🌐🇺🇦 NATO faces €7B shortfall on military aid pledge to Ukraine

NATO’s 32 member countries agreed in July to provide €70 billion in military aid to Ukraine in 2026 and an equivalent sum in 2027.

But the alliance now faces a shortfall of around €7 billion, with less than two months until the end of the year, according to three alliance diplomats, all of whom were granted anonymity to speak freely. It is unclear where exactly the current gap is coming from, but it is likely to hamper Ukraine’s ability to buy vital equipment to fend off Russian missiles and drones this winter.

The shortfall comes ahead of an alliance meeting on Nov. 17 where European capitals are expected to examine ways to boost funding and increase the transfer of critical weapons to Ukraine. While new NATO funding pledges are still expected, it’s possible that allies may fail to meet this year’s target, the diplomats said.

A NATO official speaking on behalf of the organization said that “allies continue to provide essential military support to Ukraine” to fulfill the pledge and “are working to ensure that Ukraine has the support it needs now and into the future.”
The target combines bilateral contributions throughout the year and €30 billion drawn from the EU’s €90 billion loan to Ukraine.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has also asked allies to dig deep for more money. “With winter coming, and with Russia’s aggression unrelenting, allies need to do more, especially in support of air defense,” he said during a recent visit to Tallinn.
The missing cash underscores the growing difficulties faced by allied governments in continuing to finance Ukraine. The U.S., once the main giver, has stopped almost all new aid since Donald Trump returned to the White House.

That has left European countries as Ukraine’s key supporters. But many capitals face growing fiscal strains while countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Nordic nations — which have historically provided outsized contributions — have repeatedly called on others to give more.

There is “some fatigue” from the largest donors “[which] have repeatedly financed packages,” the third NATO diplomat said.

NATO’s Ukraine funding is typically channeled toward programs like the alliance’s non-lethal aid scheme, called the Comprehensive Assistance Package, as well as its Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List that has European allies buying critical U.S. weapons like Patriot interceptors for Kyiv. The shortfall includes a $1.9 billion gap in funding for unpaid PURL deliveries, two of the diplomats said.

Separately, allies remain skeptical that they will meet Rutte’s target of $15 billion for PURL this year. “I do not think that there’s a chance we will meet that,” said the same NATO diplomat cited above.

🔗 https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-faces-7b-euro-shortfall-military-aid-pledge-ukraine/

🇮🇹🇪🇺🇺🇦🇷🇺 Italy's Meloni says EU "all over the place" on Ukraine as US, Russia talk security

US President Donald Trump has backed a “big, beautiful” European security plan as part of the current drive to bring hostilities in Ukraine to an end, but EU leaders are not convinced. They still fear being sidelined yet again from the process, although this time round the Kremlin has signalled that Europe, but not the EU, will be invited to participate, but “not yet,” according to presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov in comments to the press last week.

The multiple formats and forums are "undermining our credibility in handling one of the most complicated issues our nations are facing", the Italian prime minister wrote to European Council President Antonio Costa in a letter seen by Politico and reported on November 5. She asked for the question of how the EU speaks with one voice to go on the agenda of the informal leaders' meeting in Dublin on November 13, saying it "can no longer be postponed". Projecting "the image of a Europe that's all over the place" serves "those who want this war to continue", she wrote.

Disunity in the EU over Russia is old news, but it now costs more, because the talks have moved to the one subject that cannot be settled without Europe. The US, Russia and Ukraine meet on November 10-11 to discuss security arrangements - the make or break of any potenial agreement. Europeans hold much of what such a deal needs - the sanctions, the frozen Russian assets, most of the money and most of the work on guarantees - but they have no agreed negotiator, and their stated terms risk putting them at odds with Washington, Bloomberg reported exclusively on November 6.

European nations, or more specifically, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, want Russia to halt the war before any discussion of the Kremlin's concerns about the continent's security architecture. She also regards President Vladimir Putin's pre-war demands to roll back Nato's presence in Eastern Europe as still unacceptable. However, Putin has said repeatedly that freezing the fight before the "root causes" of the conflict are settled is a non-starter. And that means for both Putin and Zelenskiy a real and "ironclad" security deal - a term introduced by the Russians in the January 2022 talks for a no-Nato deal for Ukraine, and a phrase that Zelenskiy has adopted in the run to next week's meetings.

For Moscow the security deal is the price of stopping. Putin said on October 22 that talks should settle guarantees for Russia and the broader rules of European security, and that the aim was definitive agreements rather than "a suspension of hostilities for some short period", RT reported. "The talks will cover security issues, including security guarantees. These can only be mutual," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on November 3, calling indivisible security "a cornerstone of our position", TASS reported.

Kallas continues to hold the hardest position amongst all EU officials,  She said at a news conference in Warsaw on November 6. "Any agreement that we are not party of, we are not going to implement either," adding that "Putin does not have a veto over European security" and that "we already have European security architecture in place." 

"In short, concessions should be on the aggressor, not on the victim," she said, and any deal must stop Russia "just using a pause to rearm and reattack". Her role, as she described it, is not a broker's. "We are not the mediator. We are firmly on the Ukrainian side," she said, A News reported.

The US is working from the other end, adopting a largely Putin-friendly stance and trying to bring Zelenskiy on board. "Our objective is to develop practical arrangements that address the security concerns of all sides, reduce the risk of future conflict, and create a more stable and predictable security environment," US envoy Jared Kushner wrote on X after what he called a discussion between President Donald Trump and several European leaders.

Bankova has rejected most of the US initatives and allied itself with the Europeans on the order of business. But he is starting to int at some concessions and Zelenskiy has opened the door to discussing Russia's demands - but only once the fighting has ended and Ukraine's own protection is settled. He said in a television interview on November 5 that he wanted that protection spelled out. "What matters is that it's clear on paper," he said, AP reported. "If Russia starts (attacking) again, what will happen? Who will do what, with what means, and when?" Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said after meeting Kallas that "there can be no decisions on the security of Ukraine and Europe without Ukraine and Europe", Interfax-Ukraine reported.

Territory is now being talked about more openly on the European side too. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte told Bloomberg on November 5 that a victory for either side was not "very likely". "These kinds of wars always end in a peace deal, which is often a kind of compromise," he said. Finnish President Alexander Stubb warned in March that talks could try to force Kyiv to consider territorial concessions, the Kyiv Post reported. Sybiha said in October that Zelenskiy was ready to discuss "the most difficult and sensitive issues, including the territorial question" with Putin in person.

Moscow has shifted from a flat refusal to a selective opening. In May Peskov said Europe was a party to the conflict and could not mediate. On October 29 Putin said the Nordic call was right, since some in Europe "want to establish some kind of constructive dialogue", and on October 30 Peskov said that "at some stage, yes, the involvement of Europeans will be required", though Abu Dhabi would stay three-way.

🔗 https://www.intellinews.com/italy-s-meloni-says-eu-all-over-the-place-on-ukraine-as-us-russia-talk-security-482791/

🇮🇷🛰 Iran begins work on domestic satellite internet to rival Starlink

Iran has begun developing its own satellite internet service to rival Starlink, Supreme Council of Cyberspace secretary Mohammad Amin Aghamiri told state media, local tech website Zoomit reported on November 3.

Tehran is trying to shut a channel that has kept some Iranians online through this year's internet blackouts. A deputy communications minister warned in October that wider use of Starlink would be "the final nail in the coffin" of state control over cyberspace which has struggled with modern VPN systems beating its firewall.

Aghamiri, who also heads the National Centre for Cyberspace, said the council had put satellite internet on its agenda in 2021, with options to work with other countries or invest alone. The project had started and made progress but would take time, he said.

When asked whether it would be available soon, he said: "How soon is up to the responsible body to announce." He gave no timetable.

Iran had already disrupted Starlink, and the operator had since upgraded its system, Aghamiri said. "We are not idle here either," he said, adding that Iran had several counter-technologies it was ready to share with like-minded countries.

Foreign satellite providers must accept Iranian law and operate under the communications ministry or be blocked, he said. Iran has raised unlicensed Starlink use at the International Telecommunication Union and notified US and Norwegian regulators.

🔗 https://www.intellinews.com/iran-begins-work-on-domestic-satellite-internet-to-rival-starlink-482614/

🌏📝 The Post Pax Americana Interregnum is here and this is what it looks like — Intellinews

We have been arguing this year that the result of the East-West clash and the “rise of the rest” from the Global South in general, and the Ukraine war in particular, has led to an end of the unipolar “rules-based” order and ushered in a multipolar world.

Just how badly those rules are being eroded in the West was demonstrated by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky decision to bring treason charges on November 4 against Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s former press secretary, while all of his best friends have been charged with stealing tens of millions of dollars – during a war – and remain untouched. Likewise, Latvia’s decision to PNG journalist and IntelliNews columnist Leonid Ragozin is a repressive move that Russian President Vladimir Putin would be proud of.

From this perspective Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have already won in their face off with Washington and Brussels. Now Putin needs to get his war done, and with Kiev now entirely blacked out as Russian missiles very effectively target substations to destroy the links to the three remaining nuclear power stations, that is looking increasingly likely. The upcoming meeting in Abu Dhabi will be very interesting indeed.

One of the classic features of an interregnum is political and trade chaos. But in this modern version it has a new dimension: hackers and greed.

Two big banks have gone bust in the last two weeks: Alta Banka collapsed in the days after the Serbian electoral revolution that ousted Serbian President Aleksander Vučić that held pretty much all the accounts of Russians living there. The owners tried to escape to Moscow, but authorities forced their plane to turn around and they are now in jail.

Then two days ago the Ueno bank in Paraguay blew up, holding 60% of all deposits in the country. The country is now on fire after demonstrations turned into riots. Some 3mn people don’t know how to pay for food today. And the pensioners are even worse off as with a $10,000 deposit insurance cap many will lose the bulk of their life savings.

However, even more worryingly, France's Credit Mutuel Arkea has confirmed that hackers used a supplier's platform to reach the bank and steal over a hundred million dollars. They got into the bank’s system and used its own system to transfer the money and turn it into crypto which immediately disappeared. This comes on top of North Korean hackers stealing a mind boggling $6bn from Binance, the world’s biggest crypto-exchange.

This is the downside from the AI revolution. Previously, hackers used their nous and superior knowledge of coding to get into your machine. Now they have a tool that can win a Fields Medal to solve never solved before Millenium Prize maths problems. Hybrid attacks as the tectonic geopolitical tension shifts so rapidly they are literally “earthquakes” in their own spheres has already seen a rapid rise in hybrid attacks that are a new feature of an interregnum. Bomb threats hit about 20 flights across Europe on November 5, the third wave in four days, forcing diversions to France, Bulgaria and Austria, but searches found no explosives. Multiple supermarket freezers were turned off this week, causing the food to spoil. And in a really bizarre one, hackers targeted blood banks in France, attempting to raise plasma freezer temperatures to a boiling 110°C – what freezer even has a 110°C setting?!

As part of the same interregnum story, democracy is falling apart. We have already written extensively about how the boomerang effect of sanctions is causing an economic crisis in Europe, that has led to the rise of the right, but it has also now wrecked the US and the consequences for the midterm rout of the Republicans will have big consequences for trade, the wars and geopolitical relations. As we have written before, the Washington consensus that underpinned the rules-based order, is giving away to the Moscow consensus, where government’s put the fate of the state ahead of individual freedoms. Serbia just went in the other direction, but across Europe it’s clearly headed right to a nationalist populist model that is fragmenting the EU – another classic interregnum phenomena.

I suspect that the US will now get bogged down in a warring deadlock between the Democrat Houses and a lame duck Trump, who will focus more on foreign policy as that is the only thing he still controls. He will also use his standard tactic of trying to overwhelm the checks and balances system by issuing so many executive orders (decrees) that Congress’ legal machine to counter them can’t keep up. This was how he defeated media scrutiny when he was campaigning: he said so many bonkers things the media didn’t have enough time to debunk them before he said something else equally outrageous.

Given the new team on the Capitol doesn’t take over until January 3, Putin has one last window to leverage his hold over Trump to force Zelensky to capitulate. Ukraine is currently facing Zelensky’s worst nightmare and I don’t think the coverage is panicking enough. Putin threatened to open Pandora’s box after Ukraine hit the Wildberries warehouse in July and he has done just that with the snows about a month away or less. We always knew exactly what was going to happen – and now it's happening. To take one example, Kiev is now in total darkness. Only a month ago the assessment was that thanks to Russian attacks there would be 8 hours of blackouts a day; currently there are 17 hours, just one hour away from the worst case scenario, and Kiev’s mayor Klitschko said yesterday soon the blackouts will be “complete”. Without ammo there is nothing Zelensky can do to stop this; the US offer to sell 500 interceptors – that won’t begin to arrive until 2030 – is a joke, a piece of propaganda to appease the pro-Ukraine lobby.

🔗 https://www.intellinews.com/moscow-blog-the-interregnum-is-here-and-this-is-what-it-looks-like-482630/

🇺🇸✡️🗳 House Democrats are facing a wave of calls urging them to reject Hakeem Jeffries as speaker despite the party’s landslide election victory.

Some lawmakers report receiving more than 500 calls, while a petition opposing Jeffries has gathered nearly 900,000 signatures.

One Democrat said, “It's our No. 1 issue, and it's not close,” while another reported that “lots of people are saying make Jamie Raskin speaker.”

Progressive activists oppose Jeffries over his pro-Israel ties and perceived lack of resistance to Trump.

However, Jeffries remains the overwhelming favorite, with one senior progressive putting the chances of his defeat at “0.0%.”

Source: Axios

🔗 Clash Report

🛢🌍 Gulf of Guinea oil regains strategic appeal as global energy shocks mount – Carnegie

The Gulf of Guinea is regaining strategic importance as an alternative source of oil and gas for Western markets, with geopolitical turmoil, offshore discoveries and regulatory reforms reviving investor interest in West Africa, according to an analysis published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“West African energy production is suddenly strategic again,” Judd Devermont, a Carnegie nonresident scholar, and Gabrielle Posner of Fraym wrote in a November 5 analysis. They urged renewed US engagement with African producers amid disruptions linked to the US-Israel war with Iran and threats to Middle Eastern shipping routes.

The researchers recalled that the US National Intelligence Council projected in 2000 that West Africa could supply 25% of North American oil imports by 2015. Instead, West African crude and petroleum products accounted for less than 3% of US imports that year, as American shale production expanded and African investment faced regulatory and security obstacles.

The latest disruptions have revived the argument for diversifying energy supplies. International Energy Agency (IEA) Executive Director Fatih Birol has described the war as “the greatest energy security threat in history”. Carnegie estimates that the Gulf of Guinea, defined broadly to encompass much of Africa’s Atlantic coast, holds 4.5% of global oil reserves and 2.7% of gas reserves. Its location offers access to European and American markets without requiring shipments to transit Middle Eastern maritime chokepoints.

Much of the region’s crude is light and sweet, making it attractive to refiners, the researchers noted. Advances in seismic imaging and deepwater drilling have also opened previously difficult exploration areas, while licensing rounds are attracting interest in Benin, Cameroon, Gabon, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and other coastal states.

Devermont and Posner argued that the investment environment had improved since Washington last identified the region as a strategic energy frontier. Regulatory reforms and maritime security initiatives had contributed to what they described as “a more welcoming, and potentially more durable, operating environment”.

Nigeria’s 2021 Petroleum Industry Act established a new regulatory framework and commercialised the state oil company, while subsequent presidential directives introduced incentives for offshore investment. Shell took the final investment decision on the Bonga North deepwater development in December 2024. The project, which press reports valued at about $5bn, is expected to recover more than 300mn barrels of oil equivalent and reach peak output of 110,000 barrels per day (bpd).

ExxonMobil and its partners committed $1bn in July 2026 to the Usan offshore infill drilling project, which is expected to add up to 40,000 bpd of production. Jagir Baxi, chairman and managing director of ExxonMobil’s Nigerian affiliates, announced the investment at NOG Energy Week in Abuja on July 8, saying work on the block would begin the following month. The campaign will be Esso’s first drilling in Nigeria since 2016.

The offshore investment drive contrasts with international majors’ withdrawal from mature onshore and shallow-water assets. Shell completed the sale of its Nigerian onshore and shallow-water subsidiary to the Renaissance consortium in March 2025, while Seplat Energy acquired ExxonMobil’s shallow-water operations in December 2024. Nigerian companies now account for more than half of national oil production, while international majors increasingly concentrate investment in deepwater projects and gas.

Angola has pursued comparable reforms, transferring petroleum-sector regulatory responsibilities from state-owned Sonangol to the newly created National Agency for Petroleum, Gas and Biofuels (ANPG) in 2019 and introducing more predictable licensing rounds. Chevron announced an offshore oil and gas condensate discovery in Block 0 in August 2026 that remains subject to development assessment.

Mauritania has strengthened its investment framework following the 2015 discovery of the Greater Tortue Ahmeyim gas field, shared with Senegal. Elsewhere along Africa’s Atlantic coast, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and, farther south, Namibia have attracted exploration interest through major offshore discoveries, although projects remain at different development stages.

Maritime security cooperation has expanded alongside these investments. Six countries — Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone — launched a Combined Maritime Task Force in June 2026 to coordinate responses to piracy and other maritime threats.

Competition from China presents another challenge for US investors. Chinese companies have expanded their involvement in African energy financing, infrastructure and engineering, particularly in Angola and Nigeria. Meanwhile, tightening emissions standards and uncertainty over long-term oil demand are increasing the commercial risks associated with new hydrocarbon developments.

🔗 https://www.intellinews.com/gulf-of-guinea-oil-regains-strategic-appeal-as-global-energy-shocks-mount-carnegie-482623/