Why Russia Sees This Fight as an Existential Battle - And Why That Makes This Situation So Dangerous

Peter Zeihan's analysis of Russia's demographic collapse is an overlooked piece in a complex puzzle.

The following is a paid subscribers-only post with free preview. If you’d like access to all subscribers-only features and posts, you can sign up for just $5/month or $50 per year, right here:

Writing is how I make my living, so if you like what you see here, please support my work by subscribing!

If you’ve already subscribed but would like to buy me a coffee to help keep me fueled up for writing, you can do that at the button below:

Or alternatively, if you’d like you can drop a tip in my PayPal. Thanks for your support!

---

My last piece on the latest escalation in the Ukraine/Russia war was too long to include this information, so I decided to tackle it in a separate post.

If you’re not familiar with Peter Zeihan, he’s a geopolitical analyst and author who has gained a good bit of notoriety for his predictions about the end of globalism and the coming demographic collapse, especially in Asia, Russia, and Europe.

He’s also a somewhat controversial figure. Extremely knowledgeable, but also exceptionally confident in his own understanding of facts, some people dispute his analysis.

But for me, much of it rings true. I first saw him on the Joe Rogan Experience, where he explained why Russia is fighting this battle right now:

In his book, The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America, Zeihan explains his thesis about the Russian “Twilight War” in further depth:

Russia’s geography, in a word, sucks.

Russian lands are barely temperate, with all but one Russian city lying at a higher latitude than Minneapolis.2 Moscow itself gets under 20 hours of sunlight for the entire month of December. Russia only has one commercially navigable river, the Volga, which is frozen one-third of the year and empties to the landlocked Caspian Sea rather than the ocean. Short growing seasons make full tables something the Russians will never take for granted, while lack of easy movement condemns the country to being capital poor.

But the real difference is the shape of the land itself. Russian lands are wide open. Roughly 80 percent of the Russian population lives in European Russia, a region some 1,500 miles north-to-south but at most points only 1,000 miles east to west that is the flattest on earth.

On the western edge, the Russian plains merge almost seamlessly with the plains of Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, and especially Ukraine. There are no mountains or hills or even rivers separating them from each other. The southern border is even more open. Russia shares a 4,200-mile border with Kazakhstan, most of which is bereft of features more vertical than a Kansas interstate on-ramp.

In the southwest there is a “real” border in the Greater Caucasus chain — a mountain range that paved roads breach in but four places, only two of which remain open year-round. But most of the people in the northern slopes of the Greater Caucasus are not actually Russians. Instead the regional populations are a Halloween candy grab bag — complete with hidden razor blades — of conquered peoples ranging from the Kabards to the Ingush to the Circassians to the Chechens to the Dagestanis.3 Only one sizable Russian-populated metro center — Rostov-on-Don — sits within 350 miles of the border.

What barriers Russia does have are in the wrong places: the forests and swamps and mountains of the Arctic and Siberia aren’t between the Russians and rivals, but between the Russians and even crappier land. When the Russians look out across their world they don’t see lands brimming with potential or ocean moats granting stand-off distance or impregnable deserts and mountains guarding flanks, but instead a relatively thin slice of civilized lands surrounded by patches of chaos with richer, hostile lands beyond.

Russian security only comes from conquering everyone nearby in order to establish buffers around the Russian core. If you can Russify these conquered peoples so that they identify with Moscow’s goals (and fears), excellent! But this is not required. Or expected. The intent is not for them to be productive, but to instead transform these conquered peoples into a different sort of barrier — a sort of strategic road bump between more distant foes and the greater Moscow region. Since few people tell their children nursery rhymes about the joys of serving as other people’s cannon fodder, the Russians often have to find ways to motivate their conquered populations — or more to the point, to intimidate their subjects into accepting the role the Russians demand of them. The Russians do this with a deep, intrusive, and cruel intelligence service. Under Lenin it was the Cheka, under Stalin the NVBD, and Brezhnev the KGB, after the Cold War the FSB, and now it’s the FSB backed up with the social-monitoring techniques Edward Snowden brought with him from the American NSA. It’s not a kind system, but history has not been kind to Russia.

Russia’s territory is nearly the size of South America. Russia’s borders stretch for more than 12,000 miles. Yet Russia’s population is less than half that of the United States. The huge swathe of lightly populated lands means that Russia can never afford the dense infrastructure footprints so common in the Western world. This dictates the sort of military Russia must field: The lack of infrastructure prevents Russia from maintaining a small, technically advanced, highly mobile force that could be quickly redeployed to where it is most needed. Instead Russia must maintain massive, ponderous forces hard on its borders.

Both of these strategies — the intensive intel operations and the static military stationing — are incredibly manpower-intensive. It’s a task that requires — at a minimum — a million-man-strong intel system and another 4 million for the army. As of 2016 Russia sports roughly 770,000 active-duty troops. Its 2 million reservists could fill the gaps in an emergency, but a standing force they are not. To a degree, good tech penetration to sniff out dissidents and some snazzy propaganda to win over the masses can somewhat mitigate the intel cost, but in a land of poor infrastructure and endless flatlands, there is no substitute for a gigantic army.

It’s about to get a lot worse.