🇺🇦❌🇷🇺 — ⚡️ MoD of Russia:

"⚡️ Summary of the Russian Ministry of Defense on the progress of repelling the attempted invasion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine into the territory of the Russian Federation in the Kursk region (as of January 29, 2025)

The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continue to defeat the formations of the AFU in the Kursk region.

▫️ Units of the North group of forces in the course of offensive operations defeated formations of a tank, heavy mechanized, four mechanized, two airborne assault brigades, and a marine brigade and three territorial defense brigades of the AFU in the areas of the settlements of Gogolevka, Goncharovka, Guevo, Zaoleshenka, Kurilovka, Lebedevka, Malaya Loknya, Makhnovka, Nikolaevka, Nikolsky, Novaya Sorochina, Rubanshchina, Sverdlikovo, Sudzha and Cherkasskoye Porechnoye. Eight enemy counterattacks were repelled.
 
▫️ Strikes by operational-tactical, army aviation and artillery fire hit enemy manpower and equipment in the areas of the settlements of Viktorovka, Goncharovka, Guevo, Zazulevka, Kazachya Loknya, Kositsa, Kruglenkoye, Kurilovka, Lebedevka, Loknya, Malaya Loknya, Martynovka, Makhnovka, Melovoy, Nikolaevka, Nikolsky, Novaya Sorochina, Oleshnya, Sverdlikovo, Sudzha, Cherkasskoye Porechnoye, Yuzhny, as well as Basovka, Belovody, Veselovka, Vodolaghi, Zhuravka and Obody in the Sumy region.
 
▫️ AFU losses in 24 hours amounted to more than 420 servicemen, three tanks, seven combat armored vehicles, 29 cars, as well as seven UAV control points and an ammunition depot were destroyed. One serviceman of the AFU surrendered.
 
▫️ In total, during the military operations in the Kursk direction, the enemy lost up to 55,900 servicemen, 325 tanks, 239 infantry fighting vehicles, 184 armored personnel carriers, 1,649 armored combat vehicles, 1,693 vehicles, 392 artillery pieces, 44 multiple launch rocket system launchers, including 13 HIMARS and six MLRS made in the USA, 16 anti-aircraft missile system launchers, eight transport and loading vehicles, 103 electronic warfare stations, 14 counter-battery radars, four air defense radars, 32 units of engineering and other equipment, including 13 engineering obstacle clearing vehicles, one UR-77 mine clearing unit, as well as nine armored repair and recovery vehicles and a command and staff vehicle.

The operation to destroy the AFU formations continues."

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🇷🇺❌🇺🇦 — 🇺🇦 General Staff of the Armed Forces:

"Operational information as of 16:00 01/29/2025 regarding the Russian invasion

The enemy does not stop trying to advance deep into the territory of Ukraine, the Defense Forces are holding back the invaders, causing them significant losses.

Today, the number of enemy attacks has increased to 91.

The border areas of Chernihiv and Sumy regions continue to suffer from Russian artillery shelling. A number of settlements, including Stara Huta, Studenok, Tymofiivka, Bobylivka and Kamin, were affected by the shelling of the terrorist army today.

The enemy attacked our positions in the Kupyansk direction eight times. Ukrainian defenders repelled enemy assaults near Petropavlivka, Novoosynovo, Kolisnykovka, Zagryzovo and Lozova. Two clashes are still ongoing.

In the Lymansky direction, enemy units attacked in the areas of the settlements of Novoyehorivka, Kopanky, Makiivka, Novolubivka, Torske, Yampolivka and Zelena Dolyna. Since the beginning of the day, Ukrainian soldiers have already repelled 19 attacks, four clashes are still ongoing.

In the Siversky direction, since the beginning of the day, the enemy has made five attempts to push our defenders from the occupied positions in the Verkhnokamyansky area, but was repulsed.

In the Kramatorsk direction, Ukrainian defenders repelled seven assault actions of the invaders near Novomarkovo, Chasovy Yar and Stupochok.

In the Toretsk direction, Ukrainian defenders repelled one enemy attack in the Toretsk area.

In the Pokrovsky direction, since the beginning of the day, the invaders have already made 39 attempts to push our defenders from the occupied positions in the areas of the settlements of Vodyane Druge, Elizavetivka, Myrolyubivka, Lysivka, Vidrodzhennia, Zvirovo, Kotlyne, Udachne, Kotlyarivka, Andriivka, Dachne and Ulakly. The defense forces, restraining the enemy onslaught, have already repelled 27 enemy attacks in the direction. The enemy is suffering significant losses in manpower.

In the Novopavlivsky direction, the invaders have made six attacks on the positions of the Ukrainian troops near the settlements of Kostiantynopol, Rozlyv, Rozdolne and Novoocheretuvate. One clash is ongoing.

In the Kharkiv, Hulyaipil, Orikhiv and Prydniprovsky directions, the enemy did not conduct active operations.

In Kursk, Ukrainian defenders have repelled two attacks by Russian invaders today, three clashes are ongoing, in addition, the enemy has carried out 13 air strikes, dropping 21 guided aerial bombs."

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🇺🇦⚠️⚠️❌🇷🇺 — ⭐️ Rybar:

"🇷🇺🇺🇦 And again a UAV raid, and again not without consequences

Ukrainian forces have once again launched a large number of drones into Russian border and rear regions. More than 130 drones were destroyed last night.
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🔻 More information about the raid:

▪️In the Smolensk region, Ukrainian formations tried to hit the Smolensk NPP near Desnogorsk. No damage was recorded on the ground in the vicinity. Two power units of the station are operating in normal mode, and scheduled work has been underway on the third for two weeks.

▪️In the Nizhny Novgorod region, as a result of an attack, a fire broke out on the territory of the SIBUR-Kstovo enterprise in the Kstovskaya industrial zone. Fire crews of the Russian Emergencies Ministry extinguished the fire, there were no casualties among the personnel. The LUKOIL-Nizhegorodnefteorgsintez complex, located nearby, could also have been damaged.

▪️ Air defense activity was also noted at a much greater distance from the border with the so-called Ukraine; in the Leningrad region, a drone was destroyed in the Vsevolozhsk region on the shore of Lake Ladoga.

In addition, restrictions on the entry and exit of aircraft were introduced at Pulkovo Airport for several hours. Similar measures were taken at night at Kazan International Airport, and some time ago flights were suspended in Murmansk due to the threat of a UAV attack.

▪️ The largest number of drones were destroyed over the Kursk and Bryansk regions, where several devices were shot down by officers of the regional special forces unit of the Russian Guard. And in the Tver region, 29 UAVs were shot down on approach to Andreapol and Toropets. The latter had previously been the target of a raid in September, when a GRAU warehouse was struck.
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🔻Amid the lack of success of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the front, pro-Ukrainian resources continue to recoup in another direction, repeatedly attacking Russian oil and gas sector facilities.

Unfortunately, the problems remain the same. As Two Majors rightly noted, some officials have taken a denial stance, calling the outright attacks on industrial and energy facilities "falling debris."

Instead of strengthening air defense, saturating critical infrastructure facilities with air defense systems and mobile rifle groups, it is much easier to simply call everything a template phrase and not think about a solution.

But the problem won't go away. The enemy has set up production capacities and can afford to attack our territories daily. Moreover, Ukrainian formations and their curators see the impact of these raids on our economy.

High resolution map"

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👤🤝🇺🇦❗️👤 — 🧡 Sputnik | Putin: Russia Ready to Pick Negotiators for Direct Talks With Zelensky, But He Can't Sign Peace Deal | Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree outlawing peace negotiations with Moscow in 2022, months after the West sabotaged a ready peace treaty to pursue an all-out proxy war against Russia | January 28, 2025:

"President Putin has expressed readiness to find negotiators to speak directly with Volodymyr Zelensky.

"If he wants to take part in negotiations, I will select such people, it's not an issue. The question is about the final signing of the documents," Putin said in a TV interview Tuesday, noting that Zelensky's legitimacy has expired, and he therefore "does not have the right to sign anything."

(...)

"On the question of the final signing of the documents...there cannot be a single mistake or wrinkle. Everything must be polished"

— Putin emphasized."

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🇺🇸🇸🇪🇱🇻‼️✂️🔌👩‍💻 — 🏴 ZeroHedge | NATO, Sweden, Latvia On High Alert After Baltic Undersea Data Cable "Damaged" | January 26, 2025:

"The third severing of an undersea cable in just three months occurred on Sunday, this time between Latvia and Sweden in the Baltic Sea. The incident has prompted a criminal investigation and heightened concerns of potential sabotage by Russia or China.

Latvia's State Radio and Television Center, a data transmission provider, released this statement about the damaged cable connecting Ventspils in Latvia and Sweden's Gotland island:

In the early morning of January 26, the submarine fiber optic cable of the Latvian State Radio and Television Centre (hereinafter – LVRTC) in the Baltic Sea was damaged. The LVRTC Data Transmission Monitoring System recorded disruptions in data transmission services on the Ventspils – Gotland (Fårösund) section. LVRTC continues to provide services using other data transmission routes. Currently, there is a possible delay in data transmission speed, but it does not affect end users in Latvia for the most part."

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🇸🇪😀🇷🇺🚢 — 🏴 ZeroHedge | Sweden Seizes Bulk Carrier After Suspected Baltic Sea Undersea Fiber Cable Sabotage | January 27, 2025:

"Following Sunday's undersea cable incident, in which a bulk carrier damaged a fiber optic cable connecting Latvia and the Swedish island of Gotland, Swedish prosecutors announced that the ship had been seized and is anchored outside the Swedish port of Karlskrona.

Local newspaper Expressen confirmed that Swedish Coast Guard vessels surrounded the Malta-flagged Vezhen, now anchored at the port of Karlskrona.

"We are directly on site with the seized ship and are taking measures as decided by the prosecutor," said Mattias Lindholm, spokesperson for the Coast Guard."

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🇷🇺❌🇺🇦 — 🇷🇺 SouthFront | Military Situation In Ukraine On January 29, 2025 (Map Update)

High resolution map

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🇷🇺❌🇺🇦 — 🇷🇺 SouthFront's high resolution map regarding Kupyansky front.

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🇷🇺❌🇺🇦 — 🇷🇺 SouthFront's high resolution map regarding Pokrovsk front.

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🇷🇺❌🇺🇦 — 🇷🇺 SouthFront's high resolution map regarding Kurakhovo front.

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🐳💸➡️🇨🇳 — 🏴 ZeroHedge | China's DeepSeek AI Moves The Capital Of Tech From Palo Alto To Hangzhou | Authored by Mike Whitney | January 27, 2025:

"In a matter of days, the news of China’s AI sensation, DeepSeek R1, has gone from a gentle breeze to a Force 5 hurricane. It’s clear now that no one in Silicon Valley or Washington DC had the slightest idea that their world was about to be turned upside-down by an innovative new product that would shift the geopolitical plates further eastward. But that, in fact, is what has happened. And it’s not simply because DeepSeek’s latest version matches or exceeds the performance of America’s best model, OpenAI; but because it is cheaper, more accessible and more transparent. This is AI for everyone regardless of their station or income. And its sudden emergence from ‘out of the blue’ has cast doubts on the ability of western tech giants to anticipate the capability of their competitors or to lead an industry that is essential for Washington to preserve its ever-loosening grip on global power. Here’s a brief recap from Venture Beat:

….thanks to the release of DeepSeek R1, a new large language model that performs “reasoning” similar to OpenAI’s current best-available model o1 — taking multiple seconds or minutes to answer hard questions and solve complex problems as it reflects on its own analysis in a step-by-step, or “chain of thought” fashion.
Not only that, but DeepSeek R1 scored as high or higher than OpenAI’s o1 on a variety of third-party benchmarks…, and was reportedly trained at a fraction of the cost…, with far fewer graphics processing units (GPU) under a strict embargo imposed by the U.S., OpenAI’s home turf.
But unlike o1, which is available only to paying ChatGPT subscribers of the Plus tier ($20 per month) and more expensive tiers (such as Pro at $200 per month), DeepSeek R1 was released as a fully open source model, which also explains why it has quickly rocketed up the charts of AI code sharing community Hugging Face’s most downloaded and active models. 
- Why everyone in AI is freaking out about DeepSeek, Venture Beat"

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🐳❗️🎥 — 🏴 ZeroHedge | DeepSeek Pulls Rug Out On Nvidia, ASML | January 27, 2025:

"There is only one topic on traders' minds this morning that threatens to upend the multi-year AI bull trend driving chip stocks to record highs: the (extremely) cheaper Chinese DeepSeek response to OpenAI's ChatGPT, as noted in an overnight piece noscriptd "Goldman Asks If China's DeepSeek is AI's Sputnik Moment."

Bloomberg's Mark Cudmore said earlier that the emergence of DeepSeek is terrific news for global growth and productivity. However, he cautioned that the new free, open-source large-language model undermines the massive premium paid for AI research and development by US mega-cap stocks, warning that this development could serve as a catalyst to end 15 years of US stock market exceptionalism.

Perhaps the pin that bursts the AI stock bubble in the US."

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🐳‼️🇺🇸😱💸📉 — 🏴 ZeroHedge | DeepSink: Global Markets Crash On Cheap China AI Panic | January 27, 2025:

US equity futures and global markets are tumbling as rising weekend fears that China's DeepSeek's R1 AI platform could lead to a collapse in capex spending plans, have culminated in a wholesale rout of tech names around the world. And since tech is by and far the most important sector to global equities, almost nothing has been spared (with the possible exception of the energy sector which for months was used as a pair trade to fund tech longs). As a result, what as of 6pm on Sunday night (when futs opened) was a mere DeepSelling trickle...

... has since transformed into a full-blown DeepSink rout, sending S&P futures down as much as 3% and Nasdaq futures down 5%, before a modest bounce. As of 8:00am, S&P futs were down 2.3%, and Nasdaq futs tumbled 3.9%, on futures volume that was about four times the 30-day average, as the the DeepSeek story forces investors to "question the market position of all the MegaCap Tech names and the entire AI supply chain." Mag7 names are all plunging premarket by 4-6% while some former leaders are getting absolutely nuked such as NVDA -11%, AVGO -10.8%, VRT -18%. The global risk off panic means bond yields are collapsing while the USD is moving lower and commodities are mixed. Mag7 earnings take on heightened importance this week, but the SPX may be down 4-5% ahead of TSLA’s earnings on Weds. As JPM's market intel team puts it, "Is AI dead or is one of the greatest buy-the-dip trades in recent memory?" Separately, President Donald Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on Colombia, which sent the dollar higher, also contributed to the contracts’ decline. Trump pulled the threat after reaching a deal with the Colombian government on the return of deported migrants.

In premarket trading, Nvidia plunged 12% in US premarket trading, setting it up for the biggest drop on record in terms of market capitalization after Cramer said last week it could be "breaking out."

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🐳📊💻📱 — 🏴 ZeroHedge | The Most Important Chart In The World Right Now | January 27, 2025:

"Anyone active on X over the weekend undoubtedly saw the growing chatter around Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek. Its meteoric rise to the top of the Apple Apps download charts has been impressive. The company released its R1 model last Monday and explained how to build a sophisticated LLM on a fraction of the cost of some of its more powerful competitors, mostly run or sponsored by US tech giants.

DeepSeek’s development has been in an era where China has been restricted from accessing the highest-end AI technology and chips, with limited access to Nvidia’s products. So for now this raises the potential for stratospheric valuations in US tech firms to be questioned. No wonder then why given this news, it has been a messy day for US equities with Nvidia down -18%, one of its biggest drops on record (resulting in over $600bn in market cap lost). Given that 10yr UST yields are -11bps as well this morning it shows how crucial a handful of US stocks are to global macro.

This is an opportunity to show the stunning rise of Nvidia from an earnings point of view. The CoTD shows it's gone from LTM earnings of around $4bn two years ago to around $63bn in the last quarterly release. For context, this is around half the total earnings made by listed stocks in each of UK, Germany and France over the last 12 months. The forecasts are for Nvidia to continue to see significant earnings growth. Not surprisingly, this is the chart of the day of DB's Jim Reid. It could, in fact, also be considered the most important chart in the world right now because if Nvidia goes, everything else will follow."

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🐳➖🖥 — 🏴 ZeroHedge | DeepSeek May Trigger "Negative Capex Impact" As Peak Data Center Occupancy Forecast Faces Revision | January 27, 2025:

"The news of the (extremely) cheaper Chinese DeepSeek response to OpenAI's ChatGPT—allegedly "40-50x more efficient than other large language models," according to Goldman's Rich Privorotsky—has triggered a global selloff across the entire AI ecosystem.

The selloff spans chip designers, AI firms, semiconductor equipment manufacturers, AI data center companies, and "Powering Up" baskets tracked by Goldman. "If you can do more with less, it naturally raises the question of whether so much capacity is necessary," Privorotsky noted.

Here are Privorotsky's comments on DeepSeek:

Markets sharply lower driven by tech. DeepSeek is something we are going to be talking about a lot this week and especially ahead of Mag 7 earnings where the focus will be on upcoming AI related capex outlays. What makes DeepSeek important is not necessarily that it's Chinese or rapidly ascended to one of the most popular downloads in the Apple App Store but that it appears quite a fundamental advancement in the efficiency of AI technology. For a lot of complicated reasons it's basically a huge upgrade to effectiveness of inference. By some measurements, 40-50x more efficient than other models. If you can do more with less it naturally leads the question to whether you need so much capacity. Obviously this will be a huge area of debate and I am far from an expert the nuances of semiconductor equipment or AI data layer inference...but given the immense amount of market cap added on this thematic I think we hit hard in reverse in the tends of last week. The power up baskets are going power down. Semis/ai/tech are going to be under pressure today. Think maybe now we understand why NVDA has been de-rating to the extent it has.

The whole "do more with less" theme sparked by DeepSeek will likely suggest that upcoming AI-related capex outlays will be greatly paired down and may prompt revisions to peak data center capacity forecasts produced by various institutional desks."

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🐳😋🌎 — 🏴 ZeroHedge | Is (Chinese) Software Suddenly Eating The World? | Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog | January 27, 2025:

"I'm not sure that "software will eat the world," but it could consume the stock market bubble in a single gulp.

Is DeepSeek a Sputnik Moment? Let's break it down. The Soviet Union's October 1957 launch of the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, stunned the U.S., which reckoned it had a commanding lead in "the Space Race." (It turns out the U.S. had the capability of launching a satellite before Sputnik, but held off for various reasons.)

That a geopolitical rival had reverse-engineered advances and leapfrogged the U.S. shocked America into a multi-decade response that culminated, at least in the public perception, in America winning "the race to the Moon" by landing the first humans on the Moon in July, 1969 in the Apollo 11 mission.

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👺❌🐳 — 🏴 ZeroHedge | DeepSeek Hit By "Large-Scale" Cyberattack | January 27, 2025:

"Chinese AI company DeepSeek reminded Western investors about global competition in the artificial intelligence race, particularly in China, where large language models can be developed and trained at a fraction of the cost incurred by Mag7 companies. This sparked a global selloff across the AI complex as investors worry over "negative capex impact" and ROI concerns over hefty AI investments.

In a separate development, DeepSeek's API landing page posted this warning around noon: "Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek's services, registration may be busy. Please wait and try again. Registered users can log in normally. Thank you for your understanding and support." 

The Hangzhou-based company continued, "To ensure continued service, registration is temporarily limited to +86 phone numbers. Existing users can log in as usual." 

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