The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW LIVE： Realpolitik #52 ｜ It's Getting Worse

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Moadad.

00:00:09.720 And today we're going to be talking about the Russia-Ukraine war a little bit. We're going to

00:00:14.880 update you a bit on the Iran negotiations. And then we have the resignation of Keir Starmer,

00:00:20.520 the British Prime Minister, and what this actually means and how will his successor handle things.

00:00:29.360 and I would suspect badly, really.

00:00:34.580 Sorry about that.

00:00:35.900 The risks of broadcasting live.

00:00:38.840 Can you hear the music as well, or is it just me hearing it?

00:00:43.220 We're just going on break for one moment, chat.

00:00:45.120 We'll be right back.

00:00:48.980 Welcome back.

00:00:50.840 Welcome to this episode of RealPolitik.

00:00:53.420 I am your host, Firas Modad,

00:00:55.060 and it turns out that the technical fault was entirely and completely mine.

00:01:01.240 I'd unplugged the earphones of my laptop

00:01:03.440 and it was my laptop making the sound nothing to do with Samsung.

00:01:07.580 Sorry about that.

00:01:08.700 As I said earlier, we're going to be talking about the Ukraine war,

00:01:12.280 we're going to be talking about the negotiations between Iran and the United States

00:01:16.540 and we're briefly going to talk about Britain's next prime minister,

00:01:21.520 the new MP from Makerfield, Andy Burnham. 0.53

00:01:25.060 who is probably going to be even more useless than Keir Starmer.

00:01:29.340 Now, let's get started with the Ukraine war, and I'm going to talk about a couple of things here.

00:01:33.460 First, I'm going to give you a quick battlefield update as to what's going on.

00:01:37.560 Then I'm going to talk to you about how Russian strategic thinking is changing around the conflict

00:01:42.520 and why it's changing, because the Russians are taking quite a hammering from the Ukrainians.

00:01:48.420 And what I think they're going to do next in response to that, 0.91

00:01:51.960 which is probably going to be some strikes on Europe itself. 0.90

00:01:55.060 And then we'll talk about the Iran stuff, and then we'll get to Britain. 0.57

00:01:58.900 Now, where are we now on the battlefield?

00:02:02.660 This is a map by Suriak, who is a Spanish analyst, I believe, who produces some pretty good open source maps.

00:02:11.820 The map shows fixed front lines, but this is, in fact, a bit of a misrepresentation.

00:02:17.560 because there's a 30-kilometer zone

00:02:20.940 on either side of the troops

00:02:22.480 where you have just open skies for drones

00:02:27.420 and neither side can really concentrate forces.

00:02:32.200 And so the fighting happens

00:02:33.460 in pretty small groups of infantry

00:02:35.140 that take a lot of time to capture positions,

00:02:39.740 which leads to this being a pretty slow war of attrition,

00:02:43.980 which is quite expensive for the defenders

00:02:46.240 and for the attackers. The Russians have some superiority in drones locally, and they are

00:02:53.460 making some advances. And it seems that the Russian plan really is to try to break this

00:03:00.260 major Ukrainian defensive line, which starts here in Liman, and then goes through Slovyansk,

00:03:07.380 Kramatorsk, and then all the way to Konstantinivka in the bottom.

00:03:16.960 And this is where the bulk of the Ukrainian defenses are concentrated. And what the Russians

00:03:21.340 are trying to do is to keep the Ukrainians pinned down as they attack this line, while also nibbling 0.83

00:03:28.080 at it from the north and from the south. And the view is that if they can advance through here and 0.92

00:03:35.720 here to try to capture this little town of Druzhivka or however the hell you pronounce it

00:03:43.000 and continue their advances in Liman and consolidate there, the rest of the Ukrainian 0.81

00:03:49.620 line would be pretty much a kill zone for the Russians as what they would do is to try to flood

00:03:56.840 the area behind these lines with drones and to attack Ukrainian logistics as they come in and

00:04:04.840 by depleting the Ukrainian logistics, they'd break the Ukrainian military in that territory.

00:04:09.640 Now, the Russians are attacking in other areas. There is the Kupiansk front, which I'm not going

00:04:14.500 to bore you with. There is the Vovchansk front. There is the Sumy front, where they're drawing

00:04:21.020 closer to the city itself. And the idea behind these lines is just to create some distance

00:04:26.780 between them and the Ukrainians, and to put pressure on the Ukrainians and to force them to 0.66

00:04:32.160 send forces elsewhere. But this is the main battle line, and the second most important one

00:04:38.140 is the Zaporozhye front, where, as I've mentioned in previous episodes, the Russians are moving down

00:04:45.380 the two Ukrainian defensive lines, which are oriented towards the south, but the Russians

00:04:51.400 are attacking them from the east. And as they go through these lines, their objective is to get to

00:04:56.980 the town of Orchiv here. Once that hub is captured, they have an easier time trying to advance towards

00:05:05.180 Zaporozhia itself. This is the idea behind the Russian advances. The problem is that this is a 0.58

00:05:12.260 very long and drawn-out process. To get to the city of Zaporozhia, that can maybe take one or two years.

00:05:22.000 Even that might be optimistic. 0.97

00:05:24.100 To finish the battle in the Donbass and to take the whole Donetsk province,

00:05:28.920 that could easily be one or two years.

00:05:31.960 It can be quite a drawn-out process.

00:05:35.100 The Russian hope is that as this continues,

00:05:38.400 they would have depleted the Ukrainian military

00:05:41.380 and then they'd be able to advance faster.

00:05:44.660 But what the Ukrainians will be doing is preparing more defensive lines, 0.85

00:05:48.280 focusing on cities like Pavlograd and Dnipro, and they don't have a way around Sumy because from

00:05:56.520 Sumy, there are no major urban conglomerations before the Russians get to Kiev. But throughout

00:06:03.520 this war, nobody's been able to make breakneck advances. And that can only happen if the

00:06:10.720 Ukrainian military actually breaks, if the Ukrainian army actually collapses, which hasn't

00:06:17.140 happened. And the reason that it hasn't happened is because the Ukrainians have been able to 0.58

00:06:22.140 continue to conscript soldiers to force them into the fight. The Europeans are trying to help them 0.97

00:06:28.420 by threatening to send away Ukrainians that have run away from the war and force them back into 0.78

00:06:34.180 the country to make them fight. And in the meantime, the Ukrainians are doing two things. 0.74

00:06:40.720 They are making more and more threats against Belarus, and they are escalating their own 0.66

00:06:46.340 strikes against Russia itself. Now, the threats against Belarus are quite serious. Zelensky has

00:06:53.760 said that there are relay stations that are helping Russian communications, that are helping the

00:06:59.240 Russians identify and strike targets within Ukraine. And what Zelensky is saying is that

00:07:08.740 unless Belarus withdraws the Russian equipment or forces the Russians to leave their territory,

00:07:14.780 he is going to be attacking Belarus and ordering strikes on Belarusian infrastructure,

00:07:22.660 including the refining facilities that supposedly provide fuel to the Russians.

00:07:27.540 This is a pretty big threat because what Zelensky is trying to do here is to say

00:07:32.540 that if the Ukrainians somehow survive this war or win this war, 0.65

00:07:38.720 what they will try to do is expand the conflict into Belarus and try to create an even more

00:07:45.800 powerful coalition against the Russians. And if you look at the map here, the Russians are nowhere

00:07:52.060 near winning the war, not just because they're not taking the territory, but because victory

00:07:57.380 requires the Russians to take the city of Odessa. The importance of Odessa is that if you have an

00:08:03.700 axis that includes Odessa, Lviv, Warsaw, and Lithuania, essentially, this becomes a natural

00:08:13.360 buffer state sitting between Russia and the rest of Europe, and cutting the Russians off from the

00:08:20.220 rest of Europe, limiting their ability to have any movement in the Black Sea, basically cutting

00:08:27.240 off Russia from trade, especially with Europe, and making Russia irrelevant to European dynamics,

00:08:36.820 plus a state of that size with that population, would be a serious rival to Germany. It would

00:08:43.240 definitely dominate countries like Czechia or Slovakia. It would definitely dominate the Baltic

00:08:49.440 states. It just becomes a major power that is a rival empire to Russia, and that is a major threat 0.78

00:08:56.740 to the Russians. In addition, such a state, because it's got a historically powerful country

00:09:03.940 like Germany on its borders, and then Russia on the other side, that becomes a natural ally of

00:09:09.500 the United Kingdom and the United States, acting as a kind of buffer that forces Europe into line

00:09:16.940 on behalf of the Anglo powers. That's the big Russian fear. And Zelensky is confirming that

00:09:23.960 fear by threatening Belarus. Because if you have what, you know, the west of Ukraine, Poland and 0.91

00:09:31.500 Belarus and Lithuania, well, that is a very dominant player in European affairs. That's the

00:09:39.660 nightmare for the Russians. And so what Zelensky is doing is that he's inviting Russian escalation 0.62

00:09:46.020 by threatening escalation against Belarus. At least this is how the Russians are going to see it.

00:09:51.520 Our job here is to always look at the world through the eyes of the other side, 0.95

00:09:56.560 no matter who the other side is, be it the Americans or the Iranians or the Israelis,

00:10:01.040 or the Russians for that matter. But for the Russians, Zelensky threatening to escalate

00:10:06.580 against Belarus is a major problem. Add to it the repeated strikes that the Ukrainians have

00:10:12.560 been conducting against Moscow and St. Petersburg and Russian energy in general. They've been 0.55

00:10:18.740 hitting Russia in very significant depth. And so we had a strike in May against Moscow,

00:10:26.300 which was a big humiliation for the Russians. Obviously, they tried to send in 500 drones.

00:10:32.480 The Russians say they shot down most of them. Everybody exaggerates their interception rates,

00:10:38.960 including the Russians. And so this was a major problem for Russia. And then during the

00:10:48.160 the St. Petersburg Economic Conference, we had a major attack by the Ukrainians in June,

00:10:56.420 which targeted the main economic event in Russia. Every year they hold this St. Petersburg Economic 0.98

00:11:04.820 Forum. We had emails from Jeffrey Epstein saying that he was supposed to meet Putin there,

00:11:10.080 but Putin wouldn't give him the proper time. And so Epstein actually refused a meeting with Putin,

00:11:15.520 or so he claims. This is a major issue for the Russians, because it means that they were

00:11:22.160 humiliated in front of the investors and international partners that the Russians

00:11:27.360 are looking to get in to invest in their economy. And we had another big attack last week against

00:11:37.120 Moscow, where we had this famous image of the refinery in Russia being blown up to kingdom come.

00:11:43.980 there is some reporting that it was because of a Russian anti-aircraft missile that hit it wasn't

00:11:50.160 actually the Ukrainians somehow that makes it worse like if while trying to defend against

00:11:56.820 the Ukrainian attack you blew up this refinery in this spectacular way that's not the defense

00:12:04.120 that you think it is shall we say so this is a real and major problem for the Russians that they

00:12:12.200 are having to suffer these attacks, and that the attacks are going into the major Russian

00:12:19.440 symbolic population political economic centers that create an image of Russia being unsafe.

00:12:29.100 And it's no use for the Russians to debate the exact amount of damage and to say,

00:12:33.740 you know, haha, we weren't that badly hurt. We can continue to export oil, export gas,

00:12:41.240 do whatever we need to do, that still leaves Vladimir Putin looking incredibly weak.

00:12:50.320 And when you have people like Medvedev, the former prime minister and president of Russia,

00:12:55.980 basically calling for a much more hardline approach towards Europe and towards the West,

00:13:01.920 that really becomes quite an embarrassment for Putin and weakens his position internally

00:13:08.580 quite significantly. I'm not saying there's going to be a coup against him or anything like that,

00:13:14.380 but Putin governs through some kind of general consensus. All of these authoritarian regimes,

00:13:23.520 you rarely get an actual Stalin who is completely in charge of every decision. You almost never get

00:13:33.280 that in all of these authoritarian regimes there are various regime intellectuals there are regime

00:13:40.100 propagandists there are hardliners there are doves and there is an ongoing debate and the guy at the

00:13:48.380 top has to adjudicate between the different sides that's what you see in iran it's what you used to

00:13:55.520 see in china g is considerably stronger than previous chinese leaders um that's what you see

00:14:02.080 in Russia. And so these kinds of attacks are humiliating Putin. And the fact that the war

00:14:09.560 doesn't look like it's ending anytime soon, because although the Russians can claim progress,

00:14:15.340 that progress is incredibly slow, and the price for it is getting heavier,

00:14:22.060 that means that the Russians need to do something. And to understand what they need to do,

00:14:27.580 this is a pretty good location to start. This is one of the main think tanks of the Russian

00:14:34.680 Federation, the Center for Defense and Strategic Policies, I think. And it is the

00:14:42.460 Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. And it is the convener of the Valdai conference that

00:14:50.960 happens every year in Russia, which is the main geopolitical event on the Russian calendar,

00:14:55.500 which is regularly attended by Vladimir Putin personally.

00:14:59.960 So in the same way that when you want to understand American thinking,

00:15:04.620 you have to listen to the Council on Foreign Relations.

00:15:07.300 You have to listen to the Atlantic Council.

00:15:09.880 In Britain, you have to listen to Chatham House

00:15:12.000 because these are the entities that inform the decision makers.

00:15:16.480 That's the counterpart in Russia.

00:15:18.380 And a big part of the Putin legacy has been to sort of try to replicate

00:15:24.180 the Western systems in Russia. And so this is an institute that was founded in 1992, and it has

00:15:29.760 grown in importance. And this is the honorary chairman of that institute speaking.

00:15:38.200 And here what he's arguing in this piece is that, yes, the special military operation has been good.

00:15:44.560 It's allowed Russia to weed out the evil influences of the West. By the way, there's

00:15:49.560 something that should be said about russian thinking especially as reflected by this guy

00:15:54.460 um what's his name again uh karagonov they view the west as inherently evil they view

00:16:03.660 especially northwestern europe as inherently evil and they bleed constantly about colonialism

00:16:10.220 and racism and all that kind of stuff and they preach instead eurasianism which is the fusion

00:16:18.140 of Russia and China into an Asian superpower that is jointly run that can deliver some kind

00:16:25.420 of utopia. This is inherently evil thinking, because the way that they see the world 0.98

00:16:33.960 starts from the West is evil. And everything that the West has done throughout its history

00:16:42.080 has been evil. And these guys, you want to understand them as the people who still hold

00:16:47.420 a grudge over the role of the Latins in the loss of Constantinople, in the Last Crusade,

00:16:54.880 which attacked Constantinople, and in the Fourth Crusade, sorry, which attacked Constantinople,

00:17:01.260 and they are still not over that issue. So this is their worldview, and it's important to remember

00:17:11.160 that and they define the west intrinsically as enemies and they are uh more emphatic about the

00:17:20.080 legacy of the second world war than most others uh which is understandable because the russians

00:17:27.400 the losses for the russians of the second world war were 20 million people now in exchange they

00:17:32.780 ended up dominating all of eastern europe but their losses were quite catastrophic

00:17:37.520 So that's the mindset that you're dealing with here.

00:17:43.200 And what is being said here is that this guy warned the Europeans that the expansion of NATO into Ukraine was going to lead to a major war. 0.98

00:17:58.720 the europeans ignored this and they kept on um escalating in ukraine which is actually true

00:18:08.040 he's right about that um and that this is part of the european dna for lack of a better phrase 0.95

00:18:16.780 because you know the hatred of russia was cultivated by the austro-hungarians the poles

00:18:23.120 and other western countries who set the ukrainians against russia and so uh what is needed is

00:18:30.080 isolation from the ukrainian and european maladies to follow our own path of healthy and sound

00:18:36.980 development and then he goes on to say that the russians are actually winning the war

00:18:41.520 but the russians aren't properly responding to escalation by europe and here's the key thing

00:18:51.040 and that the Russians haven't actually destroyed the coalitions that have emerged against them

00:18:59.420 and that Europe is preparing for a new escalation

00:19:02.920 and they are backing Nazis in Ukraine, which is another partial truth, shall we say.

00:19:12.420 And so the only way to stop the Europeans is by threatening them with nuclear weapons.

00:19:19.780 and what he's advocating here is that major targets in europe including control centers

00:19:28.880 critical infrastructure and military bases of those european countries that play a key role

00:19:35.420 in preparing and executing military operation against russia must be hit and they should 0.85

00:19:41.660 include targets where the play where the elites live and work let their capitals finally sober up

00:19:49.020 If conventional strikes have no effect and Europe does not capitulate or at least retreat, we should be fully prepared militarily and most importantly politically and psychologically to launch limited but sufficient for political effect retaliatory strikes with strategic nuclear weapons.

00:20:13.980 That's what's being advocated here.

00:20:16.140 And then if you look at another piece here from the same think tank, the argument is about Iran and how Iran succeeded because it didn't just strike American military targets in the region, but also the assets of key American partners.

00:20:41.280 and then stuff about the weapon stockpile and the tolerance for damage and so on and so forth

00:20:47.720 so in the minds of the russians the iranian strategy of attacking the u.s's allies worked 0.97

00:20:56.080 and the europeans are so evil and unhinged that they need the same treatment 0.81

00:21:02.720 including the threat of launching nuclear weapons against them in order to achieve a similar effect 0.98

00:21:10.680 and again this is what they are thinking according to the most important think tank in russia

00:21:17.860 and if you want to understand what the russians are thinking that's a pretty important starting

00:21:23.980 point so if you're russia where does this logic lead you well it probably ends up leading you

00:21:34.620 towards actually striking Europe, and specifically, it leads you towards attacking the energy

00:21:44.640 infrastructure in Europe, especially the LNG facilities and the storage facilities in the EU

00:21:56.760 and probably in Britain, with the idea being that if you fire initially drones and then something

00:22:05.640 like an Oreshnik hypersonic missile, which can't be intercepted against energy targets or against

00:22:13.440 military industries or against airports or similarly important assets, you would show

00:22:23.040 the Europeans that they are going to be paying a price for continuing to support Ukraine.

00:22:29.320 If you sort of reconcile between the fact that Putin has to adjudicate between different

00:22:35.980 factions within the ruling elite in Russia, and that he himself is closer to the dovish

00:22:44.580 side, Putin is cast as a cartoon villain in Western media.

00:22:50.780 But in reality, on the Russian spectrum, he's closer to the liberal dovish side than he is to the hardline militarist side, which you're hearing from here in this think tank that we were discussing.

00:23:08.660 And so the approach, if you reconcile these two realities, is probably going to be Russia saying to Europe, look, as of next week, if you keep on backing Ukraine, we are going to start hitting targets within Europe.

00:23:26.680 And then they can bet on the fact that the Americans didn't want a major war against Iran.

00:23:32.420 There is no reason to believe that they would want a major war against Russia.

00:23:36.520 and that even though there is this influence in the United States that keeps on pushing for

00:23:43.560 escalation, the political decision makers backed down against Iran, they would probably end up

00:23:50.020 backing down against Russia. And without escalating the crisis dramatically, there is no way for the

00:23:57.880 crisis to be resolved other than continuing to fight this war of attrition against the Ukrainians,

00:24:03.980 possibly indefinitely, for another two or three years, five years, maybe 10 years, who knows. 0.80

00:24:11.840 And so it's kind of logical to think, if you're looking at the world from the Russian perspective, 0.74

00:24:18.460 that the next step that Russia is going to take is to issue some kind of ultimatum to the Europeans.

00:24:26.100 That if you release more funding to Ukraine, we are going to hit targets within European countries.

00:24:32.420 If you enjoyed this preview, please consider subscribing to lotusheaters.com starting for just £5 a month.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 24, 2026

PREVIEW LIVE： Realpolitik #52 ｜ It's Getting Worse

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