at least initially we're gonna see more easing from our Fed, maybe downward pressure on interest rates. I mean, we've already had that, you know that it's been just toxic the way it's gone through the pandemic.

I'm not gonna comment on the Fed because the Fed is about to be thrown a thousand curveballs and I'm not sure the Fed has the tools to deal with even if we all agreed on what needed to be done. Let me put this from the Ukrainian and the Russian point of view.

Yeah. And agriculture, of course, because Ukraine is a big exporter and fertilizer.

Russia is the number one exporter of wheat and it just invaded the number five exporter of wheat. Ukraine will not plant crops this spring. We have shortages in every kind of fertilizer. Nitrogen, because natural gas prices are up by a factor of seven. Before the Russian moves, they're going to go up more. Phosphate because the Chinese have blocked exports because they're terrified of about what's about to happen internally. And 40% of the world's potash comes from Belarus and Russia. No matter how this shakes out, we are going to have famine continental in scope before the end of the year. And this is just the beginning of the unwinding of global agriculture.

So how many people are you talking about this year?

I don't know. But the carrying capacity of the land of in a de globalized world is about a billion billion and a half less than what we have right now.

Right. Which by the way is the subject of your new book coming out. Right?

Yes. The whole point of the End of the World is just the beginning, is to look at what all the economic sectors look like on the backside of globalization once it's gone.

Right.

So remove all the structures that have allowed us to build and grow to where we are. What happens when they're just not there anymore? And it's different for every sector, it's different for every region. But agriculture is by far the chapter that gives me the most nightmares.

What you're saying is this conflict right now, the result of it is Going to be a continental sized famine for Europe.

Europe's probably okay. Good farmland, good local fertilizer processing. They're going to have some definite problems, but not famine. Let me give you a point of reference. In 2010, there were a bunch of fires in Siberia because they had a really horrible season for ag. And so the Russians intervened in markets and prevented exports from their part of the world. For a few months, global wheat prices doubled. Global wheat prices tripled in some of the places that used to rely on Ukrainian, Kazakh and Russian wheat. And that triggered a series of uprisings and coups and wars that we now know as the Arab Spring. And that was from a partial disruption, not a complete disruption. And that had nothing to do with fertilizer. Fertilizer just flowed fine. What we're dealing here is at least a factor of six bigger than that. Wow.

We're already experiencing very significant inflation.

If you look at the countries that have really expanded their agricultural footprint of late, Western Australia, Brazil, they do it all with imported inputs. They're just not there right now.

That's pretty scary. Pretty scary. What else can you tell us about the economic impact?

Oil and gas. Oil and gas. Oil and gas. I mean, I realize that's a little redundant.

Up, up, up.

Yeah, exactly. Well, it's. We're going to lose the world's second largest exporter of oil and largest exporter of natural gas. Because no matter how this war goes, either the Russians are going to use it as leverage or the Ukrainian partisans are going to go after the infrastructure, or the Turks aren't going to let it through the Turkish Straits because they've activated the Montreux Treaty, or the Europeans are going to do sanctions, or the Americans are going to. No matter how this goes down, Russia stops shipping energy west.

What would you say about our policy with the current administration, with the Biden administration here that has really attacked energy in favor of green energy? Has that put our energy security at risk?

The United States is still a net exporter by a significant margin. We export over 3 million barrels a day of refined product. So while I'm not exactly thrilled with some of the things the Biden administration has done on energy policy, you'd have to do a whole lot more damage to actually impact the bottom line. My concern moving forward is that in a world where the Russians cease to be a player and oil prices skyrocket because it's a globalized market, the US President has the power, granted by the 2015 Energy Omnibus Bill, to end American energy exports with the stroke of a Pen, which means that we'll be fine. But then the world would lose access to American energy and Russian energy at the same time. And now you're talking wartime shortages everywhere else.

And that would concern me that they would be very pressured to get energy and they would get it any way they can. And that means they would.

Where everything else breaks. That's one of the ways everything else can break down very quickly.

Yeah, it really is. Peter, I know your time is very limited and we're going to have you back in about two months. I think when you're, when your book launch happens, can't wait to talk to you about more normal stuff then hopefully.

But I hate to ruin it, but it's not going to get anywhere.

It's not going to be more normal. I know. Wishful thinking. Wishful thinking. What else do you want to say as you wrap it up? Anything I didn't ask you or just anything you want to tell us?

I would just add that the first three books, Accidental Superpower, Absent Superpower, Disunited nations, there's big fat sections on all of them on Russia and the Russia, Ukraine conflict in general. Any book sales that are made between March 1 and May 31, every cent of my royalties are going to Ukrainian charities to help with medical needs of the refugees and the people who decided to stay behind.

That's great. That's awesome.

And Peter, give out your website, www.zeina.com. feel free to sign up for the web for the newsletter. It's free. It will always be free.

The newsletter is great and you've got some great YouTube content out there as well. Peter Zion, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

No problem. Have a good one.

Hey, good morning. Jason Hartman and team. Thank you for all the great content, all the the great guest speakers you have on and Gina and I feel fantastic about doing what we're doing and we'll just keep on listening and take care and wish we could see you all soon and hope that'll be happening. Take care. Thank you so much much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to itunes or Stitcher radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review for the show. We would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.