 So here's a map of Ukraine. You can see Ukraine within the context of Eastern Europe. Everything to the right, as you look at the map, everything to the east is Russia. You can see north is Belarus. Next to Belarus, of course, is Russia to the north. Poland is to the west. Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova. But you can see Ukraine is also a big country. This is not a small country. Just look at the distance between Kiev and Lviv in the west, Kiev and Donetsk in the east, or down to Gelsan or Dessa in the south. So you can see the red segments here. The red with black outline are areas that the Russians took in 2014, both Crimea, that's in the bottom in the south, and on the east there, Donetsk, which is an area that the Russians took in 2014. And there's been kind of on and off battles over there since 2014, really. The rest of the red outlines is areas that the Russians have taken during this war. Of course, this is what they took in this war only post their retreat from Kiev. So what we're not seeing here is what they took and then the Ukrainians pushed them out of, which is the area around Kiev, and the area in the very northeast of Ukraine, which I'm hiding in the map, which they had originally invaded. The blue here, areas in which the Ukrainians so far have taken back from the Russians. So these are areas where the Ukrainians have pushed the Russians back, including up to about 24 hours ago. So this includes a segment that was recaptured by the Ukrainians about 24 hours ago. It doesn't include what has been happening since then. I'll try to fill you in into what's been happening since. So we're going to move the map around a little bit so you'll tolerate this. We're going to put this in the center and we're going to grow this so we can zoom in. So let's first look at this. So here you have the basic region of the war. You can see in the south, you can see this city called Kherson, which is occupied by the Russians. This is the area where you see the blue outline here in the bottom. This is the area in which the Ukrainians have been fighting over the last few weeks, where they announced that they were launching an offensive. This map doesn't reflect Ukrainian advances because the Ukrainian are not advertising. And the Russians are not declaring what is actually going on. Whatever advances are happening here are very, very, very slow so far. However, one thing you can see in this map, unfortunately, is just under Gesson, just south of Gesson there's a river, a river that goes to the Black Sea in the west and goes up through the east. That is the river that you've been hearing about where the Ukrainians have been bombing all the bridges. Bombing all those bridges prevents the Russians from continuously bringing in new troops into the Gesson area. My guess is that everything north of that river, including the city of Gesson, will fall to the Ukrainians within weeks, maybe sooner than that. And then it's just a question of the Ukrainians figuring out how to cross the river or figuring out how to attack that region from the north. There's even fear among Russian military bloggers. These are people. These are Russian nationalists who are writing about the war and are very critical of Putin because they think he hasn't been tough enough. And they think that the Russian military is disgracing the nation. There is even fear that the Ukrainian army could attack Crimea and retake Crimea. Let me just show you Crimea quickly. That is Crimea, that segment. So what has happened is over the last couple of months, the Russians have been pulling troops in the east and moving them to the Gesson area to back up troops over there. And many of the troops have been stationed here in the south. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, are using long range US missile launchers and artillery, precision weapons to basically take out the bridges, the logistical supply routes. They've even bombed through special forces operations. They bombed major logistical centers in Crimea itself. They've been undermining Russian logistics in the south for weeks now. This has only intensified Russia's certainty that the attack was going to come from the north. And therefore, they've been pulling troops from the Kharkiv area, from the north of Donetsk, to the south in order to reinforce their troops there. That has been going on, as they said, for weeks. And that has weakened the Russian presence in the east. Now, no, Russia has a real problem finding troops. By some estimates, this war has cost the Russians 50,000 troops, 50,000. That's a lot of people to replace. And they just don't have them. They're trying to accrued all over without declaring, without declaring a draft. Putin is very afraid of a draft. So they're trying to recruit volunteers. They're not getting a lot of volunteers. They're recruiting volunteers primarily and paying a lot of money for the volunteers, primarily in some of the ethnic minorities that Russia controls. We'll talk about those ethnic minorities later. But the problem there is maybe they are going to come and fight, but they're not motivated. They don't care. They have no connection to Ukraine. So the quality of the troops is very low in addition to everything else. I just want to zoom in here on the south a little bit. Let's see if we can zoom in and maybe see that. Maybe if I zoom in, it'll show the river. The internet's slow. Move. All right, there we go. Zoom. Yeah, it won't zoom in more than that. All right, we'll skip that. We're going to go east. Zoom in more here. Huh. All right, there we go. That's better zoom. All right, now we want to zoom out. Whoops. This is all over the place. Sorry, guys. All right, here is the city of Kharkiv. Now, what's interesting about the city of Kharkiv is in the early days of the war, there was a major focus of the Russians. They tried to take the city and they failed. It was one of the early failures of the war for the Russians. They could not take the city, the city held. And you could see the Russians occupied all the way to the ring road that circles the city, but they couldn't break into the city. Since then, the Ukrainians have been pushing the Russians back and back and further back to the point where in some areas, they pushed them all the way back to the Russian border. You can see that in the north here. You can see that the blue is reaching all the way to the Russian border. What's happened in the last few days is that from Kharkiv, the Ukrainians have pushed southeast. And they have advanced southeast at a rapid pace. They've basically taken 3,000 over 3,000. Maybe it's up to 5,000 square kilometers just over the last two to three days. And they have slowly pushed the Russians back. And what this does, what this blue area here that you can see, particularly the portion that is kind of curving in towards this city called Izhum, what this has done is it's cut off the supply roads that the Russians were supplying the troops at the front in Izhum and everything to the south and to the west of Izhum all the way down to city, a town you can see in the bottom here by the name of Liman, L-Y-M-E-N. You can see it down in the center of your screen on kind of the center down in the south. Now what's happened since this map was made, that is what has happened in the last 24 hours or less, maybe in the last 12 hours, is that Izhum and Liman have both fallen to the Ukrainians. That is the Russians have retreated from both of those towns. And indeed it looks like this highway, you can see it here labeled N-26 that they have reached that highway. And you see the city here called Svotev. They might, rumors have it, no confirmation yet, that they reached Svotev, which basically would cut off all of the Russians to the west and including many of the supply lines to the south. All right, so I don't remember if you heard that I said that since this map was made, the Ukrainians have taken Izhum and they've taken Liman, which are two very strategic locations and represent kind of the western push that the Russians were making. But it's more than just a western push. Let me zoom out a second and give you a sense of what's going on here. What you get from the Izhum and the Liman locations is that the Russians were hoping to drive south from there and basically be able to cut off the Ukrainian military and surround it and destroy it. And instead what has happened is the exact opposite. Instead what has happened is that the Ukrainians have now taken Izhum and Liman. And as a consequence of that, all of this area, all the way to Svotev, which is right in the center of your screen there, is now maybe probably we will see occupied by the Ukrainians. You know, rumors have it that the Ukrainians are already at Svotev, but we don't have confirmation. And with respect to Liman and with respect to Izhum, we have confirmation from the Russians themselves telling us that the Ukrainians have already captured that area. What this means now is that much of the red, much of the red at the top part here is now blue and that the Ukrainians is in the process of pushing the Russians to the Russian border and freeing up all of Khalkiv province. Next, we're looking at the red area to the south of that. You see the city, Lishchonsk, something like that. There is already again rumors or some data suggesting that the Ukrainians are pushing towards that city. That is a city that the Russians took what about two months ago in a major battle and it was considered a major victory for the Russians. It looks like the Ukrainians are making a concerted effort to push to that city and to recapture it. Slowly, I think what you're gonna see is this red on the top here turning into blue and ultimately what you'll also see is the, oops, the southern front turning in Ukraine's favor. So this is the turning point. It's a major turning point, I think. This is the first time other than the retreat of the Russian army from Kiev and from the rest of the very northeast. Since then, this is the first time the Ukrainians have made significant progress, fast progress. Up until now, the war has been more of a war of a kilometer here, a kilometer there. We're talking about 3,000 to 5,000 square kilometers liberated by the Ukrainians and where the Russians have been defeated. This is a turning point in the war. I think it's a turning point in Russia's confidence. This is a route as it looks right now. Again, fog of war, who knows what will happen tomorrow but it certainly looks that way right now. It looks like the Ukrainians are kicking ass and the question now is, how does this play out? What happens next, right? What happens next? All right, let's see. Let's cut off, we don't need the map anymore. So what happens now really depends on a few things. One is the continued, to what extent can the Ukrainians continue this momentum on the ground? To what extent is Russia gonna fold? How much of a fight are they willing to put up? Are the Russian soldiers motivated to fight? Are the Russian colonels, are the Russian generals motivated to fight, at least the generals and colonels who are still alive? To what extent is Russia really able to, willing to continue to fight this war and to what extent is it all just gonna fail? And in that sense, the second part of this really is, what is Moscow gonna do? That is, what is Putin gonna do or what are the people around Putin gonna do? Can Putin survive what appears to be a Russian loss? Can his regime survive by just replacing Putin and putting something else in his place? If Putin is replaced and Putin doesn't survive, who replaces him? Is it somebody more liberal? Somebody more nationalist? Who's gonna spend the next few years building up the Russian military and spending gazillions of dollars on that? What is the trajectory from Russia from here forward? This is of course gonna determine everything in terms of the future. This is very difficult to estimate. I don't know enough about the internal politics within Russia to say, but I will say this, and I've been saying it for months now, but I will say this, Russia as a country is in massive decline. And this is just one more data point reflecting that decline. The Russian economy was a mess before the war. The Russian economy is an unmitigated disaster as a consequence of the war, as a consequence of sanctions, and as a consequence of Putin's authoritarian government. Demographically, Russia is a shrinking country. It is a country with a shrinking population. Not only have almost 500,000 of Russia's best people left since the war began, but Russia just, Russians just don't have kids. Russians are having kids at a rate of maybe 1.2, 1.4, which is far below replacement cost, and it basically involves a significant shrinking of the country. Russia is an aging population. The generation born after World War II in the optimism generated from the victory over the Germans combined with Stalin's horrific dictatorship, that generation is dying off. There are not a lot of young Russians, and again, young Russians have been leaving Russia for decades now. Much of Russia is composed of ethnic groups. Russia is a very multi-ethnic society. I know people have this image of Russians, particularly kind of the new rate of Russia representing white power or whatever. Russian is a very diverse country. East of the Uals is Asia, occupied by Asians who look physically more like Chinese or Mongolians than they do Europeans. South of Russia, the Caucasus and other places are filled with all kinds of ethnic groups, including many Muslims. Russia has a relatively large Muslim population. Many of these ethnic groups don't like being part of Russia. I'll give you just one example of this. Chechnya, you probably all heard of Chechnya. Russia has fought two wars with Chechnya. I wonder if we can see Chechnya on this map. Let's see if we can see Chechnya on the map. Chechnya would be on the other side. All right, we'll find Chechnya in a minute, but yeah, there it is, the republics. All right, here's a map. Let me give you the map again. Oh, there's Taka, that's not it. There's the map. Just to give you a sense of where this is, we'll go up. There's Ukraine, there's Crimea, right? You can see them with the way top left over there. And then you've got these planes which are part of southern Russia. You've got the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea on the left, the Caspian Sea on the right. And then you've got these mountains here with Georgia on the other side of the mountains, Armenia and Azerbaijan on the other side of the mountains. But on those foothills, everything close to, in those mountains that goes from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, those are small little republics. You can see the Republic of Adyaja and Cherkis and North Ostecia, that used to be part of Georgia and the Russians took it. The Republic of Dagestan and we can push it further down. You can see the republics in the north here and Chechnya is in here among these republics. And the Russians have fought two wars in Chechnya. Chechnya is Muslim and the Chechens want independence. The Chechens don't wanna be part of Russia. The Chechens wanted independence and they fought two wars to establish independence. Some of those wars, the Chechens basically were fighting on the side of the Islamists and were basically the Chechens who represented the Islamists. But a big part of it was nationalism, was the idea that they wanted to be separate from Russia. They wanted their own state. Russia expended huge amounts of resources. Huge amounts of resources in people, in weapons, in arms in order to defeat the Chechens. Ultimately, the only way they could defeat the Chechens is by, what do you call it? Finding allies within the Chechens would fight the people who are not the allies. So finding divisions among the Chechens and utilizing those. But Russia fought a bloody long war over Chechnya. Now imagine the Chechens sitting back today and thinking, huh, the Russian military is depleted. It's folding. It is retreating. The Russians are fully occupied in Ukraine. This would kind of be a good time maybe for us to assert unnationalist desires. They're not all radical Islamists. Some of them are, and some of them are. And it's not clear how many of them and it's not clear what percentage, but some of them certainly were. But the Chechens could decide this is a good chance to try to establish independence. So could a lot of other parts of Russia use this opportunity to assert their independence, to separate themselves from Russia. This could be, this could be a time, an opportunity basically for the breakup and the dissolution of Russia. I don't know that that's gonna happen. That's pretty radical. It would be pretty amazing if it happened. It would completely destroy that particular power base within Europe and I think that's a good thing, not a bad thing. For those of us who care about the West and civilization. But in any case, the defeat of the Russian army in Ukraine is not gonna be limited to there. People are gonna learn from it, think of it, and take advantage of it. And Russia could be, this could just be the beginning of what could land up being much, much more trouble for Russia. Again, economics, really bad war before the war, worse today, demographics, really bad war before the war. You just killed and maimed tens of thousands of Russians that only makes it worse. And now militarily Russia's been defeated. Europe and the rest of the world is finding alternative sources of natural gas than Russia. Russia is in deep, deep trouble and will be in deep, deep trouble for years and decades to come. The question of course is, if Putin survives or if he's replaced by an even more nationalist leader, what does Russia do? Does it out of desperation use a tactical nuke? Does it out of desperation create an accident at one of the nuclear power plants in Ukraine? Remember, the Chernobyl was in Ukraine, is in Ukraine, in North. What does Russia actually do? How does it respond? There is no other side to the story. Let's be clear, Russia is in the wrong here from the beginning. I have given you all sides of this and I've given you the full analysis from day one and in spite of it all, in spite of the fact I've been right from day one. Let's wait six months. Six months ago, I said things would happen. They've happened pretty much the way I said they would. Let's see six months from now how they turn out. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support. By going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. 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