🇺🇸🤝🇻🇪 — US President Donald J. Trump on María Corina's Nobel Peace Prize:

"The person who won called me. She told me that she is accepting it in my honor, because I deserve it. It was a very nice thing to say. She is very good. I have been helping her. They need a lot of help in Venezuela".

🇺🇸📞🇨🇳 — POTUS Donald Trump on meeting with Xi Jinping at Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation:

"I haven't cancelled, but I don't know that we're going to have it — but I'm going to be there regardless."

🇮🇷🇻🇪❌🏆 — Iranian Embassy in Venezuela:

"Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to someone who justifies the genocide in Gaza and advocates military aggression against Venezuela is yet another example of the West's divisive and interventionist approach toward the developing world.

This choice is nothing but a mockery of the true meaning of peace".

🇩🇰🇺🇸🇬🇱 Denmark decides to buy another 16 F-35 fighter jets from the U.S. and will now have 43 F-35 in total.

The news comes as Denmark decides to spend another $4.4 billion on its military to secure Greenland and the waters around it from Russian and Chinese encroachment.

2 additional Arctic vessels, several drones, and maritime surveillance aircraft will also be bought.

The military buildup in the Arctic and North Atlantic will be made in close cooperation with the Faroe Islands and Greenland and include a new headquarters for the Arctic Command in Nuuk—a unit within the Danish Defense that oversees the surveillance of Greenland—and an underwater cable between Greenland and Denmark.

🔗 Visegrad24

🛢📉 Yesterday, oil prices dropped below $60/barrel for the first time since May 2025.

This comes just one day after President Trump said gas prices will fall to $2.00/gallon.

📝 Carolina Lion: Oil needs to be above $60 a barrel for the fracking companies to turn a profit by the way.

🔗 The Kobeissi Letter

🇷🇺❌🇺🇦 On Russian Strikes Targeting Ukrainian Gas Infrastructure

Over the past week, Russian forces have massively increased their missile campaign against Ukrainian energy infrastructure. A strike on October 3rd targeted gas production facilities in Poltava and Kharkov with 35 missiles and at least 60 long-range drones. Bloomberg reported that the damage to these two sites has brought around 60% of the country’s gas production offline.

The Ukrainians are planning to increase their gas imports over the winter by 30% to compensate, importing at least 4.4 billion cubic meters over the season, equivalent to $2.2 billion, or 20% of the country’s typical annual consumption. This figure is likely to rise.

So where does this leave Ukraine, especially if Russian strikes continue? Ukraine relies on gas principally for heating. The share of gas used for residential homes, larger district-level heating stations, and industrial/commercial use is roughly equal. 78% of Ukrainian households depend on gas as their primary heat source.

Industrial concerns use between 1 bcm (billion cubic meters) and 6 bcm of gas a quarter depending on the season, and 11% of Ukraine’s electricity generation comes from gas power plants. Ukraine’s total gas consumption is around 20 bcm annually.

The Ukrainian government projects that it will import 5.8 bcm of pipeline gas this year, more than twice what it imported pre-war, despite massive reductions in population and falling consumption. Around half of this gas transits through Hungary, with another quarter of the total through Poland, an additional quarter through Slovakia, and insignificant amounts through Romania and Moldova.

These pipelines once carried Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe, generating billions in transit fees for the Ukrainians, but this agreement fully terminated at the beginning of this year. Since then, these pipelines operate in “reverse flow," sending gas backwards through mostly Soviet-era infrastructure to Ukraine.

While the transit agreement was in effect, the Ukrainians were able to take advantage of a complex scheme whereby they imported Russian gas from Gazprom while simultaneously “buying” it from EU sellers without it ever physically moving gas through the seller’s infrastructure. This allowed them to save significantly on transportation fees.

With the transit agreement now terminated, Ukraine is no longer strategically placed between Russia and its former customers in the EU, making Ukraine’s gas storage facilities (the largest in Europe) inconvenient to access. The only way to fill these facilities for EU countries is now an expensive round trip from central Europe to Ukraine and back again, with corresponding transit fees, making Ukraine an economically infeasible option for EU gas storage.

With a restoration of Russian relations with the EU looking increasingly unlikely, and the Ukrainians refusing to allow the transit of Russian gas through their territory, the Ukrainian gas network has gone from a central node in a vast Eurasian web to a distant peripheral spur. Its infrastructure serves little purpose now besides meeting its own modest, domestic needs.

The EBRD announced an emergency financing deal in response to the October 3rd attack, but this program will need to be put into place with unprecedented speed. It comes on the heels of another €500 million loan for gas purchases in August, also classified as an “emergency.” Attempting to fill Ukraine’s reserves now, as extraction season begins, will cost Ukraine (or, realistically, the EU) almost twice what it would in the summer.

Repairing the damage caused by Russian strikes this year is an additional hurdle. At least $180 million in funding is required to repair the damage that has already been done earlier this year. Total needed repairs to the Ukrainian grid are estimated to cost at least $878 million. Gas infrastructure components are highly specialized and not mass produced.

🔗 https://www.amerikanets.com/p/on-russian-strikes-targeting-ukrainian

🇺🇸❗️ — Former Democratic President Joe Biden is undergoing five weeks of radiation and hormone therapy to treat an aggressive prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones, according to NBC News.

@TabZLIVE