DRC

• Congolese protesters attacked a UN building and the Belgian, French, Ugandan, and U.S. embassies in Kinshasa yesterday. They're angry that their foreign allies failed to stop the Rwanda-backed M23 from capturing Goma and aren't doing anything to help now that the city has fallen to the rebels.
• Unlike in 2012 - when the M23 last captured Goma but Western countries pressured Rwanda to call the rebels back - there are no signs that foreign diplomats will do much to intervene this time. Instead, UN SecGen Guterres asked Rwanda to kindly withdraw its proxies from eastern DRC, and the U.S. advised its citizens to leave DRC on commercial flights.
• Presidents Tshisekedi and Kagame are due to meet today in Kenya for an "extraordinary" summit to discuss the crisis.

• Russia sent a fairly senior delegation - led by Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and special presidential envoy to Syria Aleksandr Lavrentiev - to Damascus for its first official meetings with Syria's new leadership.
• Syria's new leaders seem open to Russia's courtship, despite the fact that Russia previously bombed them on behalf of the deposed Assad regime.
• The rebels' leader, Ahmed al-Shara, now calls Russia "an important country" that the new Syria still relies on for weapons and power plant operations, and said he didn't want Russia to leave Syria "in a way that undermines its relationship with our country."

• InSight Crime reported that Pres. Maduro's government has been distributing weapons to workers from 31 government agencies and community groups (colectivos) in loyal parts of the country.
• This appears to be a revival of Chávez-era efforts to enlist loyalists to help squash dissent. However, InSight Crime notes that those prior efforts fizzled out when the colectivos realized they could use their guns to make money and lost interest in enforcing ideology. That precedent doesn't augur well for Maduro's new initiative.

• Pres. Putin said he's open to peace talks with Ukraine, but ruled out speaking directly with Pres. Zelensky - whom Putin calls "illegitimate" because he extended his term in office due to Putin's war prohibiting fresh elections. [Unlike Putin, Zelensky didn't hold farcical elections or force a constitutional amendment to "legitimize" his extension.]
• Zelensky responded to Putin's slight by saying Putin "is afraid of negotiations, afraid of strong leaders, and does everything possible to prolong the war."

• Israeli officials revealed that eight of the 26 hostages Hamas said it would release in the coming weeks are dead, confirming earlier intelligence findings. In at least one case, the family of a hostage believed to be dead blamed their government for his death, claiming that he might have lived if a deal had been struck sooner.

• Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger formally left the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, today.
• The three junta-led countries plan to create their own regional bloc with a shared passport system and free movement between them.
• That plan could take a while: it's a lower priority for the juntas than battling the jihadist insurgencies that already move freely across their porous borders.