🇺🇸💸🤝🇺🇦 — 🌟 Reuters | US announces $5.9 billion in military and budget aid to Ukraine | December 30, 2024:

"WASHINGTON, Dec 30 (Reuters) - The United States on Monday announced nearly $6 billion in additional military and budget assistance for Ukraine as President Joe Biden uses his final weeks in office to surge aid to Kyiv before President-elect Donald Trump takes power.

Biden announced $2.5 billion in additional security assistance for Ukraine.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the United States has made available $3.4 billion in additional budget aid to Ukraine, giving the war-torn country critical resources amid intensifying Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure."

🗄 Archive

🔗 Source:

🇺🇸/🇨🇳 U.S. Treasury officials determined that a “major incident,” attributed to a China state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat actor, occurred this month.

Chinese hackers were able to access Treasury user workstations and steal unclassified documents.

“This incident fits a well-documented pattern of operations by PRC-linked groups, with a particular focus on abusing trusted third-party services - a method that has become increasingly prominent in recent years,” said Tom Hegel, a threat researcher at SentinelOne.

📎 Ian Ellis

🇺🇸/🇨🇳 ‘Major incident’: China-backed hackers breached US Treasury workstations

The US Treasury Department notified lawmakers on Monday that a China state-sponsored actor infiltrated Treasury workstations in what officials are describing as a “major incident.”

A Treasury spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that the compromised service has been taken offline and officials are working with law enforcement and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“There is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury systems or information,” the Treasury spokesperson said.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/30/investing/china-hackers-treasury-workstations

🇺🇸/🇨🇳🧵"Sounds like it went like this:

STEP 1: First, attackers targeted Treasury vendor BeyondTrust

STEP 2: Stole BeyondTrust's key for a remote tech support cloud platform.

STEP 3: Attackers used the platform like a backdoor on Treasury machines where it was installed.

The analogy is: hacker breaks into your plumber's office & steals master keys to the buildings they service."

https://fxtwitter.com/jsrailton/status/1873869371829084484

Luke Gromen on X:

"Interesting timing coming so close on the heels of the latest round of "BTC might eventually get hacked by quantum computing" articles in US mainstream financial media, given that China reportedly hacked US Treasury but not BTC."

📎 Luke Gromen

💸 Which U.S. Companies Receive the Most Government Subsidies?

📎 VisualCap

🇯🇵🇹🇼 "Japan's Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya said in an interview that Japan would give up "a Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency" strategy proposed by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Japan's current pro-China govt makes Taiwan's DPP nervous."

📎 ShanghaiPanda

🇷🇺🇪🇺 Telegram CEO Pavel Durov writes:

"Access to certain Russian media has been restricted in the EU under DSA/sanctions laws

Meanwhile, all Western media Telegram channels remain freely accessible in Russia

Who would have thought that in 2025 Russian Telegram users would enjoy more freedom than European? "

📎 https://news.1rj.ru/str/durov/387

🇵🇱/🇧🇾 Poland aims to fully fortify border with Belarus by mid-2025, senior official says

Poland plans to complete its fortified border wall and close the border with Belarus by next summer, aiming to curb what it sees as Russia's and Belarus's "hybrid war" through illegal migration, Polish Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Duszczyk told the Financial Times on Dec. 29.

Additional reinforcements along the 400-kilometer (250 miles) eastern border include installing night vision cameras, thermal imagers, and a new patrol road, as well as strengthening the five-meter steel fence built in 2022.

https://kyivindependent.com/poland-to-fortify-border-with-belarus-by-mid-2025/

🇪🇺 End of Ukrainian gas transit signals new energy woes for Europe

In latest act of economic self-sabotage, EU green-lights Ukraine's decision to shut down one of the last remaining Russian gas routes to Europe

Despite the war in Ukraine, over the past three years Russian gas has continued to flow to Europe — mainly to Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and Italy — through a pipeline via Ukraine.

Even though the share of Ukrainian transit in EU gas imports has significantly declined compared to pre-war levels, it still made up 5 percent of EU gas imports in 2024 — out of approximately 20 percent of gas still imported from Russia (including both pipeline imports and liquified natural gas (LNG) imports).

Alongside TurkStream — which carries gas across the Black Sea to Turkey and on to Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary — Ukraine remains the only active pipeline through which Russian gas continues to arrive in the EU. Other routes to Europe have been shut down.

However, the contract governing the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine is set to expire today (December 31) — and Ukraine doesn’t intend to renew it. This means that, as of tomorrow, Europe will no longer be receiving gas through Ukraine. The consequences could be dear. The countries most affected will obviously be the direct recipients of the Ukrainian transit route gas, especially Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and Italy.

The stopping of Ukrainian transit will not pose an immediate supply security risk to these countries: though the capacity of alternative pipeline routes —TurkStream, Bulgaria, Serbia or Hungary — to replace the Ukrainian transit is limited, storage levels in the EU remain high and alternative supply sources exist, mainly in the form of shipped LNG.

However, the latter is significantly more expensive than pipeline gas: whereby pipeline imports are governed by long-term contracts, LNG prices are tied to global spot markets, which tend to be significantly higher, not to mention much more volatile, as they are subject to global competition as well as financial speculation, which can drive prices higher during disruptions (e.g., geopolitical conflicts, supply reductions, etc.).

The significantly higher price of LNG — especially that imported from the US — compared to Russian pipeline gas has severely impacted both European households and businesses. Indeed, the Draghi report highlighted high energy costs as one of the main reasons for the EU’s loss of competitiveness.

The report emphasises that European companies face significantly higher energy costs compared to their US counterparts: energy prices remain “2-3 times higher” for electricity and “4-5 times higher” for natural gas. These high costs have pushed large parts of Western Europe — first and foremost Germany — into recession and even outright deindustrialisation, and continue to seriously hinder industrial growth and investment.

In this context, the shutdown of the Ukrainian transit route is likely to make a bad situation worse. Even though the European Commission claims that the end of gas flows through Ukraine will have a “negligible” impact on European gas prices, the reality is that European spot prices, as determined in the TTF virtual trading hub, have shown a high sensitivity to the Ukraine transit route.

More importantly, it is a reminder of the utterly suicidal policies that the EU has implemented in its attempt to wage a self-defeating economic war against Russia, alongside its equally unsuccessful military proxy efforts — both of which run counter to the EU’s core economic and security interests. The EU’s refusal to challenge Ukraine on the shutdown of the pipeline — all while sending tens of billions to the country — is simple the latest example of how EU policy undermines the fundamental interests of its member states.

Indeed, the only real beneficiary of Ukraine’s decision to shut down the pipeline will be, once more, the US, which will be presented with yet another opportunity to deepen the bloc’s reliance on its own LNG exports.

🌍 Africa is currently facing more conflicts than at any time since 1946, according to data from Uppsala University and Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo. In 2024, the institutes recorded 28 state-based conflicts across 16 of Africa’s 54 countries—more than any other region and twice as many as 15 years ago. This conflict zone spans roughly 4,000 miles, covering 10% of sub-Saharan Africa’s land mass, an area that has doubled in just three years.

https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/africa-has-entered-a-new-era-of-war-c6171d8e

https://archive.ph/QpZu0

📎 Franz-Stefan Gady