Posted by BW Actual on Oct 2nd 2025
BLACKWATER USA | DAILY BRIEF
Russia
- The Kremlin warned European leaders against approving a proposal to essentially advance Ukraine €140 billion ($156 billion) in future reparations funding backed by frozen Russian assets.
- The EU plan would package that funding as an interest-free loan to avoid the complexities of seizing Russian assets outright, but the Kremlin now says it would consider such crafty financial engineering the same thing as a seizure anyway, and would retaliate by seizing an equivalent value of frozen European assets in Russia.
- Separately, French authorities seized a Russian "shadow fleet" oil tanker off France's western coast and detained two of its crew over the tanker's suspected ties to recent drone flights over European countries. That lends credence to Ukrainian President Zelensky's assertion that the trespassing drones are being launched from Russia's "shadow fleet."
- Indeed, the seized tanker, the Borocay, was sailing near the Danish coast last week when unidentified drones - likely launched from it - menaced Denmark's skies and forced its main airport to temporarily close.
DRC
- Some Congo watchers - especially those aligned with former president Joseph Kabila - expressed concern that the death sentence a military court handed Kabila on Tuesday will derail the bumbling and half-hearted peace process that DRC and the M23 / Rwanda entered into over the summer.
- Kabila's sympathizers are probably correct that his conviction and sentence were politically motivated, and the conviction is certainly not going to encourage Kabila to help end the conflict in the east. But the death sentence is unlikely to ever be carried out, and the peace process is already so broken that a vindictive verdict against Kabila is unlikely to do much further damage.
Afghanistan
- Internet service returned to Afghanistan after a two-day outage that media reports tied to a Taliban edict against "immorality."
- A Taliban spokesman now says the government didn't intentionally cut off internet this time - unlike from 1996 to 2001 during their last turn in power, when they did ban internet use.
- That may be a way to save face after Taliban leaders realized how much Afghanistan's economy and people now depend on the internet for basic and Taliban-tolerated (for men, at least) functions like trade, travel, and communications.
Qatar
- The White House published an executive order pledging unprecedented U.S. security guarantees for Qatar, which hosts around 28,000 U.S. troops at Al Udeid Air Base.
- The new guarantees formalize something that Qatar had probably implicitly - but incorrectly - assumed before: that the U.S. would automatically intervene to protect an ally under attack if that ally hosted a large American military presence.
- That implicit assumption proved unfounded last month, when the U.S. failed to stop Israeli airstrikes on Hamas leaders in Doha (Pres. Trump has said he didn't learn about Israel's strike plans until it was too late to intervene).
- With yesterday's executive order, Qatar now has an explicit pledge that the U.S. will use all necessary means - including military options - to defend Qatar in case of a future attack.
- There is, however, one caveat. The guarantees are not binding until the U.S. Senate approves them, and the Senate has a reasonable incentive to withhold its approval for an onerous commitment to risk American lives, money, and soft power defending a foreign country that's already mired in regional skirmishes. (If such guarantees had been in place since June, they would've already invoked a mandatory U.S. military response on two occasions: once upon Israel's attack last month, and once in response to Iran's strikes on Qatar in June.)
- Until and unless the Senate approves them, U.S. security guarantees for Qatar remain essentially unchanged from the status quo: as before, Trump will decide whether and how the U.S. responds to an attack on Qatar.
- Some analysts pointed out that Saudi Arabia - arguably a stronger U.S. ally than Qatar - has long sought U.S. security guarantees like this, and the U.S. has consistently refused to provide them. That's perhaps why Saudi recently turned to nuclear-armed Pakistan to seal a similar security deal instead.
Argentina
- The Argentinian peso fell by over 6% yesterday as a tax break for farm exports ended and currency traders panicked, but it recovered most of the fall later in the day after the central bank intervened.
- Though it doesn't seem like the U.S. stepped in to help this time, the episode caused some to worry about how much U.S. money Pres. Trump and Treasury Secretary Bessent would spend to make good on their pledges to back friendly Argentine President Javier Milei's bold economic reforms amidst the volatility they're likely to create.
Monkeys
- Pioneering conservationist and primatologist Jane Goodall died yesterday, aged 91. Goodall spent over 60 years studying chimpanzees in the wild. After spending all that time with monkeys, one of the key takeaways she shared with the NYT was "that we’ve been very arrogant in thinking that we’re so separate."