🇵🇭🇺🇸🇦🇺🇯🇵 Balikatan 2025 concluded on May 9th, with over 14,000 Filipino, U.S., Australian, and Japanese service members participating.

Image 2: Visualization of Philippine Radar Sites and coverage ranges, including the positions of Japanese-supplied FPS-3ME fixed radar systems

Image 3: Visualization of AFP’s Northern Luzon Command bases and deployments, including the recent deployment of the US-operated NMESIS platform

🔗 Taiwan Security Monitor

💸📈 Rising 10-30 year yields without changed Fed expectations tells you this is about deficits and eroding reserve status of $. The term premium (the statistical junkyard for stuff we can't explain) has shot up to 90 bp, from negative.

This is partly global. But US deficits are now such a huge part of developed market borrowing (67%) that it's clear the impulse from U.S. to other bond markets is stronger than vice versa.

https://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/bond-market-yields-government-borrowing-4a78af80

🔗 Greg Ip

🇷🇺🇺🇦 Russian forces conducted one of the largest combined drone and missile strikes of the war against Ukraine on the night of May 23 to 24, but used fewer missiles than in previous large-scale combined strikes.

Additional Key Takeaways:

Ukraine and Russia conducted a second round of prisoner-of-war (POW) exchanges on May 24 as part of a larger 1,000-for-1,000 exchange agreed upon during recent bilateral negotiations in Istanbul.

Russian officials will reportedly submit a draft document of their conditions for peace in Ukraine following the conclusion of the POW exchanges, although Russia's conditions are unlikely to be anything short of Ukraine's full surrender.

Russian forces have significantly expanded their salient southwest of Kostyantynivka in recent weeks and established sufficient positions to launch an offensive operation toward Kostyantynivka from the south or to support the envelopment of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad from the northeast in the coming weeks and months.

The Russian salient southwest of Kostyantynivka is likely sufficient to support a future Russian offensive operation toward Kostyantynivka or Pokrovsk, but Russian forces will have to make further advances from Chasiv Yar and Toretsk and west of Pokrovsk before Russian forces will pose a significant threat to either of these towns.

Russian forces recently advanced near Lyman, Toretsk, and Novopavlivka.

🔗 ISW