Glenn Diesen interviews Stanislav Krapivnik on the escalating Russia-Ukraine war and the possibility of Russia striking NATO countries
Glenn Diesen interviews Stanislav Krapivnik, a Russia-born former US Army officer, about developments in the Ukraine war.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Stanislav Krapivnik, a Russia-born former US Army officer, about the evolving military situation in Ukraine and the broader risk of war between Russia and NATO. Krapivnik has just returned from a 2,500-kilometer round trip through the Donbas and reports firsthand on fuel shortages, drone warfare targeting civilians, and the Ukrainian government's use of defensive perimeters around major cities to trap men for conscription. He argues that within Russia's leadership, the faction favouring escalation has defeated the faction favouring a negotiated return to pre-war arrangements. He further contends that Russia is now systematically dismantling Ukrainian fuel infrastructure to neutralise mobile drone-launch trucks, while Ukraine is deliberately targeting Russian civilians.
On drone suppression technology, Krapivnik discusses Chinese microwave-based EMP area-suppression units demonstrated at a recent military parade, arguing that if these systems are deployed to the Russian battlefield by end of summer they could partially restore manoeuvre warfare by neutralising the drone-dominated static front — a development he regards as potentially transformative.
On the question of whether Russia might strike first, Krapivnik draws a parallel to Stalin's failure to pre-empt Operation Barbarossa, weighing the strategic logic of absorbing a first blow (generating sympathy, demonstrating resilience — as Iran did against US strikes) against the case for pre-emption when war appears inevitable. He argues that conventional or nuclear war with Europe is becoming unavoidable, and outlines specific scenarios — including strikes on Italian drone manufacturers and a naval confrontation with British vessels attempting to board a Russian-flagged tanker in international waters — that he believes could serve as controlled escalation options for Russia. He dismisses any Russian strike on Poland as strategically absurd, noting that current dynamics — including Azov's publication of a 'Greater Ukraine' map encompassing part of Poland and Ukrainian commanders threatening Polish territory — are already straining Polish-Ukrainian relations to Russia's benefit without any Russian action.
He singles out Finland's decision to potentially host US nuclear weapons as transforming it into a first-strike target, and describes the Baltic states' government-sponsored SS veteran parades as evidence of the ideological direction of NATO's eastern flank. The conversation closes with a discussion of Russian and Chinese photonic chip development and its potential to disrupt Western AI infrastructure dominance.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Fuel shortages and conditions in the Donbas
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined again by Stanislav Krapivnik, Russia-born former US Army officer. Thank you for coming back on the program. I've been wanting to ask you about what is changing in this war. One gets the impression that something is definitely changing — there's a targeting of, I guess, more specific logistics. We see both sides targeting bridges more, the energy infrastructure obviously still, but even petrol stations now. I'm curious how effective that is. Furthermore, to expand on the question, we see Kyiv was attacked in a huge way. According to Kyiv's mayor Klitschko, this was the most powerful attack on Kyiv during the whole war. I was wondering if you could speak to some of these military decisions as you see them currently being made.
Stanislav Krapivnik: I've got one thing to say: hold my beer. It's about to get worse. It's only going to get worse. I just got back myself on Tuesday from the Donbas. I travelled about 2,500 kilometres round trip. Is there a more difficult position on getting fuel? Yes, there is. Is there no fuel in Russia? No, that's not true. There is fuel. You'll probably wind up having to stay in line to get it, but it also depends. On average, anywhere from ten minutes to maybe an hour. Some places you just pop right in. It's hit or miss. Some of this is people hoarding. Some of this is companies hoarding and then trying to resell. Two guys got busted — 20 and 21 years old — driving around in a van with about 900 litres of E95 fuel that they apparently bought under the table and were planning on selling off somewhere. They got busted on that.
We came back and it's obviously more difficult when you're outside the cities than in the cities, because in the cities you get much more logistics. Outside the cities there's a lot less. The mom-and-pop stores don't have fuel because they buy from the big guys like Gazprom, Rosneft, or Lukoil, but they get what's left after those companies have delivered to all of their own stores. Out in the countryside on the interstates, it's harder to fill up because it's further away from the big cities.
I haven't recovered quite totally from Tuesday. I've been running non-stop since I landed. It's a long drive. Now, you get down to Voronezh and there are no lines in Voronezh. There's enough fuel everywhere. So it's very different by area. Lugansk also didn't have a line — had one car ahead of me. I won't call that a line. Bryansk is in a hard way. The fuel there is low quality, sucked out from the bottom with all the sediment. It varies very much from place to place. Like I said, there is fuel. There's some price gouging too. Some particularly small mom-and-pop stores are spiking their prices a lot. I'm not quite sure what the government's going to do about it, because there are normally laws against something like that in an emergency situation, but we'll see.
Sberbank apparently — I just found out from one of my kids — apparently now has a program to find fuel in your area so you don't have to go driving around looking from one station to another. What happens is some of these gas stations get topped off and then everybody rushes in. They buy up, and yes, there's also panic buying. A lot of places have now put a hold on that — you can't fill up containers. That's a problem for me because I need to fill up a couple of litres in a container for the lawn mower. But other places are limiting volumes to 20 or 30 litres at a time. Some places have a queue system — take a number and come back when it's your turn. So it's different things in different areas. There's no one unified plan.
But to say Russia is collapsing, that people are marching in the streets and all the other silliness we're used to from the Western media — well, it's more of the same. It's the Vladimir Putin who is dying from 150 diseases but has invested $28 billion into living forever and is now immortal, all in the same sentence. That's the reality of it.
Drone warfare and the targeting of civilians
Stanislav Krapivnik: The other reality is drones — particularly the Palunteer drones that have come out, and the programming on these drones. These are relatively short-range drones for aeroplane-type drones. They're not that big, and they're made to take out cars, military trucks, buses, or a grandmother in her little car driving to the market. It doesn't really matter as long as they're killing somebody. These Palunteer drones — and Zelensky is a war criminal, let's just begin with that, he's a terrorist and a war criminal — the logic they're using is that the first 80% of the AI charge is looking for military-type targets. After that, the last 20%, it's looking for anything that's moving.
We were driving at night because there were a lot fewer drones. But the drone detector could still tell there were three to four drones constantly in the air. Ours or theirs, you can't tell. The drone detector doesn't tell you that — it just tells you the distance and how many drones are in the area. That's the reality. The Russian military has adapted very quickly to it. They went Mad Max. They took all these old Bukhanka vans, cut out the back end, then took a bunch of other cars — particularly hatchbacks — took the hatchbacks out, mounted a weapons point on there, and put machine guns. These Mad Max machine gun cars are now escorting all the trucks. Usually one truck per Mad Max car, maybe sometimes two trucks, but mostly one. They're good at shooting down those Palunteer drones.
The same can't be said for civilians. There aren't enough trucks to escort civilians. Civilians drive on their own. So that becomes a whole different issue. The areas I used to drive in that had some chance of getting hit by artillery but were pretty good roads — they're closed now. We've got some relatives living in Gorlovka and some relatives living in Izyum. Couldn't go down the Dubai road — that's closed. They had just between Gorlovka six civilian cars and their occupants killed in less than a week from the American drones. That's just the reality. The Ukrainians are losing, so they've gone into full terror.
My wife sent me — this just happened — there's a massacre from Zaporizhzhia, Tokmak. Ukrainian, American, British drones hit an open-air market and just shredded people. Five dead so far, 18 wounded. Before that, we've had several buses hit. They've particularly got a hard-on for targeting Belarusian buses. I don't know if Lukashenko is going to send another harshly worded letter like he did last time. Obviously the letter of protest did not have the desired effect on the narco goblin and his crew. They've hit two more buses and wounded two drivers on one of those buses. They're really trying to expand this war.
I think more than likely the Americans had to talk them out of starting a full war with Belarus, which would mean another full war with Russia, which may actually mean Russia having to declare war finally. If that happened, the military would have all restraints released and then it could really show Kyiv what it means to be at war, because these degenerates in the Kyiv government and those that support them don't seem to understand that.
Why Russia is targeting Ukrainian fuel stations
Stanislav Krapivnik: Why is Ukraine going after Russian gas stations? For the most part they're not. Those are targets of opportunity to kill civilians. The drone operators will strike at gas stations — they're not striking the gas station itself so much, they're usually striking a car that's refuelling, trying to kill the civilians. They do it on an almost daily basis. They're not really damaging the gas station, but they are killing civilians, because that's their goal.
Why is Russia targeting Ukrainian gas stations? The Ukrainians switched to portable drone launch sites. Basically, they took all these light trucks — diesel and gasoline trucks, Gazelles, box trucks — and in the box they've put two launchers for two drones. They drive up toward the border or the line of contact, pop two drones out, and they're off. These are the big drones that can get up to Moscow and definitely into places like Voronezh. They'll do dozens of these trucks launching these drones.
Russia started hitting any possible parking spaces for these trucks, but if they're in any of the cities, they'll be hiding in somebody's underground parking lot, which is pretty hard to find, or in some garage. What's not hard to find is their fuelling points, because they're using the regular gas stations. Russia has systematically for the last week and a half been dismantling all of the gas stations in these front-area territories to a decent depth. Yesterday there were some hits on western Sumy — took out three gas stations on one road. They're not aiming for civilians. They often do it in the middle of the night, so the gas stations are closed and they get a visit from Mr. Iskander. Usually it becomes a very hot party after Mr. Iskander visits.
There's one video where some guy in the middle of the night decided he wanted to go fuel up, and one gas station blows up to his right as he's driving. He's cursing and screaming as he's driving for like another kilometre and a half, and the next one blows up on his left. He got lucky — at least he didn't pull into either of them, but they looked pretty closed anyway.
The Kyiv strikes and the shift in Russia's internal politics
Stanislav Krapivnik: There have been changes in Kyiv. I think the party of war is winning out — the hardliners. By war I mean not just prolonging the war, but actually taking the gloves off and putting on the spike gauntlets. The faction that wanted to go back to 2012 and make a deal — just make any deal so they can go back to shopping in Paris and their wives can go back to Monaco — that was mostly the financial and economics team, the central bank faction and other representatives like that. From what I can see right now, they seem to have lost the local power struggle for now at least. They've been put in the back seat and things are expanding, and they're going to continue expanding.
I'll give you an example of the things that were hit in Kyiv this last time around. LCC Radio ICs — a company that produces cruise missile control components for the Flamingo. Athlon Avia LLC — a scientific products company, drone manufacturer. Antonov serial production — they produce airplanes, which they're not exactly producing much of, and also drones. D Radio Plant LLC — they produce sighting systems for armoured vehicles: lenses, periscopes, and camera equipment and camera lenses for drones. EF25 — both a software house and a producer of storage hardware for electronic warfare units. MLP Chaikivka — one of the biggest logistics centres, which was destroyed. That's just a short list of targets that were hit. Kyiv is a big city — 2.5 million people is the normal population — and the population has swollen because men have run to Kyiv, as Kyiv was a nature reserve for the male species in Ukraine. That's now being harvested.
Defensive perimeters around Ukrainian cities as conscription traps
Stanislav Krapivnik: One of the things you notice — this came out about a month and a little over a month ago — Kyiv, Odessa, Mykolaiv, and other cities suddenly got surrounded by belts of defensive lines. I'm not sure if we discussed this before. Barbed wire, dragon's teeth, anti-tank ditches, minefields, all the roads under checkpoint control. And you know, I was on an evening show with Solovyov and everyone was saying, "Yeah, see, they know the Russian army's going to break through." Well, the Russian army is breaking through, but the point is that no matter what the rate of advance, because of drones it is slow. Even if you break through, you're talking less than 10 kilometres a day at best on movement, which gives any of these cities more than enough time to put up defences.
Second of all, these defences without oversight are pointless — or maybe not pointless, but they're just a pain in the ass for any enemy approaching. The reason you put obstacles like this up is because you have them overwatched by indirect and direct fire. While they're trying to clear the minefield and fill in the hole and move the dragon's teeth out of the way, they're being shot at. Ukraine doesn't have that kind of manpower. So what that means is a series of obstacles like that for the Russian military may be a one-and-a-half to two-hour delay one time, and then you've got a corridor for everybody else to go in behind you.
So why would they do that? Like I said, Kyiv — these cities are nature preserves for the male of the species, and now they're being harvested. Ukraine's meat machine has run out of men in the small towns, medium towns, and villages, which have pretty much depopulated their male populations. Most of them are in the grave. So what do you do now? You start looking around for where you have the big reserves. You have Kyiv. You have Odessa. Cities like that. The problem is Ukraine is a big open-air concentration camp with plenty of places to hide, and the men started running out of the city. So these aren't defensive lines — these are concentration camp ghettos inside the big concentration camp. Try driving across a field when you have landmines somewhere out there, plus Constantina wire, plus dragon's teeth. Try getting across there on foot when again you have Constantina wire, then you have to get across a minefield. That limits your mobility. You can't drive out on the roads because everything's under a guard post that's going to be asking for papers — or better yet, stacks of cash if you want out. That's the reality of it. So what the Ukrainian government has done is basically closed the perimeter around the nature reserves and now they're harvesting.
Drone suppression technology and the possibility of returning to manoeuvre warfare
Glenn Diesen: No, well — as you see, Ukraine is being hit much harder, and in this war, whenever there's escalation including on NATO's side, the retaliation usually comes against Ukraine. But now the pressure is also mounting on hitting something in Europe. How do you think — what do you think Russia might consider? Because we saw this article — I forgot where it was, it might have been the Washington Post — they wrote that the Russians were planning an attack on Poland, apparently around Kaliningrad, which wouldn't make that much sense. But that being said, there obviously are those in Russia who are now pushing for restoring its deterrent by hitting a European NATO country. How essentially would the logic work — trying to hit the adversary hard enough to back away from the Ukraine war but not so much that one triggers a nuclear war? And even if this can't be controlled and it ends up in an all-out direct war, what do you see such a war looking like?
Stanislav Krapivnik: First of all, the Chinese — and I've got a lot of hope for this equipment. The Chinese demonstrated in their last big military parade three drone suppression units. These were microwave-based EMP devices — big antennas, big radars to track down drones — and the antenna is just one big block, like the old radar systems used to be in World War II, just miniaturised to one truck, but a decently sized truck, about a 2.5-ton truck, running on 15 kilowatts up to 5 kilometres in distance. It's an area suppression weapon.
There's lots of stuff that kills drones. Some of the best is lasers. Sure, you can melt right through that plastic piece of crap flying 5 kilometres away in half a second. The problem is that once they figure out where that laser just came from — because unlike in space, in the air you can actually see the beam if it's high enough intensity, especially in certain conditions — once they figure out where it's coming from, there'll be 30 to 40 drones flying at it on a very wide frontage of height and width. Drone laser systems only service one target at a time. Even if it takes half a second or a second to kill that target, then another second or two to reorient to the next target and power up for another one to three seconds to get enough energy back up off the generator to do another impulse — even if you're hitting a possible rate of one drone every 10 seconds, you have 30 to 40 drones closing in at 140 to 220 kilometres per hour from a few kilometres away. You're done. It's that simple. Again, you're back to the $5,000 drone just killed the $3 to $10 million piece of equipment.
Every system we have right now is first and foremost a single-target servicing system. You need an area suppression piece of equipment, and that's what the Chinese have demonstrated and field tested. Have they combat tested it? Of course not. We haven't seen that yet on the Russian battlefield — and where else are they going to combat test it? That's a lot of hope, because if you put enough of these units together, especially when you have artillery overmatch like Russia does against the EU as a whole and Ukraine in particular, what you're going to have is the possibility — at least limitedly — of bringing back manoeuvre warfare. If this equipment comes in by the end of summer, this war could look dramatically different, because now you've opened up at least on some frontage fast-moving manoeuvre warfare, which makes drone operators very problematic. They operate best when the front is more or less stable. Even if there's a small Russian or Ukrainian breakthrough, drone operators can handle it because it's infantry and they're not moving that fast.
Russia's escalation options against European NATO members
Stanislav Krapivnik: Now, what about the strikes? I can't speak for Vladimir because I haven't been invited to any of his sessions, and if I was, I still wouldn't be able to say — just out of military censorship. But from my own opinion: the 16 drones that took out the entire block — you saw my video from Shakhtyorsk. It's not just those two buildings. They took out everything around them. They took out an arts high school or junior school arts centre across the street. They took out a private house across the street. They took out a restaurant that was next door. One of the shell holes from one of these drones was 4 metres wide and 2 metres deep — one of our guys climbed down there and measured. Those drones were all made in Italy. Made in Italy stickers. You'd think the Italians would be at least a little smarter and take their names off them — plausible deniability. This is one of those moments where you take that to the UN, you show it, and say, "Gentlemen, on the screen is the manufacturing facility that manufactured these terror weapons." That's one way to do it. Obviously that moment has passed because it's something you would have had to use relatively quickly.
Glenn Diesen: Other places. Yeah, sorry.
Stanislav Krapivnik: The other place that would make a lot of logical sense — two other places. You can hit the British, for example, in Cyprus, because you're not hitting NATO territory per se and it's not on the main British islands. Otherwise, personally, I would take out a Russian-flag tanker. I'd have it break down somewhere to the northwest of the UK with a full contingent of Marines with MANPAD anti-aircraft systems and at least one heavy machine gun. And somewhere trailing behind that would be an attack submarine. When the British come running over to try to land and pirate the oil ship, I give them one warning and then open fire. Take out the helicopter, take out the crew. If those cutters start firing on the tanker, the submarine sinks them both. You've just created a major casualty event for the British in neutral waters. You've taken prisoners as pirates. Now, shall we tribunal and execute them, or are you going to talk about it? Because by the way, they're pirates — they're grabbing a foreign ship under a foreign flag in neutral waters. That's piracy. Or do you prefer a declaration of war, and then we can start bombarding London into Gaza? That's the position you put the British in. Until something like that happens, they're not smart enough to take this war seriously. It's a game to them.
Finland, Estonia, and the nuclear escalation ladder
Glenn Diesen: It looks like we could be heading somewhere in around that direction, because the rhetoric seems to have shifted. I saw this interview with Putin where he not only referred to getting very close to finishing off Donbas, but then he also included Novorossiya, which would then include Mykolaiv and Odessa. I thought that was interesting. And then we see Medvedev making the point that Finland is now on the nuclear targeting list after they changed the law and can host nuclear weapons. That seems all kind of predictable. But also Maria Zakharova made this comment that Russian pranksters essentially exposed that Estonia was involved in the attacks on St. Petersburg. The reason this is interesting is that once you put that out there, on one hand you create the case for why it would be legitimate to strike Estonia, but once you put it out there it also puts a lot of pressure on the government — if you recognise that the Estonians have attacked Russia, it's very hard not to go up that escalation ladder. I mean, that would then be better to pretend as if you weren't attacked, that there was no evidence. So all of this — I don't want to read too much into it — but one gets the impression that something is shifting, that they're prepared to take a harder line now against at least Europeans. I was wondering if you see some of the same.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Yeah, absolutely. Because this can't go on the way it's going on. We're heading into either a conventional war or a nuclear war. There is no in between. The question with the conventional war is how much of Europe is planning on dying off at a slow rate. If we go to nuclear war, well, all of Europe is going to be dying off at a very fast rate. So that becomes the question.
Finland is not on the nuclear list yet because American nuclear bombs — and they're literally bombs, gravity bombs — haven't been sent there yet. They will be, and the second world economy collapsing to the armpit of Europe again. Finland is well on its way to becoming a nuclear strike target for a first strike or any retaliatory strike. I guess the Finns don't want to just be the armpit of Europe again, which they're very rapidly becoming, which they were before the Russian Empire took them over. Under the Russian Empire, Finns were given schooling. Helsinki was built from a stinking fishing village, and Finns for the first time were actually running Finland in maybe a thousand years and were part of the Russian upper classes. Finland was absolutely the armpit of Europe, probably competing only with maybe Albania. Finland grew up and got rich, particularly rich during the Cold War, by staying neutral. It tied its economy to the Russian economy, particularly after the Cold War, and then decided to commit economic suicide, which they've successfully done. They're slowly hanging off a rope and slowly strangling to death. They prefer to do it slowly, more painfully — I guess they're masochistic that way. But now they've decided that's not enough and they want to become nuclear targets. You can't fix stupid. Stupid sometimes fixes itself — it gets itself killed.
People have tried rationally speaking to the Finns, but they're dead set on it. They want to die, and they want to die spectacularly. These are the same people trying to put American bases right across the border from Russia. These are the same people who allowed Ukrainian drones to fly through. And I guarantee you if Zelensky called up Stubb and got to talk to him, he probably spilled the beans the same way — "Oh yeah, yeah, we're arming and we're launching those drones for the Ukrainians." I would not be surprised to hear that from these guys. They are quite literally the knuckle-dragging inbred mouth-breathers of European aristocracy — way too much pure blood — and this is the people you get running Europe now. But if the people aren't overthrowing them, they must be liking it, otherwise they would overthrow them.
Whether Russia might strike first — the Barbarossa parallel
Glenn Diesen: Let me ask a last question here. The way you frame it now, it sounds as if you see war as almost unavoidable — either nuclear or conventional. But it also seems that Russia now believes the Europeans are preparing for war, largely because that's exactly what the European leaders are saying and also doing in terms of arming themselves. How do you see the possibility of Russia actually striking first if it thinks war is unavoidable? Why wait until you get punched first? I saw during this interview with Putin that he referred to Operation Barbarossa, and that's an interesting comparison to the current situation. I was wondering if you see this as a possibility — that Russia becomes convinced that the war is coming and essentially takes ownership and decides when it starts and how it will be fought.
Stanislav Krapivnik: You know, Barbarossa — Stalin had a very big misconception. He believed that war could be avoided. He believed that the British were trying to instigate the war, and to a degree they were, but war was never avoidable. Hitler was dead set on it. At that point, Stalin refused his generals who came to him six days prior and said, "Let us at least partially mobilise." He said no movements, because that would be used by the British to instigate conflict with the Germans. Yeah, that was not the smartest move, obviously, when the night before — the 22nd, at 4:00 a.m. when Barbarossa kicked off — about 12 hours earlier, you had a Polish communist swim across the river and go up and say, "You know, the Germans are about to attack." He got pulled in by some military intelligence types, and at 4 in the morning they were still questioning him. So when he's telling you they're about to attack, well, they've attacked.
This is a slightly different situation. Why would you absorb an attack? Why let the enemy strike first? There are reasons to do this. One, if you're very convinced you can absorb that attack and come back, there could be two things that happen. One, the enemy is in for a shock when they give their best blow and you go, "Yeah, okay." That's what we saw with Iran. The Americans struck with everything they had. When the dust cleared, the Iranians were just shooting back and going, "Is that all you've got?" Seriously. And the Americans at that point are looking at their warehouse and going, "Damn, that is all we've got. We've got pretty much nothing left." And we can't manufacture anything because our economy is basically a second-world-power manufacturer at best, with components that come from other countries.
So that would be a reason to wait and let the enemy strike — because you know you can take the blow and reverse it, and it also generates sympathy. Particularly if countries that were sympathetic would then be more easily persuaded, or it would be easier for them to come to your assistance on a moral high ground. The Iranians did quite a bit of that. Russia had a reason to strike when it struck, because the Ukrainians were getting ready to start genociding Donetsk and Lugansk, and they were sitting right outside of — well, inside the western edges of Donetsk. There would have been a massive genocide. That's why Russia invoked Article 51, the right to protect.
And by the way, for the Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and Finns — just so you understand — there's a separate article in the UN charter that allows the UN permanent members to come wipe your nations out if there is any rebirth of Nazism in your countries. Go read the charter. You'd be surprised what's in there. So yes, if Merz really wants to go ahead and get his grey uniform on, then we can go ahead and start demolishing Germany — quite legally, quite legally, to the very charter. Germany is also now signed as a member of the UN.
Why you would absorb a blow in the case of Europe — I would say a strike on Italy, for example, or an ambush on the open seas of the British pirates would be a very good escalation with some amount of control still available. As for Russia striking Poland — yeah, that's about as likely as Russia going to the moon in the next two days. Why would we want to? We've got everything we need right now on the land. Or better yet, as likely as Russia annexing Western Europe. Why would we ever want to do that?
Who suggests this? The very people who are afraid that Poland has now gone off course. It's off the sheet of music. It's on a new sheet of music, and it's a nationalist sheet of music, and they don't like that new sheet of music, because all of a sudden Poland has said Melnyk is one Nazi too far. I'm not sure why Bandera wasn't one Nazi too far, but apparently Melnyk was finally that Nazi too far — that old bastard who died of old age in Luxembourg, a mass-murdering psychopath who was allowed to live the rest of his life in comfort. And the Ukrainians start naming their units after Nazi formations and Nazis. Maybe Novorossiya was just waiting for an excuse. That's also possible. And the Ukrainians gave them the excuse. Not only has Zelensky told them to bugger off — "We'll name our heroes and our units anywhere we want" — but it's his runaway commanders that have now started threatening to start murdering Poles. They're now directly threatening to invade Poland and start hitting Poland with drones.
And if you look at Azov — the core now, it's no longer a battalion or brigade, it's a corps — Azov published their black flag, and on it in red is an outline of Greater Ukraine, which also happens to include one-third of Poland. If you think the Poles didn't notice that, you're kidding yourself. Of course the Poles noticed, and relations have gone to hell. And they're already bearing fruits — Norway said those MiGs aren't coming, don't hold your breath. So that's a wing of MiG-29s that Poland was getting ready to hand over to Ukraine that are no longer going to be heading over there.
Again, why get rid of somebody like Zelensky? Why attack Poland? This is a perfect situation. Any move from the Russian side like that would be just plain silly. When it comes to places like Italy — if you want to make an example of one of these countries, taking out the manufacturing facility that created the drones that murdered Russian children is a very good basis for the reason you've done this. Italy may find it very hard to go to war on such a footing. Meloni is not as popular as most people think. She's also totally betrayed the conservative movement and flooded Italy over the last two years with migrants. Her days may be numbered. So if you do an exemplary attack on that manufacturing facility, that's possibly not going to lead to war and may get you the political results you want.
Estonia also has this problem that almost half its population are Russians on Russian historical land. Narva — that region has been Russian since the 9th century. The Bolsheviks started drawing nice little new lines and included Russian lands in Estonia, just to give them a bigger territory and another big city. Who cares? We still rule from Moscow. Well, that same mentality created the problem with Crimea. The Russians in Estonia aren't even second-class citizens — they're not citizens at all in their own homeland, which they've occupied for the last 1,100 years. They're basically semi-legal residents with a grey passport.
Estonia — and by the way, the three Baltic countries, most people don't understand this, especially if they're in the EU — they all have SS parades once a year, around summertime, that are government-sponsored, paid for, with government officials coming to speak to the veterans of the SS. The very people who gave their oath to Adolf first and foremost. Estonia may be an extremely good example. One, because there are a lot of Russians there who need to be returned home, and territories that need to be returned home that were artificially separated by the Bolsheviks. And two, because they want to fight. Apparently they want to fight. Let them taste what fighting means.
Closing reflections — photonic chips and the broader shift
Glenn Diesen: Well, on that note, thank you very much for coming on. Something is definitely changing now. I see the same now with the Russians guiding or escorting their vessels with military warships. We see guns mounted on civilian ships to prevent this piracy. So the rhetoric is shifting, the heavy attacks — across the board, something appears to have shifted. Let's see how this plays out. Thank you very much for taking the time.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Thank you, Glenn. Always a pleasure. And maybe we'll have some good news — rainbows, butterflies, apples, and berries — to discuss one day.
Glenn Diesen: You know, I started this podcast because I thought my main research focus is on Greater Eurasia and how the Russians are reorienting their economy to the east. At least ten of my books have been focused on this issue, and that's what I was teaching. But oh god, this is so depressing — the past year, hardly anything but war. I'm looking forward to academia becoming slightly more boring. That would be delightful.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Well, I think the problem is that a lot of academia is very boring — they're just ignoring everything you're talking about, other people are talking about, I'm talking about. They just ignore it. They have a very narrow bandwidth that they're responding to, and unfortunately it's a group formation. All the details are boring to them. It's just "the Russians are evil," and that's it.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. I remember when I first started working on it, because I thought it was fascinating — the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, all of them creating new tech centres, creating their own supply chains, developing their own physical transportation corridors, their own development banks, de-dollarising, new payment systems. And then when you turn to the media and academia, it's like, "Ah, you know, it's just a sideshow. It doesn't mean that much." But yeah, here we are. Russia just launched its first photonic chip factory. The Chinese launched one a couple of months ago.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Photonic chips — you want to talk about crashing the AI bubble, particularly the AI construction bubble that Americans built. Photonic chips, because they're not etchings in silicon — they're not electronics, they use photons, light — they don't build up nearly as much heat. The capabilities are much greater. The Chinese ones — they're planning on producing 12,000 of these chips by the end of the year. I'm not sure how big the Russian chip manufacturing is going to be on the photonic side, but they're talking about a thousand times faster than the best Nvidia chip. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but even if it's 10 times faster, that's a massive breakthrough. So if Russia and China are now going into photonic chips and the US is nowhere near that — having invested heavily into current technology instead of more advanced technologies — that's a huge bubble burst.
Glenn Diesen: Definitely. Well, thanks. We'll have to cover that next time.