Ukraine

• Pres. Biden and VP Harris spoke with Pres. Zelensky yesterday, and pledged a fresh $625 million military aid package including four more HIMARS from Pentagon stockpiles.
• That's the 22nd aid package the U.S. has allocated to Ukraine since August 2021, and with the addition of these four HIMARS, the U.S. will have offered Ukraine 20 of the systems.
• And Ukraine's sudden gains toward Kherson on two fronts - around Lyman and Kherson - have left Russian forces reeling. Russia began training over 200,000 new recruits - of the 300,000 it planned to conscript.
• Meanwhile, Ukraine's foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, is on a tour of Africa to dispel Russia's mythical narrative about the war. He's the first Ukrainian foreign minister to visit Africa, where Russia has spent decades propagating its propaganda, so he'll face an uphill battle explaining, for example, that Russians and Ukrainians are not "one people," and that Russia - not the West - is the aggressor in this war.

• Just days after Burkina Faso's second coup this year, demonstrators in Ouagadougou are breaking out Russian flags again.
• We first saw the flags in January days after the previous coup, and analysts speculated then that Russia and its collaborators had distributed them to locals (who were probably very confused) to make it looks like there was a groundswell of popular support for hiring Wagner Group to run the country's security.
• Now the flags are back, as is the conversation about engaging Wagner. The new junta leader, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, seems more open to the idea than Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba, the predecessor he deposed. (Actually Damiba had been a Wagner proponent and tried to convince Pres. Kaboré to hire Wagner before he deposed him, but once in power Damiba seems to have changed his mind - perhaps with some coaxing from France and the U.S.).

• The U.S. gross national debt reached $31 trillion for the first time. With high inflation raising borrowing costs, that figure is poised to grow quickly.
• A small $13 billion sliver of that went to build the U.S. Navy's newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, which deployed for the first time yesterday. It's the first of a new series of carrier, the Ford class, and boasts almost three times the electrical power of the previous generation Nimitz-class carriers - as well as dual-band radar and an electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS).

• Colombia said it would restart peace talks with the country's largest rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN, en español), sometime next month, with Norway, Venezuela, and Cuba mediating.
• Colombia's new leftist president, Gustavo Petro, was a former rebel himself - though he was part of the now-disbanded left-wing M-19 movement rather than the ELN or FARC - and has been more sympathetic than his predecessor towards rebel groups like the ELN.