Transcription
AL Peters coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 21st of June and the new news is that in Russian occupied territory in Crimea in southern Ukraine Russian authorities have suspended all fuel purchases for all civilians whether it's personal cars or businesses.
Short version is that the Ukrainians have now deployed enough drones reliably enough that can target things like fuel trucks that there is no more fuel coming in the Russian navy long since abandoned the province and everything has to come in by rail and those rail bridges has now been damaged or truck and now the Ukrainians are patrolling with dozens of drones at a time over the territory and basically hitting the drugs before they can get anywhere close. So we basically have whatever little fuel is left being hoarded by the military and the only reason that the Kerch Strait Bridge remains operational that's a that's a bridge that comes from Russia proper over a straight of the Sea of Azov into Crimea is so that civilians in Crimea can flee to Russia.
It's not that the Ukrainians are planning a final push or anything to take over the territory but they have systematically damaged all of the infrastructure that allows the Russians to supply Crimea and as big of a deal as that is and it is and there'll be more of it in the future it's just the first start of a broader Ukrainian offensive. Most of these attacks are coming from places like Kherson which are just on the other side of the Dnieper River but there are a couple of towns further up Nikopol and Dnipro where the Ukrainians are starting to launch attacks as well not interrupting logistics going to Crimea per se but logistics going to other parts of the occupied territories.
Keep in mind in the early days of the war the Russians came in from the north and the east and the south. And Crimeans in the south. The stuff in the north was eventually purged. It's the stuff in the east that is now in question and and in the southeast cuz we have multiple provinces that includes Donetsk and Luhansk that are hard up on the Russian border and that provides a lot of backstop for the Russians. Ukrainians can't dislodge us further. But as you move south and along the coast by cities like Mariupol and Melitopol, uh that does not apply. They can only be supplied by road or rail just like Crimea or by sea just like Crimea. And the sea link has already effectively been cut and the Ukrainians have already been going aggressively after the ports in that region.
So the next stop is to do basically what they've done to Crimea Crimea further to the northeast and east and east and east until they get hard up to the Russian border or at least into the Donetsk region where the Russians have a few more geographic advantages. Basically, what we're looking at here is roughly 2/3 of the territory that the Russians have captured since the first war going back to 2014 is now becoming a sandbag that the Russians cannot reliably resupply.
>> [snorts] >> And while Crimea might be the literal bridge too far cuz it's just too far away, you can imagine a situation where the Russians lose access to that entire southern zone or the ability to supply it and the Ukrainians start crossing the river or coming across at say Dnipro further north and punching through and basically excising the Russians from the entire area. Not suggesting they'll be quick. Not suggesting they'll be easy. There's still lots of minefields and this is still Russia we're talking about here. But the balance of forces in this entire region has now shift and the question isn't will the Russian strategic position collapse? It's how and what will the Russians do in reaction to that?
There's still a lot of options on the table. There's still a lot of ways where this can go horribly, horribly wrong. But the Russians have yet to come up with a way to counter the Ukrainian memory drones that are capable of selecting their own targets, which makes them unjammable. And now that those are being produced in the hundreds per day, uh the Russian position across the entire southern parts of the occupied territories is really falling apart.