Tag: eu

Spain’s Sánchez urges EU to break Association Agreement with Israel within 48 hours

During a Socialist Workers’ Party rally in Gibraleón under the slogan ‘Defend Public Services’, on Sunday, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Socialist candidate María Jesús Montero confirmed they would ask the EU to end its Association Agreement with Israel.

Pedro Sánchez used an election rally in the province of Huelva to deliver one of the most far-reaching foreign policy messages of recent weeks. “This Tuesday, the Government of Spain will take to Europe the proposal that the EU sever its association with Israel,” he told supporters.

The prime minister added that Spain is “a friend of Israel”, but that it does not share the actions of its government, and urged other European countries to join the initiative.

The announcement did not come out of the blue. Days earlier, Sánchez had called on the EU to suspend its Association Agreement with Israel after what he described as the heaviest Israeli attack on Lebanon since the start of the offensive. On Sunday, that appeal hardened into a firm pledge, with a date set for action.

Spain’s stance on this conflict has been hardening for months. Sánchez and Ireland had already called for an urgent review of the EU–Israel agreement, arguing that respect for human rights and democratic principles is an “essential element” of the relationship.

At the European Pulse Forum 2026, held in Barcelona, Sánchez argued that Israel is “trampling on and violating” several articles of the Association Agreement, and said that Spain is “ready to take that step together with many other European countries”. Netanyahu responded by accusing Spain of waging a “diplomatic war” against Israel, to which Sánchez replied by taking the debate to the European institutions.

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Russian Missile Strikes Would Bury EU’s Drone Scheme for Ukraine Instantly – Expert

The key vulnerability in this plan lies in the gap between the European assembly of the “carcasses” and the Ukrainian installation of the “brains,” suggests military journalist Aleksey Borzenko, deputy chief editor of the Literary Russia newspaper.

Speaking to Sputnik, Borzenko argued that the arrangement remains viable only until Russian missiles target the assembly sites.

The main issues lie in logistics and combat efficiency, he explains:

The drones’ fuselages and engines cannot be shipped to Ukraine in low-profile containers, so they will remain viable only until Russian Kalibr missiles strike them.

Splitting the production cycle into two unsynchronized stages — one in Europe and one in Ukraine — creates a bottleneck at final assembly. As a result, even simple disruptions, such as border protests or bureaucratic delays, can easily paralyze the entire process.

Even if Europe manages to deliver thousands of drones, they will likely be shot down by Russian air defenses and electronic warfare systems. Thus, increasing the number of UAVs would merely drive up European budget expenditures without improving outcomes.

“Meanwhile, the European facilities themselves—whose addresses have been made public—become legitimate targets. Attacks on them don’t have to be purely military; targeted acts of sabotage or cyberattacks on design documentation would suffice,” the expert adds.

Ultimately, while the plan may look viable on paper, its actual results will be inversely proportional to the billions of euros spent on it, Borzenko concludes.

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Europe’s Drone Pipeline to Ukraine Could Soon Be In Russia’s Crosshairs – Analyst

The Russian Defense Ministry’s statement on Europe’s plan to scale up drone production for Ukraine contained an explicit warning, says military analyst Ivan Konovalov speaking to Sputnik: Europe is turning into a “strategic rear base.”

The term applies to infrastructure that, while located outside the battlefield, directly sustains combat operations.

Under this logic, European hubs supplying Ukraine with drone components, data systems, FPV drones and heavy fixed-wing UAVs are no longer a “civilian facility in a peaceful country.”

“Once the production cycle on their territory is integrated into Ukraine’s strike capabilities against Russia, the line is crossed – they become a target deep within the enemy’s operational structure,” remarks the analyst.

After Russia’s strikes dismantled Ukraine’s centralized drone production, a workaround emerged: assembly lines were set up in Bavaria and the UK, using foreign-made components, while the finished systems were marketed as “Ukrainian.”

However, European production creates a long, predictable supply chain via Poland or Romania, exposed to disruption, insurance risks, and logistical bottlenecks, says the pundit.

Large shipments would be visible to reconnaissance and potentially easier to disrupt at critical junctions, he argues.

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Europe vs. Russia in a War: Food, Energy, and Logistics Favor Russia

A companion analysis I conducted for The Gateway Pundit examined European versus Russian military capabilities without U.S. support, focusing on direct military hardware such as tanks, aircraft, carriers, submarines, and nuclear weapons.

It found that Russia holds decisive advantages in ground-force experience, armored production, submarine power, Arctic dominance, and tactical nuclear weapons. Europe’s theoretical hardware advantages are undermined by readiness failures, fragmented command, and a complete lack of peer-level conventional warfare experience.

Raw firepower is only part of the equation. Wars are won or lost on the ability to sustain operations over time. That means keeping weapons factories running, fuel flowing, soldiers fed, and supply lines open under fire. On every one of those dimensions, Russia’s position is stronger than Europe’s. In some cases, the gap is not even close.

European defense spending has risen sharply since 2022, but remains structurally insufficient for a peer conflict. At the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague, allies committed to investing 5 percent of GDP by 2035, with at least 3.5 percent on core defense. Commitments and current reality remain far apart, however. Sixteen European allies barely exceed the 2 percent threshold, spending between 2 and 2.1 percent of GDP in 2025, and only Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland are projected to reach 3.5 percent this year.

By contrast, Russia’s total defense spending reached RUB 6.3 percent of GDP and 32.5 percent of the federal budget.

Putin claimed in December 2025 that since February 2022, Russia increased tank production by 2.2 times, aircraft by 4.6 times, strike weapons and ammunition by 22 times, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers by 3.7 times, electronic warfare and communications equipment by 12.5 times, and rocket artillery by 9.6 times, with the defense sector now employing approximately 4.5 million people and accounting for 20 percent of all manufacturing jobs.

General Christopher Cavoli told the US Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2025 that Russia is replacing battlefield losses at an unprecedented rate due to industrial expansion and full transition to a war economy.

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Hormuz Blockade: Europe Mobilizing Against the U.S., Not the Iran Regime

When President Trump announced on Truth Social that the U.S. Navy would blockade “any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” he also instructed the Navy to interdict vessels that had paid tolls to Iran and to destroy mines Iran had placed in the waterway.

CENTCOM subsequently clarified the actual scope: the blockade applies to vessels entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas and does not affect ships transiting the strait to and from non-Iranian ports. The blockade is therefore a naval embargo on Iranian trade, not a closure of the strait to international shipping generally.

Trump took the action in response to Iran’s “world extortion.” The IRGC had imposed a de facto toll regime in the strait. The Tehran regime said that vessels would be required to submit documentation, obtain clearance codes, and accept IRGC-escorted passage through a single controlled corridor. Trump’s goal was to stop Iran from policing the strait and profiting from its closure while the rest of the world absorbed the economic damage.

Neither the U.S. nor Israel is dependent on oil transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Around the globe, the U.S. is the primary enforcer of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), maintaining freedom of navigation for all countries. Trump’s request for Europe and other allies to support U.S. freedom-of-navigation patrols in the Strait of Hormuz was rejected.

Europe’s argument was that the U.S. took action against Iran unilaterally and therefore could not expect European support. President Trump’s position is that the U.S. has spent trillions defending Europe and keeping sea lanes open around the globe for 70 years, and it was reasonable to ask for reciprocity.

Instead, Europe blames Trump for the Hormuz closure, completely ignoring the fact that it is the IRGC, not the U.S., that has closed the strait.

Their refusal to help reopen it is a classic example of cutting off your nose to spite your face, since Europe’s energy supplies are at stake, not America’s. However, anger at Trump is mobilizing Europe to form a coalition to protect the Strait from America rather than from Iran.

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With Hungary’s Orbán Gone, Europe May Escalate in Ukraine, Triggering a War Without U.S. Backing

Viktor Orbán’s concession on Sunday following Hungary’s parliamentary election removes the most consistent single-state obstacle to EU consensus on Ukraine, and in doing so raises the probability of European escalation in a conflict the continent lacks the military capacity to sustain without American backing.

Orbán conceded defeat after early results showed the opposition Tisza party on course for a two-thirds majority, with Tisza projected to win 135 of 199 seats and Fidesz taking 57. Voter turnout surpassed 77%, the highest since the fall of communism in 1989. Tisza’s leader, Péter Magyar, a former Fidesz insider who founded the party two years ago, will become prime minister.

joint EU summit communiqués on Ukraine carried an asterisk noting the position “was firmly supported by 26 heads of state or government” rather than all 27, because Orbán refused to sign any statement backing Kyiv. He vetoed a €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine, tying the bloc to a dispute over a damaged pipeline carrying Russian oil. He also blocked a 6.6 billion euro lethal aid package from the EU’s European Peace Facility, satellite image sharing with Ukraine, and EU accession talks for Kyiv.

Magyar stated Monday that Hungary would maintain its opt-out from participating in the €90 billion (approximately $100 billion) loan financially but would not veto it, allowing the EU to proceed. His personal reservations about weapons transfers and Ukraine’s EU accession bid are structurally irrelevant. Measures requiring unanimity were blocked by Orbán. Magyar will not block them. The brake is gone.

The significance of Orbán’s removal is that, without a veto blocking consensus, the EU is more likely to agree on additional weapons, money, and equipment transfers to Ukraine. That trajectory increases the probability of a Russian reaction. The question is whether European leaders have accurately calculated the risk.

European behavior suggests they have not. Countries that genuinely believe they must confront a nuclear-armed adversary, the world’s number-two military power, alone would be pushing for negotiations, not escalation.

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What a piece of 15,0000-year-old jewellery found in a Devon cave tells us about this prehistoric ‘civilization’

A piece of prehistoric jewellery, discovered in a West Country cave, is helping to shed new light on Stone Age Europe’s most spectacular culture.

Known as the Magdalenian, that 21,000 to 13,000 year old prehistoric ‘civilization’ dominated much of Western Europe, particularly southwest France, northern Spain and parts of Britain and Germany for most of the final 10,000 years of the Ice Age. A detailed scientific analysis of the British Magdalenian jewellery item, carried out at University College London and the Natural History Museum, has now revealed that it was a polished pendant made from a seal’s tooth.

It’s the first such artefact identified in Britain – and only the fourth anywhere in Europe.

The discovery adds to the substantial evidence showing that Stone Age Magdalenians were extremely fashion-conscious – and that they had a particularly strong preference for maritime-originating jewellery.

For, as well as the four seal-tooth pendants, many sites across Europe, often located far from the sea, have yielded literally thousands of marine shells, virtually all of which would have been used as personal adornments (as pendants, like the seal tooth – but also to beautify clothing and for use in necklaces, bracelets, anklets and headwear).

The scientific investigation into the British artifact (found in Kent’s Cavern, Torquay, Devon) has identified it as a premolar tooth of a grey seal, that had been polished and perforated by a Magdalenian artisan, using a handheld flint boring tool. Microscopic analysis of the wear pattern in the hole has revealed that the tooth had been worn as a pendant, suspended on some sort of cord. The wear, caused by the cord, was so substantial that the pendant appears to have been worn for many years or even decades.

Indeed, it’s conceivable that it may have been a valued heirloom, worn successively by several generations of the same family. Its value and significance to the Kent’s Cavern Magdalenian community – probably an extended family living there seasonally for many generations – is underlined by the fact that the seal tooth would have had to have initially been imported from the seashore which in Magdalenian times was between 50 and 100 miles away.

However, there would have been a direct river connection between the Kent’s Cavern area and the sea – along the river Teign’s prehistoric lower course (now submerged under the English Channel) and then along a now long-vanished major prehistoric waterway, dubbed the Channel River by archaeologists, to the Atlantic. In Magdalenian times, the Thames, the Rhine and the Seine were merely that Channel River’s major tributaries.

Even when living hundreds of miles from the sea, Magdalenian people had a strong cultural connection to it.

Via the Channel River and its many tributaries, they had an easy and direct connection to the Atlantic. They used large numbers of periwinkle, European cowrie and so-called ‘tusk’ shells as well as fossilised molluscs, sea urchin spines and sharks’ teeth to make jewellery and other adornments.

Like ordinary Atlantic seashells, these fossils must have been highly valued because they were often imported from hundreds of miles away. Shells were also imported to inland Magdalenian sites in France, Spain, Germany and Czechia from the Mediterranean. Some had travelled up to 600 miles.

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US & EU Negotiate Biometric Data-Sharing Deal

Washington wants to run European fingerprints through American databases, and the EU is considering it. The Department of Homeland Security and the European Union are in formal negotiations over an arrangement that would give DHS direct query access to biometric records held by EU member states, a level of access that Brussels has never granted to a non-EU country for border security purposes.

The deal sits inside DHS’s Enhanced Border Security Partnership program, which effectively tells Visa Waiver Program countries to open their biometric databases or risk losing visa-free travel privileges. Washington has set a December 31, 2026, deadline for EBSP agreements to be operational. After that, DHS reviews each country’s compliance. Countries that fail to meet expectations risk suspension from the VWP, which would reimpose visa requirements on their citizens.

When DHS encounters a traveler, asylum seeker, visa applicant, or anyone flagged during immigration processing, it would query a participating country’s database using that person’s biometrics.

A match returns fingerprints and related identity data to DHS.

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Battle for Hungary: How the Russiagate blueprint has been unleashed against Orban

The shadow campaign to swing the Hungarian election against Viktor Orban has escalated with the wiretapping of Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto. The case offers a rare look into how bureaucrats, journalists, and spies run a regime-change operation in real time.

Three weeks out from the April 12 elections, the political opposition to Orban scored what seemed to be a win over the weekend, when Politico and the Washington Post ran articles alleging that Szijjarto had phoned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with “live reports on what had been discussed” at multiple EU meetings. The reports cited anonymous “European security officials.”

Neither Orban nor Szijjarto make any secret of their desire to maintain cordial relations with Moscow, particularly on matters of energy security and the peace process in Ukraine. However, when bundled with more outlandish claims – that Russian “election fixers” are already embedded in Budapest, for example – the reports paint a picture of a government compromised by the Kremlin.

Orban’s leading opponent, Peter Magyar, has repeated these claims in his speeches. After the Szijjarto story broke, he accused the foreign minister of “betraying Hungarian and European interests,” and threatened him with “life imprisonment” for treason, should his Tisza party win the election.

All it took was one leaked audio file for the scheme to unravel.

The Szijjarto wiretapping plot

In an audio file released by Hungarian conservative outlet Mandiner on Monday, opposition journalist Szabolcs Panyi can be heard telling a source how he passed Szijjarto’s phone number to “a state organ of an EU country.” Once they had this number, he explained, agents of this country were able to extract “information about who that number spoke to, and they see who is calling that number or who that number is calling.”

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EU Parliament Told Continent Is ‘On Track For CIVIL WAR’

Europe’s ruling class has spent decades importing chaos under the banner of “diversity,” and now the bill is coming due in the most explosive way possible.

A major conference held inside the European Parliament has heard stark warnings that the continent is barreling toward civil war as mass migration erodes trust, creates no-go zones, and fractures societies along ethnic lines.

Professor David Betz of King’s College London cut straight to the point, telling the assembled lawmakers and experts: “Europe is on track for civil war”.

The event, titled Civil War: Europe at Risk?, was hosted by French populist-right leader Marion Maréchal and Sweden Democrats MEP Charlie Weimers. 

It also launched a new report documenting up to a thousand no-go zones across Europe based on public data including crime rates, sexual violence, youth gangs, unemployment, school performance, antisemitism, homophobia, mosque density, attacks on firefighters, and NGO presence.

Maréchal opened the conference by reflecting that formerly peaceful and stable societies are “rapidly transforming before our eyes into societies of violence and mistrust”, stating that “the main basis of trust between citizens is cultural homogeneity”, which is now fast eroding.

She warned Europe is already under a great strain of “diffuse guerrilla activity”, which takes various forms, including “riots, looting, random attacks, anti-white racism, and terrorist attacks”.

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