NATO-Russia escalation analysis with Stanislav Krapivnik, a former US Army officer now based in Donbas
Glenn Diesen interviews Stanislav Krapivnik on the accelerating NATO-Russia confrontation.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Stanislav Krapivnik, a former US Army officer who returned to Donbas after his military service, about the escalating NATO-Russia confrontation. Krapivnik argues that the European campaign to overwhelm Russian air defenses with strategic drones — with the explicit goal of blinding Russia's early warning and nuclear deterrent systems — is pushing the conflict toward a logic of nuclear first strike, because a blinded nuclear power facing an adversary with a first-strike doctrine has no rational alternative. He contends that strikes on Russian radar and nuclear assets could only have been executed with US assistance and serve no purpose other than enabling a first strike. Beyond the nuclear dimension, Krapivnik covers the front lines in Donbas, where he reports Ukrainian losses at a ten-to-one ratio, and provides a detailed account of the Russian African Corps repelling a large jihadist assault in Mali — an operation he links directly to Ukrainian and Western backing, and which he frames as one of several converging fronts in what he describes as an emerging world war.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The Drone Escalation and the Nuclear Threshold
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Today we are joined by Stanislav Krapivnik, a former US Army officer from Donbas who, since his army service, has returned to Donbas. Thank you for coming back on the program.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Thank you. Always a pleasure.
Glenn Diesen: I get the impression the NATO-Russia proxy war keeps escalating and we're moving towards very dangerous terrain. One of the developments we've seen lately is the volume of drones being used to overwhelm Russian air defenses, and Europeans especially do not shy away from essentially bragging about how they're contributing to this. A lot of this is also intended not just to overwhelm their defenses but to enable deep strikes within Russia, and it's no secret that the targets include Russia's energy installations among others. How do you see the situation?
Stanislav Krapivnik: I'm going to say a few words that some people are probably going to think are overblown, but they're not. I've spoken with various military officials. Look, we're entering — by mid to late summer, if there's not a ground war going on — considering everything the European Union is about to be hit with, including starvation at least in the lower classes, we are going to be entering a zone of possible nuclear war. I'll explain why.
Russian air defense systems — I'm not going to say how many targets they can handle, that's a state secret and I know approximately but won't mention it — but right now it's well within manageable scope. True, some things get through. What happens is Russia is a very big country. It can't cover everything. They'll find occasional corridors to go in and strike. I've just come back from Donbas, Monday night. You pass some of these oil facilities — they've got netting up, they've got everything up. They're climbing the ladder of defensive measures.
But the job the EU has set out for itself — and what says "we're just a defensive alliance, we're just helping Ukraine, we're not really part of this war" — is to overwhelm Russian defensive systems and the production rate they can maintain, by several fold, with these strategic drones. And then — as we've seen attempted before — take out the Russian radar systems, early warning radar systems, and possibly strategic assets such as strategic bombers, strategic bombing command, and maybe go after nuclear submarines in port.
So what you're going to have is a nuclear superpower, blinded, facing off against the US — which is fully involved; Trump just signed another giveaway to Ukraine of 1,500 JDAM kits, extended range, still only 80 km but still — you have a nuclear superpower blinded, with a threat to at least part of its nuclear deterrence, facing off against another nuclear superpower and its European proxies, who has a first-strike doctrine. The logic for that blinded superpower is to strike first. I don't know what's coming. I know the other guy has a doctrine to hit me the moment he thinks he can get away with it. The only logic left is to strike first with everything and exterminate the enemy, because tomorrow I might not be able to do it. That's the logic we are now in, or at least heading into. If the Europeans don't have enough brain power to stop themselves, there will not be a Europe. There'll be a nuclear desert in the northern hemisphere. I don't know how else to put it.
Glenn Diesen: I'm a bit surprised by the lack of restraint. I remember when Russia's early warning radar systems — the ones supposed to warn against a nuclear strike, which have no purpose in the theater of the Ukraine war — were hit, it was barely mentioned in the media. I had Ted Postol on, the MIT professor who also advised the Pentagon, and he was making the point of how outrageous this is, how extreme — the only purpose for doing it, the only way it could be done, was with US assistance, and the only purpose for striking it is to enable a US nuclear first strike. And then of course, as we saw in June of last year, the hitting of the nuclear triad of the Russian Federation. This is incredible. My concern is this is pushing Russia toward a more offensive approach — not waiting until the first strike comes.
Stanislav Krapivnik: There's one other approach — a first strike on a conventional weapon scale. For example, Russia could take out the factories manufacturing these drones. Sure, it may mean war with all of Europe, but it doesn't mean a nuclear first strike.
Glenn Diesen: How seriously do we know the Kremlin is taking the threat to its nuclear deterrent? You would think alarm bells would be going off. And what would be a proportional response, given that nobody wants an all-out nuclear exchange?
Stanislav Krapivnik: Nobody wants a full-out nuclear exchange. They just want a one-sided nuclear exchange. That's America's policy of first strike — we exterminate you before you can respond, whatever comes back isn't going to be enough to really destroy us, and we come out on top. That's the American approach. It was proposed to Kennedy when he came in and it's never gone away.
It would be much less dangerous if the US had a second-strike-only policy, the way China and Russia do. India and Pakistan also have that position, by the way — they're both nuclear powers that have fought wars and just fought another one, but they have a sane second-strike doctrine. They're not going to be the first to launch. The US doesn't. So the logic for anyone facing off against the US is: don't wait for him to hit you, even if that's not your policy. Hit him first — particularly if you're being blinded.
There was a study done about fifteen or sixteen years ago on how many key targets in the US would have to be destroyed to turn the US into a medieval economy — probably shattering the country for a hundred years, or possibly politically shattering it forever. Take a wild guess how many targets need to be hit.
Glenn Diesen: I wouldn't know.
Stanislav Krapivnik: 47. That's your key cities, your key nuclear power plants, your key oil and gas facilities. There are only 47 spots that need to be taken out and the US is done — economically done for the next hundred-plus years. Its key population and decision-making centers are gone. Its key industry areas are gone. Its key logistic areas are gone.
Russia may have more than 47 just because Russia is much bigger — the size of two and a half Americas. But the point is that in a high-tech economy, things are actually very fragile. In medieval times, every village had a smith, and if you killed a couple of smiths you didn't crash the metalworking economy because every village had multiple smiths. When you have a Silicon Valley where the majority of high-tech IT companies and engineers are concentrated, you take that out and it's very hard to come back from when it's been atomized.
And here's the other problem, particularly for the Europeans. Russia is huge — the biggest country in the world. The US is still pretty big. Any strikes of a limited character are only going to cover a certain percentage of the country in nuclear fallout or direct destruction. The non-Russian European subcontinent — and Russia, if you count Donbas, is about 42% of the European subcontinent — everybody else is pretty packed in there. So any one strike is going to affect a disproportionate amount of people, cities, and areas. Even a limited nuclear exchange on the rest of Europe would leave vast swaths of territory no longer habitable, or habitable only at your own risk.
That's the reality. But I don't think European officials or the people still get it. I mean, you remember the 1980s — medium-range ballistic missiles became a thing and there were mass demonstrations, because all of a sudden it's not the Soviet Union and the US doing the exchange, we're going to be the first ones hit. And the crowds came out in the streets, and in the end that whole class of nuclear missiles was banned. Now we've got them back. Europe is very much going to be the first things hit, and then maybe America.
The Immunity to Common Sense in Western Discourse
Glenn Diesen: There's a weird mindset in Europe now. If one warns that striking Russia's early warning radar systems, or bombing its nuclear deterrent, risks World War III and a nuclear exchange, the usual feedback is: "Well, Ukraine has the right to defend itself. This is pro-Russian talking points." There's an immunity to common sense. It's a binary option — either you support the Russians or you support the Ukrainians, and supporting Ukrainians means you don't discuss risks such as nuclear war. It's impossible to challenge this. It's a very dangerous path. This is often the argument made by a common guest on my program, the former CIA director for Russia analysis, George Beebe — that the Europeans are really trapped in narratives. There's no strategic thinking anymore. It's just sloganeering, and everyone has locked themselves into very destructive positions.
But besides going after Russia's nuclear deterrent, a key objective is of course the energy installations — refineries and everything else. With more long-range strikes deep into Russia, and NATO obviously assisting Ukraine to try to overcome some of the Russian air defenses, how big an impact is this having on Russia's energy industry?
Stanislav Krapivnik: It's having some impact, but we've seen that a lot of what's normally being hit is not key infrastructure. An oil refinery is a huge facility — somewhere between three to five kilometers long with hundreds of kilometers of pipes. What's normally being hit — and I passed one of these tank farms where part of it had been burnt and the rest had been saved — is storage facilities, because they burn really bright and make really good pictures for Western media. Look, it's burning, ha ha.
If you hit the pipes, the pipes are under pressure, monitored by computer systems. Valves cut off the pressure if it drops and they don't burn. They take a bit more to replace, but we've seen that the Russian economy and industry is fast enough at replacing them. It's a little harder if you get certain vessels damaged — they may take anywhere from a week to a couple of weeks to replace because they're all welded and designed by hand. But for the most part, there hasn't been that big a damage.
These last couple of strikes were more vicious, especially on the Black Sea coast. Novorossiysk — they hit pretty hard, and still the majority of the damage was storage facilities that exploded. And then what we saw on the Black Sea coast, the same as in Iran — mass pollution, oil spilling out, carcinogenic ash coming down. But overall it still hasn't reduced, and it won't reduce, Russian production.
What it is doing is accelerating Russia's move of facilities from the west toward Asia. Asia and other locations are going to be the key ports for energy. Europe — the EU anyway — has been cut off one way or another, and technical problems on the Druzhba pipeline are just another hit. It's going to hit them hard.
What the strikes do have as an effect is they further drive up the cost of oil on the market, especially the spot market, and the Europeans are pretty much buying off the spot market right now. So it just makes it more expensive for them. In supporting — as you said, they're in lockstep no matter what damage they do to themselves — the level of ignorance or self-destruction at this point is beyond comprehension.
Zelensky is trying to strike at TurkStream — the pumps pushing gas into southeastern Europe. They've struck multiple times the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which is 50% owned by Chevron and 50% by Kazakhstan's oil company. It's cost them something like $9 billion in lost revenue over the last half year. That's huge money. So they're driving up costs on the markets, which is again going to hit Europe hardest of all. And if they do manage to take out the TurkStream gas line, it's going to be a major hit on the Turkish economy — which is going to make the Turks really happy — and a major hit on southeastern European economies. Outside of LNG from the US, that's about the only gas they have left coming in.
They had been managing to alienate the UAE and other countries with the Third Energy Package and everything else they were demanding. At this point it's self-destruction, but they're going for it. They can't stop themselves.
And I didn't finish answering the last question. I can't speak for the civilian leadership in the Kremlin, but the military is looking at this very seriously — seriously enough to discuss nuclear first strike, I think, and definitely strikes on drone plants inside the rest of Europe. Even if it risks a conventional world war, at this point it's still better than a nuclear exchange.
Zelensky's Threat to Strike the May 9th Parade
Glenn Diesen: On another escalation which might come sooner — there's the threat by Zelensky to strike the May 9th Victory Day parade in Moscow. I saw that Zakharova made a comment that if the EU doesn't rein Zelensky in and this attack actually goes through, she advised various European leaders and their embassies to evacuate Kyiv immediately, because the retaliation would be immense. Do you think this is just Zelensky trying to sow uncertainty and bring Ukraine back into the news, or do you think this is something he might actually carry out?
Stanislav Krapivnik: The first does not negate the second. Of course he wants to be at the head of things. And at this point — look, it's always hard to tell how much Zelensky is in charge and how much the Americans and the British are in charge, particularly the American CIA. The American CIA is on destroy-Russia mode no matter what it costs. They're locked into this very destructive mode, and definitely the British. They're all in, even to the possible extermination of England. These people lost sanity a long time ago, and the British people had better wake up because they may be lost with them in any possible nuclear exchange one day. Not that England exactly has anything to exchange with — even the missiles are not their own and neither are the Typhoon submarines. They're all rented from the US.
Would he do it? I think he would. I'm going to be there — I'll be off to the side with RT as a commentator on the 9th of May. I was there last year also. So if anything happens, I'll be on location.
The parades are downscaled, and it's not because of the threat. There was a lot of criticism in 2023 about the size of the parade because the country is at war — we need to save money and cut on some of these grandiose ceremonies. 2025 was a big parade because of the 80th anniversary. This year, as far as I know, the parade is not going to have any ground equipment — it's going to be basically a marching parade. They can still march a hell of a lot better than what the Americans put together, as we remember from that shameful example.
Would he strike? I think he'll try. The question is — there was a response from the Russian military side that said they'll just wipe out the center of Kyiv, and they could very easily. They can Gaza Kyiv, and that's what I don't think anybody remembers. They see what the Israelis are doing to Gaza and they support it. Russia is quite capable of doing the same to Berlin or London or any other city in Europe. It's got the missile capabilities. So we'll see. I think they will try it. They're either not that smart or they're that desperate — it's hard to tell. And partially it's the fault of the Kremlin: they've lost deterrence, or any threat of deterrence, and the West isn't taking it realistically until something happens.
From the Western point of view, the Ukrainians are meat. For the average European, the Ukrainians are Eastern barbaric meat being used against the other Eastern barbarians. Who cares if they die? The average European doesn't give a damn about how many Ukrainians die. They virtue signal all day long — it doesn't cost them anything. "Oh, look how virtuous I am, we're giving money to those Ukrainians to die." And pretty soon they'll be sending their men off, gathering them up and sending them to the front. According to the Ukrainians, the French have already handed 40,000 people over to be mobilized and sent to the front as fast as possible.
The Europeans, to the average European, Ukrainians are more of a pain in the ass — some kind of Eastern savages. They don't care how many of them die. The Americans sure don't care how many of them die. All they hear is a cha-ching every time a Ukrainian turns into a corpse. And if you can get a Russian, that's even better. It's all money in the bank. Beating around the bush and making euphemisms about what they are is pointless. It's horrid, it's brutal, and that's what it is. To the average Western politician and their backers, it's all money. It's just meat for the grinder, and it's never been anything else.
Glenn Diesen: I can't help but notice that every time there's some expression of empathy for the suffering of the Ukrainians, it always translates into sending more of their youth to the trenches. If there are other issues — things that can't be used for warfare, such as the forced mobilization, Ukrainians being dragged out of their homes and sent to the front — suddenly the empathy is gone, because it can't be used in any instrumental way.
The Front Lines in Donbas and Zaporizhzhia
My last question is about what you currently see on the front line. It seems the Russians are doing quite well in the Donbas region, in the Kursk region, and in Sumy for that matter, but in the Zaporizhzhia region we see that the Ukrainians have had some successes, especially over the past week along the Dnipro. How are you reading the situation?
Stanislav Krapivnik: Ukraine has successes but it doesn't have staying power, because it gains those successes by using up a lot of people. A friend of mine who was a sapper and storm infantry, and is now on the cleanup crews that go into the battlefield to remove bodies, was in Kupyansk. Kupyansk is in Russian hands — Ukraine is holding some of the forested areas and some buildings on the very edge. They came in from the south to clean up the bodies from what used to be more or less a static front. He said it's ten to one. He was shocked. He thought there would be a lot more Russian dead, but no — ten to one. Ukrainians are just losing a massive amount of people.
Another guy told me he was on the front line in Kharkiv region, and they had a two-kilometer open field between their high-ground positions and the line of contact. The Ukrainians would just drive up, unload a bunch of infantry — and talking with him about how the infantry was moving, it was obvious they were absolutely untrained, basically given a rifle and told to go forward. He said they barely ever fired on them. The artillery would chew them up before they got halfway across that field.
A two-kilometer field to charge across is huge. Close combat is 50 meters and closer. At 2 kilometers in a modern military setting, you're never getting to 50 meters. Between heavy artillery, mortars, air-dropped munitions, and then direct fire from tanks being used as infantry support vehicles — heavy machine guns, landmines — you're never making it across that field. He said they just send body waves. There are corpses laying on the ground rotting.
The Russians won't go out and pick them up anymore, because they did that in Zaporizhzhia during the big 2023 counteroffensive — Russian troops would go out to pick up the wounded Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian artillery would use that for targeting on Russian soldiers. After a couple of artillery ambushes while Russians were trying to save the lives of Ukrainian wounded, they left them out there to bleed out and die. What are you going to do? You're not going to risk your own guys when you're dealing with people like that.
Russia's Drone Reorganization
Stanislav Krapivnik: The main thing I've seen from this trip is the reorganization of Russian drone forces. Ukraine was actually ahead of this and Russia is finally catching up. When Russia went into FPV drones — and there are different missions: reconnaissance, kamikaze, bombing, supply — every battalion, every company had its own drone section, organic to whatever company-plus-level unit they were in. So there were different levels of training, different levels of equipment, different levels of everything.
They're all being reorganized now. They've been stripped out of all of these other units and are being formed into drone battalions. These are separate from the anti-aircraft, anti-drone units — the anti-drone units are now categorically inside air defense organizations, regiments, and battalions. The offensive drone units are being specialized and standardized.
New schools are opening up inside Russia and closer to the battlefield. Units are opening their own schools because so many people are going through. I was in one of these labs where they're developing their own drones or modifying existing ones — whatever the Ukrainians toss out as a new idea, they bring it down, take it apart, remodify it, and move on with new models. So they have a limited capability of developing their own drones plus what's coming in from centralized manufacturing, and it's all going into a very professional organization with plenty of candidates signing up.
Russia's African Corps in Mali
Glenn Diesen: Before I forget, I wanted to ask you about Russia's activities in Africa, specifically Mali. It doesn't really pop up much in the news. How would you give an overview of what's actually happening there in terms of the fighting?
Stanislav Krapivnik: Pretty much abject failure — for the attackers. They tried to do the Syria scenario. The president of Mali — I'm probably butchering his name — the difference between him and Assad is that Assad turned away from Russia, then turned away from China and Iran, all three of whom were offering to upgrade his military. Just open your economy, let us invest, which would have brought jobs too. Assad wanted to be loved by the West. He went and got loved by the West. We know how that ended.
The Malians didn't have this kind of problem. The Russian African Corps — formerly Wagner, reorganized and with additional Russian personnel added, now part of the Russian Ministry of Defense, not a mercenary company, these are Russian regulars — has been rebuilding the Malian military and upping its capabilities quite a bit.
What we saw was something like 12,000 fighters out of a Mad Max road warrior scenario, charging in on technicals and motorbikes — two guys per bike — a lot of money behind this. These were both Islamic jihadists and Tuareg nationals wanting independence. But the problem is the Tuareg, who were supposedly secular, are now fully in bed with the Islamic jihadists, which really turned the Tuareg people in the north against them.
They came charging in from the desert trying to do a blitzkrieg. Additionally, there were obviously elements inside the Malian government that betrayed it — hit squads with suicide bombers were led right to the minister of defense, who and his family were killed, and there were other strikes inside the capital Bamako. The president — he was a colonel in the Malian army when it was ruled by the French through black hands instead of white hands, the neo-French empire — he armored up, got his assault rifle, and went off trying to control what was going on. He's not running. That's the point — unlike Assad, he's not running.
The Russian military was the axis on which everything else was pinned, and they stood and fought. The Islamists took the city of Kidal, which is basically the capital of the north. The Russian and Malian forces moved out to the south to a base there, and the Malian government coordinated through negotiations to evacuate them. But apparently there are still checkpoints and bunker systems north of the city being held by Russian forces.
One of the problems for this Mad Max assault is they have no artillery, no drones, no staying power. They are what would be called flying columns. Flying columns can do a lot of damage because they can get in fast, but they're light infantry at the end of the day. They can cause a lot of chaos, but the moment the lines stabilize, they get exterminated — they blunder into fixed positions, into ambushes, and get wiped out. We saw the same thing with the Kursk incursion: they could get in deep, cause a lot of trouble, but couldn't take any built-up areas, and the moment the lines stabilized, the flying column ended.
Not only do the Russian military and the Malians have the artillery, they also have aviation — a lot of Mi-24s coming in with rocket pods, laying waste to the jihadists. On top of that, there's a drone section Russia set up for the Malian army, doing very good work, taking these guys out left and right with kamikaze drones. The jihadists have very little they can do about it, particularly in very open country.
What was interesting too is that even in Bamako, once their raids got crushed, they scattered, and the locals hunted them down and killed them. They'd pull all these corpses together, pile them up with trash, and burn them — because these people are trash to them. Dozens upon dozens of bodies. They've been destroyed. Kidal is getting basically surrounded now. The latest news is some of these bands were asking for green corridors to leave. I highly doubt the Malian army is going to let them leave so they can come back in another year or two or three.
But the point is not that these guys came in — that's not a surprise. It's who's backing them. Buying bikes, motorbikes, and technicals — Toyota trucks, Toyota makes a lot of money off of feeding wars all over the world, they never know where their trucks are going as they sell them hundreds at a time — equipping all of that takes a lot of money. And the Ukrainians are involved. In fact, they're stupid enough that they posted photos of themselves with these jihadists and their jihadi-Ukrainian flags all over the internet. If there's any doubt that this is not a homegrown event but an invasion, just like Syria was, there you go.
Burkina Faso sent troops to assist Mali. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have basically formed a self-defense alliance because they knew the French would be back — and the Americans are back, and the French and the Ukrainian proxies are working directly for their masters. Ukrainians are arming jihadists, cartel thugs from Colombia and Mexico. They're the American proxy in all of this.
Glenn Diesen: Incredible — you see this fighting between Russians and Ukrainians spreading from Africa across the world. Amazing developments.
France's Desperation and Mali's Economic Future
Stanislav Krapivnik: One thing I want to add — something that's not getting talked about. The French are extremely desperate. Mali has uranium. Mali has eight gold mines. Mali has finally started to build up a gold reserve. France has a huge gold reserve and no gold mines — they just took it out of Mali when Mali was part of their neocolonial empire.
Most of Mali doesn't have electricity. Rosatom is in the process of starting to build three nuclear power plants for Mali. Not only is this going to give electricity to the people, it's going to provide the electricity needed for manufacturing. So Mali is no longer going to be desperate and selling its raw resources at the bottom of the value chain. It's going to be able to start processing those resources, maybe even bringing up finished goods. Mali is going to get rich, or at least a lot richer than it was, off of its own resources, rather than letting Western Europeans continue to steal them at rock bottom prices.
The uranium that Macron and everybody before Macron was buying — you have very little uranium in the ore, you have to chemically bleach it out. The going price on the market is $250 a ton. The French were buying at $50 a ton. Now they have to pay market value. So of course they're furious. They lost their gold mines, they lost the uranium mines, they lost their cobalt mines. They've lost a lot by losing this portion of the Sahel. And there's a threat of everything else going too. Madagascar had a revolution and got rid of the French neocolonials — Russia wasn't playing any role in that, but it's catching on that Africa has a choice now, which is something it has not had in a very long time.
Glenn Diesen: Well, thanks for sharing the insights. I'm going to start following what's happening in Mali a bit more closely, because this is going to have massive consequences.
The Converging Fronts of a World War
Stanislav Krapivnik: What we're looking at is possibly a world war. World War I was essentially a flare going up and everybody charging at each other. World War II was actually a lot of different small wars that eventually grew into one continuous front line — the Italian adventures, the Japanese, the Spanish Civil War, they're all part of World War II. We're seeing the same thing. The front line right now is in Ukraine, the front line is in the Persian Gulf, and now the front line is in West Africa. It's growing. The number of these front lines — eventually they're all going to merge into one big war if this doesn't stop. And unfortunately, I don't see the West stopping. The West is absolutely driving this.
Glenn Diesen: I keep hearing the argument that we're already in a world war. And that argument is starting to sound convincing.
Stanislav Krapivnik: It does.