Russia-EU Asset Dispute, DRC Political Tensions, and Afghanistan Internet Outage

Off Leash update 2 October RUSSIA •The Kremlin warned European leaders against approving a proposal to essentially advance Ukraine €140 billion ($156 billion) in future reparations funding backed by frozen Russian assets. •The EU plan would package that funding as an interest-free loan to avoid the complexities of seizing Russian assets outright, but the Kremlin now says it would consider such crafty financial engineering the same thing as a seizure anyway, and would retaliate by seizing an equivalent value of frozen European assets in Russia. •Separately, French authorities seized a Russian "shadow fleet" oil tanker off France's western coast and detained two of its crew over the tanker's suspected ties to recent drone flights over European countries. That lends credence to Ukrainian President Zelensky's assertion that the trespassing drones are being launched from Russia's "shadow fleet." •Indeed, the seized tanker, the Borocay, was sailing near the Danish coast last week when unidentified drones - likely launched from it - menaced Denmark's skies and forced its main airport to temporarily close.

DRC •Some Congo watchers - especially those aligned with former president Joseph Kabila - expressed concern that the death sentence a military court handed Kabila on Tuesday will derail the bumbling and half-hearted peace process that DRC and the M23 / Rwanda entered into over the summer. •Kabila's sympathizers are probably correct that his conviction and sentence were politically motivated, and the conviction is certainly not going to encourage Kabila to help end the conflict in the east. But the death sentence is unlikely to ever be carried out, and the peace process is already so broken that a vindictive verdict against Kabila is unlikely to do much further damage.

AFGHANISTAN •Internet service returned to Afghanistan after a two-day outage that media reports tied to a Taliban edict against "immorality." •A Taliban spokesman now says the government didn't intentionally cut off internet this time - unlike from 1996 to 2001 during their last turn in power, when they did ban internet use. •That may be a way to save face after Taliban leaders realized how much Afghanistan's economy and people now depend on the internet for basic and Taliban-tolerated (for men, at least) functions like trade, travel, and communications.

1/2