Russia

• On Monday, Russian state media hinted that Pres. Putin might still press charges against Yevgeny Prigozhin - despite reportedly agreeing to drop them in exchange for Prigozhin going into exile. Now it seems both sides have fulfilled their end of such a deal: criminal charges against Prigozhin have been dropped, and Prigozhin has officially entered Belarus (per Belarus's Pres. Lukashenko, who brokered the deal - and says he saved Prigozhin from Putin, who wanted to "whack" him).
• There are reports that two senior Russian generals - Valery Gerasimov and Sergei Surovikin - knew of and supported Prigozhin's plan to rise up against the rest of the military elite and Putin. Gerasimov and Surovikin hasn't been seen in public since early Saturday morning.
• Russia's defense ministry says Prigozhin's Wagner Group fighters have started transferring their weapons to the regular army, and the 25,000 of them (per Prigozhin) will get to choose between joining Prigozhin in Belarus, laying down arms and going home, or joining the regular army - which reportedly pays half as much. Satellite images show constructions in Belarus that some analysts speculate will become camps for the Wagner fighters who follow Prigozhin into exile there.
• On Tuesday, Putin admitted for the first time that the Russian state had "completely financed" Wagner's operations in Ukraine, paying Wagner 86 billion rubles ($1.0 billion) from May 2022 to May 2023 - plus an additional 110 billion rubles ($1.3 billion) in insurance / death payouts and a further 80 billion rubles ($0.9 billion) in payments to Prigozhin's catering company for feeding the regular army.
• Putin said those payments to Prigozhin will be investigated - "I hope nobody stole anything, or didn’t steal much, but we’ll sort this out" - leading analysts to speculate that he'll look for other charges to slap on Prigozhin.

• China's industrial profits fell 18.8% in the year to May 2023 due to weakening demand as the country's COVID recovery limps along. Economic policymakers (read: the Politburo) are cutting interest rates while the rest of the world is raising them in an effort to kickstart the sluggish economy.

• Azerbaijani forces killed four Armenian soldiers in Nagorno-Karabakh - which doesn't bode well for the peace talks the long-feuding neighbors are engaged in right now in Washington.

• The EU's border agency is considering suspending its operations in Greece because of concerns over how Greece treats migrants - particularly after last week's awful shipwreck in which the Greek Coast Guard was accused of dragging its feet to rescue survivors.

• Canadian oil firm CGX and its majority shareholder, Frontera, announced they'd struck oil at the Wei-1 well in the Corentyne block offshore Guyana. This is the second discovery to date in the Corentyne block, which hasn't been as prolific as the next-door Stabroek block.

• Pres. Bio was sworn in for another term as Sierra Leone's president - although the opposition insists he didn't win enough votes to avoid a runoff.