GOMA, A NEW FRONT
A new politico-military movement, the Front pour la refondation de la Nation, was formally unveiled in Goma on Monday with former president Joseph Kabila as its head. Corneille Nangaa and Bertrand Bisimwa were named vice presidents, M23 field commander Sultani Makenga becomes chief of staff with vice-presidential rank, and Freddy Kaniki takes secretary general. The announcement matches warnings in the UN Group of Experts' June 2026 report that AFC/M23 was heading for a rebrand under Kabila, though the same report flagged friction, with Makenga's camp wary of ambitions reaching beyond North and South Kivu. The province supplies much of the coltan and cassiterite moving through regional trading houses, and the announcement lands alongside two days of fighting between AFC/M23 and Wazalendo militia at Kaziba in Walungu.
LUSAKA, THE SAME DAY
Hours before that announcement, Congo's mines minister Louis Watum Kabamba was in Lusaka telling the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region that member states must turn commitments into action to break the conflict-minerals cycle. The call for a cleaner minerals corridor and the week's biggest development in that same corridor arrived from opposite directions on the same calendar day.
THE DIESEL CRACK
Brent climbed 6.3% to 106.52 USD/bbl, or 806 USD/t. Diesel followed but not in step, up 2.0% to 4.7167 USD/gal, or 1,476 USD/t, while gasoline slipped 1.8% to 1,133 USD/t. Trade press is blaming refining outages for keeping the diesel side of the barrel tight even as crude itself ran hard, a crack spread moving in the opposite direction from what a looser crude market would normally imply. Russian-language trade coverage over the weekend described Washington easing the sanctions regime around Russian diesel deliveries, which would, if it holds, put more barrels against a market that currently cannot absorb them fast enough to cool the premium.
THE LITHIUM TICKET
EnergyX signed a 10-year, 2 billion dollar offtake deal with Trafigura, covering lithium product from its Black Giant project in Chile alongside its Lonestar project in Texas. It is the kind of contract that puts a trading house with a deep copper and cobalt book into a long-dated lithium position without owning a mine, and it is worth noting purely for the length of the commitment: a decade is an unusually long offtake to sign in a metal whose price has been anything but settled.
Loose ends
- Copper rose 2.4% to 14,890 USD/t the same day an avalanche added fatalities at Codelco's El Teniente, where open-pit operations were already halted for weather.
- USDA trimmed its Russian wheat export forecast to 40 million tonnes while holding Kazakhstan steady at 9.5 million tonnes; CBOT wheat itself eased 2.0% to 247 USD/t. Fastmarkets has begun separate Russian Baltic Sea assessments and suspended six deep-sea Black Sea assessments.
- The Baltic Dry index fell 2.2% to 2,852.
- Sulphur in China slipped 1.0% to 7,319 CNY/t even as Western trade press described a squeeze on fertilizer producers from rising sulfur costs, a reminder that the regional sulphur markets are currently pulling in different directions.