Final Battle. Donbass And Zaporozhzhye Lines Crack (The Duran)

The entire Donbass region is set to fall into Russian hands shortly. The discussion turns to the further advances and the economic fallout from oil shortages and looming secondary US sanctions. The Russians also look set to upgrade the conflict to a full scale war. They likely held off while buffering their economy to prevent too much civilian hardship.

Another reason for holding off an upgrade to the SMO was to build up arms supplies. If Iran can produce thousands of drones and ballistic missiles then the Russians are likely stockpiling many hundreds of thousands of weapons, if not millions. You can imagine that the targeted numbers of theatre ballistic missiles is probably in the hundreds of thousands, with production line factories turning out a masses of finished products every month. 

Time Stamps:

00:00 Intro: the situation on the ground in Ukraine
00:57 Donbass nears its decisive final battle
01:41 Rapid Russian advances toward Orikhiv in Zaporizhzhia
04:32 Russians breaking through the last defense lines
06:35 Why the fall of Zaporizhzhia city would be catastrophic
11:46 Left bank versus right bank Ukraine explained
13:56 Donbass: the decisive battlefield since 2022
17:22 Russia closes in on Dobropillya
20:53 A cauldron forms around Sloviansk and Kramatorsk
20:53 Mystery deepens over the battle for Lyman
26:34 Trump's disconnect from battlefield reality
26:57 Odessa's total naval blockade explained
30:35 Russian FAB bombs start hitting Odessa's port
34:03 Ukraine's Caspian Sea strikes on Iranian shipping
39:42 What happens if bone crushing sanctions pass

[Posted at the SpookyWeather2 blog, July 30, 2026.]