Bloomberg - Evening Briefing - It’s not a “retreat"

The Kremlin says it’s pulling back some of its troops around the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv as cease-fire talks in Turkey appear to yield some progress. Those developments, however, came as Ukrainian officials warn Vladimir Putin is simply looking to cut his losses after a month-long invasion that failed to take a major city and reportedly cost him thousands of dead soldiers. After largely destroying some of those cities while killing hundreds if not thousands of civilians, the announced “de-escalation” is being seen in some quarters as merely a tactic as Putin consolidates gains in the east and tries to establish a land corridor with Ukraine’s occupied Crimean peninsula. 

A rescuer on Tuesday clears the rubble of a warehouse containing more than 50,000 tons of deep-frozen food in the Ukrainian town of Brovary, north of Kyiv The Kremlin has been accused of targeting civilians and infrastructure, including food depots. Photographer: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images

NATO officials appear to view Moscow’s statements warily (Russia repeatedly promised before the war that it had no intention of attacking Ukraine). Markets reacted well to the news, a response that at least one observer found problematic. “I think there was very serious misunderstanding of what both sides said in Istanbul after the talks,” said Evgeny Minchenko, a Moscow-based political consultant. “So far I just heard is that there will be less action near Kyiv and Chernihiv, because the Russian army is concentrating its resources against the Ukrainian army in Donbas.”

Volunteers assemble sand bags around a monument in Kyiv on March 29. Photographer: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images

If Russia’s goal is to take all of the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk provinces as a prerequisite to ending its attack, that would translate into Ukraine losing a big chunk of its internationally recognized territory. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said however that Putin’s goals stretch well beyond eastern Ukraine. Nobody should “be fooling ourselves” over suggestions from Moscow that it would reduce attacks around Kyiv or withdraw forces in the area. The Pentagon, Kirby said, isn’t ready to call it a withdrawal or even a “retreat.” —David E. Rovella

Bloomberg is tracking the coronavirus pandemic and the progress of global vaccination efforts.

U.S. regulators cleared second booster doses of Covid-19 vaccine from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech for adults 50 and older as the potential for yet another infection wave, this time fueled by the omicron subvariant, threatens the U.S. After racing to build capacity and meet once seemingly insatiable orders for shots, the global vaccine industry is facing waning demand as many late-to-the-game producers fight over a slowing market. But in China, the virus continues to wreak havoc.

The Congressional panel investigating the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol found an eight-hour gap in official records of then-President Donald Trump’s phone calls that day. The gap included the hours during which the insurrection took place. Investigators are probing whether the Republican had any role in planning or delaying a response to the assault on the seat of U.S. democracy.  

A federal judge thinks Trump likely committed fraud when he and one of his lawyers sought to block Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election, Timothy L. O’Brien writes in Bloomberg Opinion. So how much longer, O’Brien says, will it take U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to draw the same conclusion about the “attempted coup?”

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland Photographer: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Xi Jinping’s efforts to regain the trust of international investors may face serious hurdles. The Chinese government showed little regard for the same investors last year when it unleashed a series of crackdowns on the country’s most profitable companies. The result was confusion and punishing losses for shareholders. Regulators have yet to follow through on promises made this month to ensure policies are more transparent and predictable. Add to that the Chinese president’s friendship with the near-globally condemned leader of Russia, and you have a recipe for increasing wariness of Chinese assets.

The U.S. 2-year yield briefly exceeded the 10-year Tuesday for the first time since 2019, inverting yet another segment of the Treasury curve and reinforcing the view that Federal Reserve rate increases may cause a recession. Here’s your markets wrap.

Public pension plans put billions of dollars into private equity funds. They expect to pay a fee and a share of profits to the firm running the fund. But on top of those costs are expenses ranging from travel to dinners to news subscriptions, and it’s proving difficult to determine how those dollars are spent. A Bloomberg analysis of data collected from more than two dozen U.S. public pension plans shows most of those investors aren’t tracking details of so-called partnership expenses across their private equity portfolios. Some say the task is too difficult because fund managers are reporting the costs in vastly different ways—or fail to break out expenditures at all. 

Hackers stole about $600 million from a blockchain network connected to the popular Axie Infinity online game in one of the biggest crypto attacks to date. Computers known as nodes that support a so-called bridge—software that lets people convert tokens into ones that can be used on another network—were attacked. It was the latest example of how bridges have beccome rife with problems. 

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