Ukraine

• Pres. Zelensky visited Washington after addressing the UN General Assembly. He's hoping to ask Pres. Biden for long-range ATACMS missiles, but Biden is reluctant to offer them: Congress and the U.S. public are increasingly divided on the issue of military aid for Ukraine.
• Zelensky traveled to Canada next.
• The first of the M1 Abrams tanks the U.S. is sending to Ukraine will arrive next week after a long delay: the U.S. had stalled the transfer due to concerns that high-tech Abrams tanks aren't what Ukraine needs to fight this grinding ground war.

• Pres. Assad arrived in China on a mission to strengthen Syria-China ties and secure financial support for rebuilding Syria.
• Syria signed on to China's Belt and Road Initiative last year, but no major joint projects have launched yet.

• Pres. Tshisekedi asked the UN to accelerate the withdrawal of peacekeeping troops from DRC to start this December - to coincide with DRC's general elections - instead of a year later in Dec. 2024. The peacekeepers are unpopular in DRC, so Tshisekedi is trying to woo voters by evicting UN forces sooner.

• Col. Doumbouya, Guinea's junta leader, spoke before the UN General Assembly to defend the coup he led and criticize foreign meddling: "the real putschists, the most numerous, are those who avoid any condemnation - they are those...who cheat to manipulate the text of the constitution in order to stay in power eternally."

• CNN reported that Iran nearly scuttled the prisoner swap deal by raising last-minute roadblocks and demands. The U.S. refused to bend: "We held our line and the Iranians backed down and we made it work."

• Local reports suggest Libyan authorities are rushing to crack down on protests against their slow response to recent flooding that killed over 11,000 people: several vocal demonstrators and journalists have been arrested and comms have been severed to make it difficult to organize demonstrations (officials blamed sabotage for the outages).

• France's Total Energies hinted that it would start producing oil in Suriname in 2028. Suriname has sought to attract exploration interest in its offshore oilfields in hopes that oil majors will find the same mineral wealth as they have in nearby Guyana.
• Suriname is already an onshore oil producer: it exports about 16,000 barrels per day (which is tiny - Guyana, by comparison, already produces 400,000 barrels per day).