US-Ukraine Minerals Deal, China’s Domestic Economic Pressures. Plus we’re relaunching deep dives (with an upgrade)

Andrew Sheves Good morning.

🇺🇦** US-Ukraine Minerals Deal Signed**

Ukraine and the US signed an agreement to establish the “United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund” for joint investment in Ukraine’s natural resources, marking a diplomatic victory for Kyiv which rewrote the deal after initially refusing to sign. The revised agreement removes language requiring Ukraine to reimburse Washington for past military aid and includes provisions protecting Ukraine from violating EU laws, though Trump’s frustration grows over the three-week delay in signing. The largely symbolic deal offers no concrete security guarantees but signals “long-term strategic alignment” between the countries. More - Washington Post

🇨🇳** China’s Domestic Pressures**

Comment - How the US-China trade war resolves comes down to who blinks first. So far, reports indicate that President Trump and his team seem more keen to speak to Beijing than vice versa. However, while this indicates that China is in a stronger position — and everything points to China having much greater patience and pain tolerance than the US — this BBC article outlines the pressures in the Chinese domestic economy and how these are applying pressure on President Xi.

In-Depth Research Reports

You might recall the DCDR Pro Reports from a while back. These gave you an in-depth look at a particular topic, like shipping or rare earth minerals, which you could use in your planning and decision-making.

The downside was that these took a long time to write and didn’t answer a specific question so answering the ‘so what?’ question was still left to the user.

However, the agents now give us the opportunity to create these reports much more quickly and to consider the potential outcomes of a situation, so we can relaunch these reports. But now, instead of just a deep-research report, we’re also going to be answering a timely, pertinent question.

For example, instead of just looking at shipping choke points, we might consider the size of the interruption that the tariffs have inserted into America’s supply chain and when these might hit. Something that’s on everyone’s mind right now (or at least should be).

These reports will be a pro subscriber feature and eventually something users can commission by themselves, but for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be making these public and sharing the reports via the SITREP.

So here’s the question - what do you want a report on?

Hit reply and let me know

Asia Stability Ratings and News Summary

More Unstable

🇦🇫 Afghanistan, 🇦🇲 Armenia, 🇦🇿 Azerbaijan, 🇧🇩 Bangladesh, 🇧🇹 Bhutan, 🇰🇭 Cambodia, 🇨🇳 China, 🇬🇪 Georgia, 🇮🇳 India, 🇮🇩 Indonesia, 🇯🇵 Japan, 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan, 🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan, 🇱🇦 Laos, 🇲🇻 Maldives, 🇲🇲 Myanmar, 🇳🇵 Nepal, 🇰🇵 North Korea,

Carpe tomorrow!