BLACKWATER USA | DAILY BRIEF - Blackwater Worldwide

Posted by BW Actual on Dec 2nd 2025

Ukraine

Russia claimed its troops have captured Pokrovsk after months of heavy fighting over the now-ruined transport hub.
However, Ukraine disputed Russia's claims as "loud statements" designed to impress U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who are in Moscow this week to discuss ceasefire terms with Pres. Putin (who only seems interested in a truce on his own punishing terms that Ukraine could never agree to).
Even if Russia's Pokrovsk claims are premature - as several previous Russian capture claims have been - it's clear that Ukraine is close to losing Pokrovsk. The city's fall will give Russian troops a platform they can use to contest other cities in the Donbas that are still under Ukrainian control, like Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Meanwhile, although outgunned on the front lines, Ukraine appears to be taking the fight to Russia on the seas.
Last week, a Russia-linked oil tanker anchored off the coast of Senegal was struck by "four external explosions" that are being (credibly) blamed on Ukraine.
A further two strikes on Russian-linked tankers in the Black Sea over the weekend also seem to have Ukrainian fingerprints on them.

Sudan

The WSJ reported that Sudan's military government has offered Russia 25-year rights to what would be its first naval base in Africa - at Port Sudan - as well as lucrative mining concessions, in exchange for discounted fighter jets and weapons to support the army's civil war against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The army is clearly desperate to match the arsenal the UAE has dispatched on the RSF's side of the war, but some Sudanese government officials expressed concerns that partnering with Russia could jeopardize the junta's already-tense dealings with the U.S. and EU.
Separately, the RSF broke its own unilateral truce - which RSF leader Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, aka Hemedti, announced just over a week ago - and claimed it had captured the West Kordofan transport hub of Babanusa from the army.
The RSF blamed the army for invoking the assault on Babanusa with a "surprise attack" in "clear violation of the humanitarian truce" (which the military had never agreed to and rejected as biased).
The army disputed the RSF's claims and said it had "decisively repelled" the RSF attack on Babanusa, but one thing is clear: thousands of civilians who remained in Babanusa through two years of RSF siege are finally fleeing the city now.

Honduras and Venezuela

The conservative Honduran presidential candidate that Pres. Trump backed, Nasry Asfura, has maintained his narrow lead in the vote count from Sunday's election - though many votes remain uncounted.
Another conservative contender, Salvador Nasralla, trails closely behind Asfura at around 39% to Asfura's 40.5%. The other three candidates split the remaining ~20% vote share between them, so it's clear that one of the two conservatives will win.
That spells trouble for Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, who had counted Honduras's current leftist president, Xiomara Castro, among his precious few allies in the region.
Another Caribbean Maduro ally, St. Vincent's longtime Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, also lost his bid for re-election last week and will hand over to a center-right government that won't be nearly as sympathetic to Maduro's autocratic socialist regime.

DRC

DRC declared an end to its 16th Ebola outbreak. This one was quickly isolated to Kasai, which limited its spread to 53 confirmed and 11 probable cases. Of those cases, 45 patients died.

Southeast Asia

Sri Lanka's President Anura Kumara Dissanayake called Cyclone Ditwah - which hit the island nation last week - the “largest and most challenging natural disaster in our history."
Flooding related to the storm - and exacerbated by an unusually heavy monsoon season - has also killed at least 850 people in Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam.