🇷🇺🇺🇦 A strike by an FPV kamikaze operator from the 1st Slavyansk Brigade of the 1st Donetsk Army Corps on a tank of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Avdiivka direction.

🇺🇲🇺🇦⚡ Security guarantees for Ukraine to be announced today - White House

🇷🇺🇺🇦🇺🇲 Soldiers of the RF Armed Forces and the BMP M2 Bradley ODA-SA of the Armed Forces of Ukraine abandoned by the enemy in the Zaporozhye direction.

🇺🇦👶 Ella Libanova, Director of the Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine has a piece on the demographic situation there.

▪️ Ms. Libanova predicts Ukrainian TFR was only 0.90 in 2022 & may be as low as 0.70 in 2023.She also predicts that TFR will return to the level of 1.3–1.4 only in the 2030s. However, she states TFR was 1.2 in 2021 when it was possibly higher as the population may have been inflated.

▪️ She also predicts that Ukraines population (within 1991 borders) will only be just north of 30M by 2035. That is down from ~52M in 1989. So Ukraine will have lost more than 20M people in under five decades (larger than the current population of Romania!).

▪️ If the postwar TFR recovery is as modest as Ms. Libanova fears+TFR stays stuck ~1.4 instead of more healthy territory like 1.6-1.7 then Ukraine’s catastrophic demographic decline is basically assured to continue.

- Aaronal16

Admin Comment: To the last Ukrainian, indeed...

🇺🇸🏦 Interesting comment from a BoA analyst. If the full implications of interest rare hikes get baked into financial markets interest payments would rise by the equivalent of Japanese and German GDP combined. Post-QE global economy is way over-leveraged!

- Philip Pilkington

🇷🇺🇺🇦 The defeat of the Ukrainian armored personnel carrier YPR-765 by an FPV drone.

🇷🇺🇺🇦 Accurate work of a sniper pair of DPR on the Ukrainian military.

🇷🇺🇺🇦🇬🇧 The Microturbo TR60-30 engine of the British-French Storm Shadow / Scalp EG cruise missile manufactured by the Safran group. Fell into the hands of the RF Armed Forces on the Zaporozhye front.

🇩🇪🇵🇱🇺🇦⚡Germany terminates an agreement with the Polish authorities on the repair of Leopard 2 tanks transferred to the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the territory of Poland - Handelsblatt.

The reason for this step is called inadequately overpriced by 10 times from Poland. According to the German publication, about half of the Leopard 2 tanks delivered to Ukraine are already damaged.

Each tank requires several hundred hours of work to repair, so a service center on the border of Poland and Ukraine had to solve this problem. However, now, apparently, options for repairing damaged German equipment are being considered in other countries.

🇷🇺🇺🇦❗Ukrainian media reports about an air strike by the Russian Aerospace Forces on Zmeiny Island in the Black Sea.

🇩🇪⛽️ Europe's energy shock is FAR from over. This is German industrial production in gas-intensive chemicals & pharma. Production fell a stunning -5.5% in May 2023 & is down -16% from its pre-COVID average. Euro is substantially overvalued at current levels. EUR/$ fair value is 0.90.

🇩🇪⛽️ Germany's energy-intensive industries (red line) continue to suffer, with production falling in May sharply. The impact of the energy crisis in Europe is not over. There's a reason why EU gas demand remains so lackluster.

- Javier Blas