Ukraine Strikes Inside Russia With U.S.-Made Missiles
Attack on air-defense system followed shift in policy by Biden administration to allow limited strikes with American weapons
KYIV, Ukraine—Ukraine used U.S.-made missiles to strike in Russian territory this week as it counters a Russian offensive in the northeastern Kharkiv region that appears to have stalled.
Ukraine’s military used Himars ground-to-ground missiles to hit a Russian air-defense system in the Belgorod region, according to a Ukrainian military officer in the area familiar with the strike. Western analysts earlier cited geolocated videos posted online in assessing that Ukraine had used the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, to strike an air-defense battery nearly 40 miles from the current front line.
The Biden administration reversed its policy on Thursday and permitted limited strikes on Russian territory with U.S. weapons to hold back the Russian offensive launched last month toward Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have threatened serious consequences if Western weapons are used to strike within Russia. The Biden administration had long forbidden strikes in Russia in an effort to avoid the risk that the conflict in Ukraine could escalate into a direct clash between Washington and Moscow. But the White House changed its policy after Russia began the fresh thrust toward Kharkiv.
That offensive stretched a thinning defensive line of exhausted Ukrainian troops, and Russian forces quickly seized several villages. Ukraine rushed reinforcements to the area, including elite airborne units, and shored up defenses, largely halting the Russian advance by the end of May.
Ukraine’s top military commander, Lt. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, said Wednesday on a visit to the region that Ukrainian troops were repelling fresh Russian assaults.
Russia has said it is aiming to create a buffer zone along its border. Ukrainian officials say they believe the Kremlin’s ultimate goal is to attempt to seize Kharkiv, although it currently lacks the forces in the area for such an operation.
Ukraine’s government had long pleaded for permission to use Western-provided weapons to strike Russian military targets such as artillery systems, logistics hubs and troop formations before they cross the border.
The new U.S. policy allows Ukrainian forces to use U.S.-supplied artillery and fire short-range rockets from Himars launchers against command posts, arms depots and other assets on Russian territory that are being used by Russian forces to carry out its attack on the Kharkiv region. But the policy doesn’t give Ukraine permission to use longer-range ATACMS surface-to-surface missiles inside Russia.
A video and photographs posted online this week showed smoke and flames coming from what analysts said were two air-defense missile launchers and a command post. Analysts geolocated the images to a field in the Russian border region of Belgorod, which the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. think tank, said was within Himars range but beyond the range of other rocket systems used by Ukrainian forces.
Themes matter more than geography for UK portfolio managers
Exposure to the right theme is now a bigger driver of equity market outperformance than geography or style, according to a range of portfolio managers.
David Jane, who runs a range of multi-asset funds at Premier Miton said: “It used to be the case that sectors and regions drove things but in a globalised world themes are much more important for the big caps and many of those themes straddle sectors or exclude parts of sectors.”
He said macroeconomic factors tended to impact specific areas such as the oil price, which goes on to impact certain sectors of the stock market, but he said he had less value to add in terms of understanding these factors than he did themes.
Jane said: “Think how the renewable theme straddles energy, industrials or utilities and those with exposure do well when the theme is in favour. Alternatively consider the digital economy and how digital retailers now dominate the retail sector and how there performance has diverged from the historic cyclical nature of that sector.”
Matthew Yeates, deputy chief investment officer at 7IM, said: “It’s a nuance of equity investing generally that people tend to cut their equity exposure by the country of listing."
He said 'UK equity' or 'European equity' often simply meant 'listed in the UK' or 'listed in Europe'.
"When we look at our equity exposure we apply a look through across several different dimensions of sector exposure, factor grouping and in some circumstances these can be thought of as themes," Yeates said.
Among the themes in which he is invested right now is healthcare, a sector which he said gives global exposure that isn’t linked to the performance of individual markets or economies.
Luca Paolini, chief market strategist at Pictet Asset Management went further, believing that in the current market environment, clients seeking a normal level of equity market return would need to pick the right themes.
He said that while long-run average returns for most equity markets tended to be “double digits”, he predicted that in the coming years it would be closer to 7.5 per cent at the index level.
Paolini said: “Within equities, investors should focus more on specific sectors and themes rather than regions. We have identified three industries that should significantly outpace the wider equity market, thanks to structural trends that support their increasing share of corporate revenues and their outsized success at innovation: tech, industrials and healthcare.
"We also expect these sectors to outperform the global equity benchmark by a cumulative 20 per cent or so over the coming five years. By increasing portfolio weighting to these industries, investors will be able to lift their equity returns substantially."
When foes become friends: Capital One partners with fintech giants Stripe, Adyen to prevent fraud
The tension between incumbents and fintechs has existed for decades. But every once in a while, the two groups decide to put their competition aside and work together.
In an unusual move, Capital One is teaming up with payment giants (and rivals) Stripe and Amsterdam-based Adyen to offer a free product aimed at fraud reduction, the financial services giant told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.
While Capital One has built models to protect its customers from fraud, it was getting stuck because it just “didn’t have enough data,” said head of fraud strategy Jon Borman.
So it built an open-source project, called Direct Data Share, which he described as an API that allows merchants or anyone in the payment stack to send real time transaction data. This is particularly useful for e-commerce transactions, which he described as “pretty unsafe” compared to in-person purchases where a user is verifying the chip on a credit card, for example.
With Direct Data Share, every time an online purchase was made, “a bunch of data” flowed through Capital One’s API to the bank, which would be used to help prevent fraud for more customers and merchants, he said.
But by partnering with Stripe and Adyen with Direct Data Share, Capital One can act like a data clearinghouse, identifying fraud across all of their rails.
“If we see an IP address through Stripe that turns out to be fraudulent, we can now use that same IP address to prevent fraud for transactions happening at Adyen, and vice versa,” Borman told TechCrunch.
Merchants win, he said, because more fraud should be identified. Global ecommerce fraud losses are expected to spike to $343 billion by 2027, according to a study by Juniper Research.
But it should also mean fewer false declines, when a card or transaction is flagged but shouldn’t be. And merchants pay no extra fees for the protection. So far, Borman said that the partnering with the fintechs has resulted in the approval of over a billion dollars worth of transactions that would have been declined.
“They’re trying to stop fraud on their side, too, both for financial reasons, as well because this is criminal activity that we’re preventing,” he said of Stripe and Adyen. “So we had this light bulb moment in that we realized we have the exact same business model, so we can work together and fight fraud.”
Capital One has been working with Stripe on this offering since early 2023, but only recently began collaborating with Adyen.
Specifically in the case of Stripe, Capital One through its API is able to receive fraud scores from Stripe’s Radar product that it says will help it improve accuracy during the transaction authorization process.
When Capital One approached Adyen with a solution to improve authorization rates, “it was an easy decision,” Trevor Nies, Adyen SVP and global head of digital told TechCrunch.
“We love this partnership because we can succeed together,” he added. “Adyen’s merchants benefit from higher authorization rates and fewer chargebacks just as Capital One’s cardholders benefit from fewer false positive declines and less fraud.”
Confirms approached by one of the third parties with whom we had previously engaged regarding its interest in an acquisition for all of our company - filing As we had previously stated, throughout 2023, Cytokinetics engaged in Business Development discussions with potential strategic partners with respect to aficamten. Leading up to and after our late December 2023 disclosure of top-line results from SEQUOIA-HCM, the Phase 3 clinical trial of aficamten, Cytokinetics was approached by one of the third parties with whom we had previously engaged regarding its interest in an acquisition for all of our company.
- Cytokinetics and that third party engaged in good faith negotiations. The Board was supportive of moving forward on a potential acquisition on substantially the terms the counterparty communicated to us and on terms that we believed were going to be mutually acceptable. However, the third party did not move forward with an acquisition of our company at that time. There are a few additional points I’d like to make by way of background:
1. Cytokinetics’ Board is sophisticated, highly engaged, and takes its fiduciary duties to shareholders very seriously.
2. The Board is well advised and our longtime financial advisors, Centerview and JP Morgan, as well as outside legal counsel at Sullivan & Cromwell and Cooley, have been advising the Board on potential value creation opportunities since long before recent rumors started and including through the discussions referenced above.
3. If there had been an actionable proposal in the best interests of shareholders, it would have received support of our Board and would have been executed with support of Management.
4. To be clear, Management and the Board are committed to driving shareholder value in whatever manner can best deliver for shareholders and would never stand in the way of a value-maximizing transaction.
Russia has taken out over half of Ukraine power generation
Country’s electricity capacity has dropped below 20GW, with Russian attacks causing worst blackouts since start of war
Russia has knocked out or captured more than half of Ukraine’s power generation, causing the worst rolling blackouts since the start of its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Moscow’s missile and drone attacks in recent months have homed in on Ukrainian power plants, forcing energy companies to impose nationwide shutdowns while scrambling to repair the damage and find alternative supplies.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s domestic energy production was about 55 gigawatts of electricity, among the largest in Europe. That power generation capacity has currently dropped below 20GW, due to bombardments or to Russian occupation taking those plants offline, according to Ukrainian officials.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told government meeting on Thursday that the consequences of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector are “long-term”, which means that saving power “will be part of our daily life in the years to come”.
“Our goal is to save at all levels: from large enterprises to individual houses and apartments,” he said.
A Russian attack on Saturday struck energy facilities in five regions, causing significant damage, said Kyiv energy minister German Galushchenko.
The latest strikes have also targeted pumping facilities for underground natural gas storage being used by EU customers. Though these pumps can be easily replaced, the attacks do highlight concerns about security of supply come winter — both for domestic use and exports to the bloc.
The EU’s ambassador in Kyiv, Katarina Mathernova, said that since March, “Russia has destroyed [a] whooping 9.2GW of energy generation” in Ukraine. She added that she was meeting officials to establish what their “urgent energy equipment needs” were in order to “help alleviate the impact of continuous Russian missile attacks on energy infrastructure”.
Russia’s first aerial bombardment campaign in the winter of 2022-23 targeted the country’s electrical distribution grid — which could be repaired relatively easily, according to officials and experts. But the latest barrages are zeroing in on thermal and hydroelectric power plants which will be much harder and more expensive to fix, rebuild or replace, they said.
One Ukrainian government official described Saturday’s assault as “devastating” while another said it was likely to mean that by winter residents would be spending a vast majority of their day without electricity.
Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the press. One of the officials said 1.2GW of power generation was lost in Saturday’s bombardment alone, while infrastructure critical for transporting gas from underground storage facilities in western Ukraine was badly damaged.
Asked what the damage would mean for the months ahead, one of the officials put it bluntly: “We should prepare for life in the cold and the dark.”
“This is our new normal,” the second official said, gesturing outside a window to the darkness that had descended on Kyiv during a recent emergency power shutdown.
Ukraine’s leadership has blamed the recent destruction on insufficient air defences being provided by western allies. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian missiles were able to hit Kyiv’s largest thermal power plant in April because Ukrainian forces had run out of munitions.
Zelenskyy has urged his allies to send more interceptors and air defence batteries — but so far only Germany and Italy have pledged to do so.
Russia’s aim appears to be to make life untenable for Ukrainians, Oleksandr Lytvynenko, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, told the Financial Times. He described plans to set up a “decentralised energy system” relying on more mini-power plants that would be less vulnerable to Russian attacks.
European countries have so far donated 120 shipments of critical energy equipment and tools to Kyiv to help shore up and repair the energy system.
In addition to increasing imports of EU electricity from 1.7GW to 2.4GW and bringing more gas-fired energy plants online, Ukraine’s leadership will have to adopt further unpopular tariff hikes, according to Borys Dodonov, head of energy and climate studies at the Kyiv School of Economics.
“If no measures are taken, according to our modelling, then probably the population will have only two to four hours of electricity [per day] in January,” said Dodonov.
On Friday, Ukrainian authorities doubled energy prices in a bid to fund the reconstruction effort but they still fall short of market rates.
Lytvynenko said Ukraine was also trying to increase its use of green technology, such as solar panels and wind turbines. While these are seen as crucial for Ukraine’s future energy security, they require foreign investment which given the country’s risk profile is difficult to attain.