YouTube link to Redacted’s interview with John Kiriakou on possible CIA involvement in Ukrainian protests against Zelensky here.

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 7/30/25

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is an academic who analyzes and critiques propaganda.

On the battlefield, Russian forces are reliably confirmed to have a strong presence to the south of Pokrovsk and to be fighting Ukrainian forces in the center of Pokrovsk Reports suggest that Russia forces are now moving north of Pokrovsk with a view to outflanking cities in Donbass such as Sloviansk and Kramatorsk that are still held by Ukraine, as Russians move north from Pokrovsk, and north and east of Kamianske in Zaporizhzhia.

Increasingly Russians encounter Ukrainian positions that are no longer defended or poorly defended. Some reports suggest that in effect Ukraine is expecting to retreat west of the Dnieper where it may already be working to establish a major new line of defense. Reports also seem to be converging in agreement on the increasing superiority of Russian drones, in quantity and impact. Russian drone production facilities in Kazan are expanding. The best of Ukrainian forces is said to be being transitioned to the Sumy region, which is critical to the defense of Kiev, which is likely to be Zelenskiy’s paramount concern.

Rumors – fed both by a recent story by Seymour Hersh and by a Russian intelligence statement – are swirling of destabilization in Kiev and the possible overthrow of Zelenskiy in favor of General Zaluzhnyi, currently Ukrainian ambassador to the UK. Such a development, long anticipated, in itself means little. The installation of a new President by coup would simply replace on illegitimate leader, Zelenskiy, with an even more illegitimate leader. The new leader would still be accountable to the kinds of western intelligence, Banderite militia and comparable sources of pressure against making considerable concessions to Russia’s demands as articulated by Putin in July of 2024, and there are few indications to suggest that those demands will be reduced any time soon – quite to the contrary, they will have increased in line with military advances – I dont expect to see Russia give up any territory.

We wait to see whether Trump will move, as he has threatened, to impose further sanctions on Russia, and on the major clients for Russian oil (China, India, Turkey). Russia and China have made it clear that they will not be intimidated. Trump had already been talking about imposing 25% tariffs on India; India has expressed exasperation with US negotiators and their terms and will almost certainly be enraged if Trump now imposes further heavy sanctions on them for their purchase of Russian oil, especially if they end up being charged more than China.

Predictably, the price of oil is rising. Europe, along with being subjected to tariffs of 15% are also committed to spending $750 billion on US LNG (even though there are insufficient European ports available for processing LNG), thus increasing their dependence on US oil very considerably). This will place additional strain on US production and US prices at a time when many experts believe that peak shale oil production in the US has passed and that from now the amount of available oil will be in decline.

On the Middle East, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said that the UK will join France in recognizing a Palestinian state in September if there is no ceasefire agreed by that time. This makes the question of an absolute – the right to national recognition – conditional on what another state, Israel, does or does not do. In reality of course, the UK has more responsibility (yes, OK, it is complicated) than other nation for the original creation of Israel in 1947 (not accompanied, note, by a UN insistence on nation for Palestine) and for the civilizational injustice to the Palestinians that has resulted and is now made egregiously worse as a result of the genocide, a process to which the UK has contributed by its disastrous loyalty to Netanyahu, its direct complicity in making its Cyprus base available for Israeli planes and its transfer of intelligence about Gaza collected by the RAF to Israel. And in so many other ways.

Elsewhere in West Asia, there is growing confirmation that proposed US long lease of the Zangezur corridor in Armenia, along Iran’s border, between Turkey and Azerbaijan, is indeed intended to be a new and significant front in the West’s long-term aim to surround Iran and Russia, perhaps igniting a conflict no less threatening than the West’s proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. The corridor will greatly facilitate the possibility of transfers of military personnel and materiel right to Iran, where Iran must rightly be concerned about the loyalty of its 20 million Azeris in its north even as it continues to send back to Afghanistan a potential four or more million undocumented Afghans, under national conditions of increasing temperatures and water shortage.

Meanwhile to the south and west of Iran the destabilization and possibly ultimately balkanization of Syria is in rapid progress. We learn today that the horrific and brutal slaughter of Druze in the southeast of Syria was the result of a carefully planned joint operation between Israel and the terrorist and illegal HTS regime in Damascus in which the Kurdish SDF also participated alongside HTS forces in a bid, among other things, to consolidate Israeli control over southern Syria and to create a direct line of progress for Israel toward northern Syria and eastwards into Iraq. The US and Israel continue to intimidate the government of Lebanon to crush the country’s major force for civil order, Hezbollah.