Zeihan talks about Russian demographics and if Putin will disappear. It doesn't sound very promising for Putin's disappearance. He thinks this war only ends when one side cries uncle.
Zeihan can be a bit over the top sometimes, but in this case I agree with him. When this war ends, it will end in Russia, not Ukraine. If Ukraine has a good run and forces Russia completely off their territory, then the Russians will be left sitting on their side of the border attacking Ukrainian territory, but they will still be fighting until something happens to bring down the Russian system.
One thing when he was talking about the demographics is that Russia never had the expertise to develop oil fields very well. My sister is a petroleum Geologist and she left the major oil companies around 1990 to go work for a small Geology company in town (Bakersfield, CA). The guy who owned the company had been a manager at Occidental and was getting some projects that Oxy didn't have the internal staff to handle.
Occidental was working with the Russians to rehab their oil industry and my sister's company was digitizing and processing the data. It's standard practice that whenever someone drills an oil well, before putting it into production various instruments are dropped down the well and data is collected on the formations and layers surrounding the well. One measure is resistivity of the rock, another sends signals out into the surrounding rock and the return signals are recorded.
Even by the 1980s the technology to do this was fairly common knowledge and even the Soviets did it, but to a standard well below any western company. I saw a bunch of the well logs. They were printed on paper akin to what you would find in a restroom. It may have been restroom paper towel roll. For rubber bands they used cut up bicycle inner tube. Western data collection is all done in one of a handful of standard scales, but these were all scaled to fit the paper.
From analyzing the data my sister concluded that Soviet Geologists didn't know what they were doing, or if they did, they were not allowed by the system to do their job properly. The Russian oil production was in steep decline at that point due to horrible mismanagement of the oil fields. Many of these oil fields had been originally opened up by Occidental Petroleum in the 1920s and 1930s when Occidental was doing a lot of business in the USSR. Armand Hammer who had founded Oxy was a physician in the early USSR and was kicked out by Stalin shortly after Lenin's death. He took with him a lot of Russian state treasures he had acquired and it's how most of the Faberge eggs got to the west.
For decades afterwards the Soviets just drilled more wells in known fields hoping to increase production. The management of the oil reservoirs was terrible.
Even among the graybeards educated before the collapse of the USSR, there is not a lot of oil expertise. Russia would have to get expertise from the west to continue to develop most of their oil plays. China is coming along in its native expertise, but they don't have the sophistication to develop complex plays yet.
What's inside Germany's first-ever national security strategy?
Apparently the Russian invasion of Ukraine has gotten Germany to think more about national defense. Are other NATO countries doing the same?
After WW II the allies basically turned Germany into a pacifist state. Germany's government has hamstrung the military at every turn since the end of the Cold War. This war has forced Germany to wake up to the reality that NATO needs to be strong again.
The Perun video on Germany's military goes into detail about both how bad it is in Germany and why it's that way.
The rest of NATO was fairly complacent putting Europe's defense on the back burner to a large degree, though nobody was as bad as Germany. This war has stirred all of NATO into action and rearming is a high priority for many nations now.
And my Hebrew is non-existent...
But allegedly...
One
Israeli media 'outlet' claims that two countries are buying about ~200+ Merkava 2 and 3 tanks no longer in use by the Israeli Armed Forces. One of those countries is allegedly a European country. The tank has never been exported before, and this could be some kind of Ukrainian purchase, or two other countries that are buying them and then sending them to Ukraine.
A google translate:
The cost is expected to be tens of millions of dollars, or a few hundred thousand euros per tank – therefore rather cheap compared to various Western tanks. The Merkava Mark 2 has a 105 mm main cannon and the Merkava Mark 3 has a 120 mm (main cannon).
The Merkava is also unique in its design in that it has the engine at the front, which leads to higher survivability for the crew who, in addition to frontal armor, also have an engine between them and the enemy. The drive wheels are therefore located at the front as on an IFV [?]. In addition, there is a modular compartment with a rear door behind the turret, which can either be used as an extended ammunition magazine, to accommodate some troops or for evacuation of wounded from the battlefield.
The Merkava tank is [allegedly] widely considered to have the best crew survivability in the world. A contributing factor is that the rear doors can be used for evacuation backwards if the tank is knocked out.
It's however not certain that these tanks are intended for battle in Ukraine. It could also be that some other European country quickly needs to replace the tanks they have sent to Ukraine.
40 שנה לאחר שנכנסו לשירות בצה"ל, צפויים להימכר מאות טנקי מרכבה מסימן 2 ו-3 לשתי מדינות זרות, ובהן לראשונה למדינה אירופית. הטנקים יצאו משימוש בשנים האחרונות, נשארו במחסנים - אבל לאחר תחילת המלחמה באוקראינה והביקוש המחודש לכלי מלחמה משוריינים נבדקו ונמצאו כשירים מספיק להימכר
www.ynet.co.il
I didn't know Israel had any retired Merkervas. I know they have a lot of M60s in reserve. Pulling those out, rehabbing them, and giving them to Ukraine would have helped the Ukrainians.
The low cost of these tanks tells me that they are being sold as a kind of gift. I strongly suspect they could be going to Ukraine.
