BLACKWATER USA | DAILY BRIEF - Blackwater Worldwide

Posted by BW Actual on Jul 11th 2025

China

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit this week, SecState Rubio hinted at a possible imminent meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Secretary Wang Yi.
It would be the highest-level U.S.-China meeting since Pres. Trump's return to office in January, and it could set the stage for Trump to accept Pres. Xi's invitation to visit China with a delegation of U.S. executives later this year.
Rubio - who met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier this week - said he planned to use his meeting with Wang to raise concerns about China's support for Russia's war in Ukraine: "The Chinese clearly have been supportive of the Russian effort, and I think that generally they’ve been willing to help them as much as they can without getting caught."

Iran

Israeli intelligence concluded that some of Iran's enriched uranium survived U.S. and Israeli airstrikes last month.
That's not a big surprise: Iran had worried about strikes on its nuclear facilities for years, and must have had plans for safeguarding the precious ~400 kg it painstakingly enriched to 60%.
Perhaps the bigger surprise is that the Israeli officials behind this assessment don't seem concerned about it. They noted that Iran wouldn't be able to recover its safeguarded uranium and resume enrichment to weapons grade levels without being detected, whereupon Israel would have time to take a second shot at what's left of Iran's stock.
Separately, the UK's Intelligence and Security Committee - a parliamentary body that oversees British intelligence - warned of a rising risk of Iranian attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets within the UK, citing at least 15 Iranian attempts to kidnap or kill British nationals on home soil since 2022.
One interesting insight from the UK report is that Iran "sees the U.K. as collateral in its handling of internal matters" and does not view attacks within the UK as attacks on the UK. The Committee recommended that the UK and its partners change that perception by endeavoring to "make it clear to Iran — at every opportunity — that such attacks would indeed constitute an attack on the U.K. and would receive the appropriate response."

Ukraine

Col. Ivan Voronych - a senior officer in Ukraine's domestic intelligence agency (the SBU) - was assassinated in broad daylight in Kyiv yesterday.
Russia hasn't commented on Russia's possible involvement in the targeted killing, but Voronych was certainly in Moscow's sights: he was behind the 2016 killing of a senior pro-Russian separatist commander nicknamed Motorola, and his unit played an integral role in Ukrainian incursions into Russia last summer.
While Russia has generally had an arms and personnel advantage on the battlefield, it has struggled to carry out covert operations like this inside Ukraine. If Russia was behind this assassination, it would be an unusual success.

Libya

The UN's mission in Libya, UNSMIL, warned of rising tensions between armed groups in Tripoli, where forces loyal to enfeebled Prime Minister Dbeibah are fending off threats from autonomous militias like Rada and the Stability Support Apparatus.

Venezuela

Last month, the EU's Financial Action Task Force added Venezuela to its "grey list" of countries deserving extra scrutiny due to deficiencies in their safeguards against money laundering and terrorist financing. [Monaco was also added, while the UAE and Gibraltar were removed after strengthening their financial diligence requirements.]
Yesterday, Venezuela responded with a classic "I know you are, but what am I?" retort. In a successful proposal to ban the responsible EU officials from entering Venezuela, National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez accused the EU of "launder[ing] money from drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and human trafficking;" as well as complicity in genocide through its failure to stop Israel's war in Gaza.

Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan's Pres. Aliyev met with Armenia's Prime Minister Pashinyan twice yesterday during five hours of bilateral talks in UAE.
Both sides politely called their summit "constructive," but it failed to yield any breakthroughs or set a date for finalizing a truce to end nearly 40 years of border skirmishes.