EU ministers keen to use Russian profits for Ukraine ammo
The EU is nearing a deal on using profits from frozen Russian assets to buy ammunition for Ukraine, while preparing the next round of anti-Russia sanctions.
Tuesday
19th Mar 2024
The EU is nearing a deal on using profits from frozen Russian assets to buy ammunition for Ukraine, while preparing the next round of anti-Russia sanctions.
Fourteen EU member states are pushing for the European Investment Bank to boost defence investment, potentially including ammunition — but bank officials have shown reluctance.
We estimate the total direct cost of Ukraine to current member states via the regular EU budget at €19bn per year. But Ukraine's feeble democratic institutions have been weakened by the war, writes Zsolt Darvas of the Bruegel think-tank.
Many of the Russian programmers who investigated the legitimacy of president Vladimir Putin's last election victory in 2018 have been forced to flee the country fearing prosecution, amid concerns over attempts to hold the country's electoral process accountable.
She was 16 when Russians put her on a bus one morning in October 2022 in the main square of her Ukrainian home town.
How the roll-out of online voting will hand Vladimir Putin his fifth presidential term.
Finland, which shares a border with Russia, has cautioned about the danger of a Russian attack in coming years. Russia is not "invincible" but "self-satisfaction is no longer an option," Finnish prime minister Petteri Orpo said.
The US and EU are supplying the most weapons to the Middle East, including to Israel, as the Gaza war threatens to ignite a regional conflict.
The US has threatened Austria's top bank with sanctions for doing business in Russia, following earlier talks with German lenders.
It is high time to step back to take a look at a wider picture —that takes into account a broad array of factors affecting the European agricultural market so that the impact of the Ukrainian imports is not overblown.
Russia is planning to sabotage a referendum on EU integration in Moldova, Chișinău's spy service has warned, as EU diplomats fear bad "surprises" also in the Western Balkans.
The European Commission has unveiled its first-ever defence strategy and investment programme — in a bid to reduce its dependence on the US and in response to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Karl Kraus, the prolific Austrian journalist and satirist, once wrote: "There is only one thing worse than the shame of war: the shame of people who no longer want to know about it." That would now seem to include Europe.
Ukrainians struggle to match the kindness of individual Hungarians with the nationalist government's pro-Russia rhetoric. "Ukraine's primary enemies are Russians and Putin, obviously. But the number two is Viktor Orbán," Viktoria Petrovszka, a Ukrainian woman living in Hungary, says.
Since the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine, deep fakes have been weaponised, infiltrating every corner of social media in Italy and Spain.
Putin's latest nuclear threat was meant to maximise Western division over French remarks on Nato, but contained little new, Kremlin-watchers say.
In this week's Euroscopic podcast; antisemitism and confusion in France and Germany, Sweden joins NATO, Novaya Gazeta Europe editor Mikhail Komin on Ukraine and EU and a chat with DiEM25, an EP election hopeful campaigning in Berlin.
EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen urged "a new European defence mindset" to strengthen the bloc's defence capabilities. But will her latest proposal, to use Russian assets for Ukraine's military needs, stir up controversy?
Macron's taboo-shattering words on Western troops in Ukraine likely meant more special forces on the ground, but were also a new alarm-call on Russia's growing threat.
If we pretend that states are democratic because they are in the EU's geopolitical tent, we betray democracy. Conversely, functioning democracies can make geopolitical choices that the EU does not like.
All of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán's MPs voted in favour of Sweden's entry into Nato on Monday, in an anticlimactic end to his veto drama.
EU paid Russia €420-per-capita for fossil fuels since war began, new research shows.
Two years of tragedies, with well over 100,000 Russian war crimes now registered, underscore the urgent need to stop international LNG investments in Russia that continue to fund Vladimir Putin's war chest.
What would 'just peace' look like for Ukraine? How could we get there? And what does 'just peace' actually mean? Brussels Dispatches on how to get to long-term peace in Ukraine.
Hungary failed to get three Russian and three Chinese names deleted, as the EU approved its 13th package of sanctions ahead of an anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
EU headlines, Russia after Navalny, the Munich Security Conference and an interview with Ian Bremmer, author and founder of the Eurasia Group on his main takeaways from the conference.
Fewer than one-in-ten Ukrainian refugees intend to settle permanently outside Ukraine, according to new research by the associate director of research and the director of gender and economic inclusion at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.
EU banks still operating in Russia are squirming to show they're abandoning their ever-more toxic client — but actions speak louder than words.
It happened. The Kremlin has finally managed to kill Alexei Navalny, the major political opponent of the regime run by Vladimir Putin for the last quarter of the century. Yet another dramatic watershed in the history of his country.
When the political timing is right, Ukraine will go into Nato as swiftly as Finland and Sweden are doing, Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has said.
Recent farmer's protests have put food production on the political agenda. Yet until now, policy-makers and regulators have largely ignored the forces that direct global food trade: Big Agri and their monopolies.
By plunging Russia into his nefarious campaign against neighbouring Ukraine, not only did Putin wreak havoc on the Ukrainian nation, he also inflicted a historical wound on Russia itself — a wound whose repercussions will echo through generations of Russians.
The EU is to hit Russian shipping firms that import North Korean weapons as part of its 13th blacklist on the Ukraine war.