Tag: eu

Europe ‘wary’ of US arms dependence after unprecedented NATO spending boost

As European nations commit to their most significant military buildup in decades, growing unease is emerging over their reliance on US weapons manufacturers.

Despite depleted stockpiles due to aid to Ukraine, many European leaders are questioning the wisdom – and political cost – of deepening their dependence on US arms under the leadership of US President Donald Trump.

Trump’s recent trip to Europe underscored his push for allies to buy more US-made weapons. Yet his open admiration for Russia and controversial comments – such as threats to annex Greenland – have fueled wariness. “Buying American weapons is a security risk that we cannot run,” Danish parliamentarian Rasmus Jarlov declared earlier this year.

Canada is now considering exiting the US-led F-35 program in favor of Sweden’s Gripen fighters, Bloomberg noted on 27 June. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently said, “We should no longer send three-quarters of our defense capital spending to America.”

Meanwhile, in France, President Emmanuel Macron has spearheaded EU efforts to boost local weapons production, with the bloc fast-tracking a €150 billion ($162 billion) defense funding initiative.

Despite these efforts, the US maintains a commanding lead in key defense technologies – from missile systems to satellites – and European firms lack the capacity to meet the continent’s defense needs. 

Carlyle estimates Europe’s planned defense buildup could reach €14 trillion ($16 trillion) over the next decade when infrastructure is included, far outstripping current European capabilities.

“We have far too many systems in Europe, we have far too few units, and what we produce is often far too complicated, and therefore too expensive,” said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

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EU plans to add carbon credits to new climate goal, document shows

The European Commission is set to propose counting carbon credits bought from other countries towards the European Union’s 2040 climate target, a Commission document seen by Reuters showed.

The Commission is due to propose a legally binding EU climate target for 2040 on July 2.

The EU executive had initially planned a 90% net emissions cut, against 1990 levels, but in recent months has sought to make this goal more flexible, in response to pushback from governments including Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic, concerned about the cost.

An internal Commission summary of the upcoming proposal, seen by Reuters, said the EU would be able to use “high-quality international credits” from a U.N.-backed carbon credits market to meet 3% of the emissions cuts towards the 2040 goal.

The document said the credits would be phased in from 2036, and that additional EU legislation would later set out the origin and quality criteria that the credits must meet, and details of how they would be purchased.

The move would in effect ease the emissions cuts – and the investments required – from European industries needed to hit the 90% emissions-cutting target. For the share of the target met by credits, the EU would buy “credits” from projects that reduce CO2 emissions abroad – for example, forest restoration in Brazil – rather than reducing emissions in Europe.

Proponents say these credits are a crucial way to raise funds for CO2-cutting projects in developing nations. But recent scandals have shown some credit-generating projects did not deliver the climate benefits they claimed.

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“Drag The EU Into A Direct Conflict” – Orbán Confronts Zelensky, Tells Him EU Was Created For Peace, Not War

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is leading an effort to ensure Ukraine, which is currently at war with Russia, does not join the European Union due to the high potential for a conflict that could spread to all of Europe.

In this regard, he is now confronting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky directly on X on the issue.

“President (Zelensky), with all due respect: the European Union was founded to bring peace and prosperity to its member states. Accepting a country that is at war with Russia would immediately drag the EU into a direct conflict. It is unfair to expect any member state to take this risk,” wrote Orbán.

Orbán had responded to a post from Zelensky, in which the Ukrainian leader thanked EU leadership after a meeting, stating that they discussed, among other things, Ukraine’s ascension into the EU.

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How To Free America From EU Censorship

On January 20, 2025, the first day of his second presidential term, Donald Trump signed an executive order: “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” The bad old days of the “censorship-industrial complex,” allegedly responsible for suppressing online speech under President Joe Biden, were over.

Except they weren’t. The driving force behind online censorship had never been the U.S. government, which meant that freedom of speech could not be restored by the stroke of a president’s pen. Rather, the European Union has wielded its Digital Services Act (DSA) to restrict the speech not just of Europeans but especially of Americans and other English-speakers. The E.U. has not violated the free-speech rights of Americans, since it has no obligations under the U.S. Constitution. But it has vitiated those rights, essentially nullifying the First Amendment in cyberspace.

The DSA is not a “threat” to free speech, as some American commentators put it, implying that possible danger lies in the future. Because the DSA is in force now, all major online platforms and search engines must comply with it to remain on the E.U. market. There is effectively no free speech on the internet nowadays, at least not on the major platforms falling under the DSA’s strictest provisions, but only more or less heavily curated, algorithmically managed speech.

Some supporters of President Trump might find this hard to believe. After all, the president’s most prominent ally and advisor is Elon Musk, whose purchase of Twitter in 2022 was said to be motivated by a desire to restore free speech to the platform. But Musk has always insisted that “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach,” and there’s the rub. Using platform algorithms to restrict reach artificially is a form of censorship, one that is not only compatible with the DSA but even encouraged by the E.U.

The Trump Administration can truly restore free speech to the internet only by confronting the European Union. The administration needs to challenge the DSA, to get it repealed or at least neutered. If the E.U. refuses to back down, then the administration will need to work with Congress to pass a law ensuring that American tech companies cannot comply with the DSA by restricting Americans’ First Amendment rights.

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Green agenda is killing Europe’s ancestry

Western Europe’s new green regime reorders the continent through policies of territorial cleansing and restriction, replacing the lifeways of rooted peoples with a managed wilderness shaped by remote technocrats and mandated compliance. What arrives with the language of environmental deliverance advances as a mechanism of control, engineered to dissolve ancestral bonds.

In the soft light of the northern dawn, when the fog rests over fields once furrowed by hands and prayers, a quiet force spreads, cloaked in green, speaking in the language of “sustainability,” offered with the glow of planetary care. Across Europe, policymakers, consultants, and unelected “visionaries” enforce a grand design of regulation and restraint. The new dogma wears the trappings of salvation. It promises healing, stability, and ecological redemption. Yet beneath the surface lies a different pattern: one of compression, centralization, and engineered transformation. This green wave comes through offices aglow with LED light and carbon dashboards, distant from the oak groves and shepherd chants that once shaped Europe through destiny and devotion. Traditional Europe lived through the pulse of the land, its customs drawn from meadows, its laws mirrored in trees, its faith carried by the wind over tilled soil and cathedral towers.

The terms arrive prepackaged: “rewilding,” “net zero,” “decarbonization,” and “climate justice.” These sound pure, ringing with the cadence of science and morality. Their syllables shimmer with precision, yet behind their clarity stands an apparatus of control, drawn from abstract algorithms rather than ancestral experience. They conceal a deeper impulse: to dissolve density, to steer the population from the scattered villages of memory into the smart cities of control. The forest returns, yet the shepherd departs. The wolves are celebrated, while the farmer disappears from policy. Across the hills of France, the valleys of Italy, and the plains of Germany, the primordial cadence falls silent. Where once rose smoke from chimneys, now rise sensors tracking deer. Where once stood barns, now appear habitats for reintroduced apex predators. Rural life, the fundament of Europe’s civilizational ascent, receives accolades in speeches, even as its arteries are quietly severed.

The continent reshapes itself according to new models, conceived in simulation and consecrated in policy. Entire regions are earmarked for rewilding, which means exclusion, which means transformation through absence. The human imprint recedes, and in its place rises a curated silence: measured, observed, and sanctified by distance. The bond between man and land, established over centuries of cultivation, ritual, and kinship, gives way to managed wilderness.

Yet this wilderness unfolds without its own rhythm, shaped and maintained through remote observation and coded intention. It remains indexed and administered. Every creature bears a tracking chip. Every tree falls under statistical oversight. Drones scan the canopies. Bureaucrats speak of ecosystems the way accountants speak of balance sheets. The sacred space, once alive with sacrifice and harvest, turns into a green exhibit in the managerial museum of Europe.

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Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Blasts EU’s Digital Services Act as Gateway to Censorship and Centralized Control

While European regulators polish their halos and crank out legislation faster than Brussels can subsidize cheese, Pavel Durov is out here playing the role of a digital heretic.

In a French interview, the Telegram founder is sounding alarms over what he sees as a not-so-slow crawl toward speech control disguised as safety. The latest darling of the bureaucratic elite? The Digital Services Act is a piece of legislation that reads like it was written by a committee of risk-averse interns with a fetish for vague language and zero accountability.

Durov isn’t whispering his concerns at think tank luncheons or lobbying dinners. He’s calling it what it is: an institutional greenlight for censorship. “Once you legitimize censorship, it’s difficult to go back,” he says, which probably makes him the least popular dinner guest in Brussels since anyone asked about eurozone debt.

What makes this more than another libertarian tech rant is that Durov isn’t hypothesizing. He’s living it. Right now, he’s effectively stuck in France, being slow-roasted by criminal accusations that, according to him, are so flimsy they wouldn’t hold up in a Bluesky comment section.

“Nothing has ever been proven that shows that I am, even for a second, guilty of anything,” he insists.

One story in particular peels back the clean, professional veneer of Europe’s “rules-based” order.

Durov describes a charming little tête-à-tête with the head of France’s foreign intelligence service, the DGSE.

Over croissants and state-sponsored pressure, he was asked to delete Telegram channels tied to Romanian political activists.

He refused. Not with a polite “I’ll look into it” or some carefully lawyered dodge, but with what may be the most defiant line uttered by a CEO since Steve Jobs told IBM to get lost: “I told them I prefer to die than betray my users.”

Nothing screams “democracy in action” quite like a spy agency demanding censorship in a private meeting. At least they skipped the pretense.

Beneath the PR gloss of the Digital Services Act lies the basic truth of modern governance: power is being centralized and speech, sanitized.

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EU hits Greece with record fine over farmers subsidy fraud

The European Union has imposed a 392.2 million-euro ($451.9 million) fine on Greece over a major scandal involving the mismanagement of agricultural subsidies by a government agency between 2016 and 2022.

The bloc’s Executive Commission decided to reduce the subsidies Greece will receive in the next years by 5%, it said on Friday, reflecting the view that there has been no proper supervision and operation of the subsidy management model for years.

Greece expected to receive about 1.9 billion euros in direct EU subsidies next year.

The fine comes months after European prosecutors charged dozens of Greek livestock farmers who received EU financial aid through the Greek government paying agency OPEKEPE with making false declarations of ownership or leasing of pastureland.

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Europe’s risky war on Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’

The European Union’s latest moves (as part of its 17th package of sanctions against Russia declared in May) to target much more intensively Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” of oil tankers and other vessels illustrate the danger that, as long as the Ukraine war continues, so will the risk of an incident that will draw NATO and the EU into a direct military clash with Russia.

The EU sanctions involve bans on access to the ports, national waters and maritime economic zones of EU states. Ships that enter these waters risk seizure and confiscation. It does not appear that Washington was consulted about this decision, despite the obvious risks to the U.S.

As part of this strategy, on May 15, an Estonian patrol boat attempted to stop and inspect a tanker in the Gulf of Finland. Russia sent up a fighter jet that flew over the Estonian vessel (allegedly briefly trespassing into Estonian waters), and the Estonians backed off — this time. In January, the German navy seized a Panamanian-flagged tanker, the Eventin, in the Baltic after its engines failed and it drifted into German territorial waters.

Sweden has now announced that starting on July 1 its navy will stop, inspect and potentially seize all suspect vessels transiting its exclusive economic zone, and is deploying the Swedish air force to back up this threat. Since the combined maritime economic zones of Sweden and the three Baltic states cover the whole of the central Baltic Sea, this amounts to a virtual threat to cut off all Russian trade exiting Russia via the Baltic — which would indeed be a very serious economic blow to Moscow.

It would also threaten to cut off Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad, which is surrounded by Poland, from access to Russia by sea.

This is the kind of action that has traditionally led to war. The Swedish assumption seems to be that the Russian navy and air force in the Baltic are now so weak — and so surrounded by NATO territory — that there is nothing Moscow can do about this. However, it is very unlikely that the Swedes would take this step unless they also believe that in the event of a clash, Washington will come to Sweden’s defense — even though the EU and Swedish decisions were made without U.S. approval and are not strictly covered by NATO’s Article 5 commitment.

And despite all the hysterical language about Russia being “at war” with NATO countries, these moves by the EU and Sweden are also based on an assumption that Russia will not in fact lose its temper and react with military force. European policymakers might however want to think about a number of things: for example, what would the U.S. do if ships carrying U.S. cargo were intercepted by foreign warships? We know perfectly well that the U.S. would blow the warships concerned out of the water and declare that it had done so in defense of the sacred rule of free navigation — in which the EU also professes to believe.

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Europe’s Populist Parties Keep Gaining Ground, But Cannot Get Into Power

Across the European continent, despite gaining considerable proportions of the vote, populist parties are increasingly being frozen out of governing in coalitions by political opponents who regard them as extremist.

Proponents of the tactic known as a “cordon sanitaire” or “firewall” say it’s not an attack on democracy but a defense of it. But one war expert said the tactic will only arouse anger in voters and that “there is no potential for peaceful political change.”

Coalitions are part and parcel of political life in many European countries.

But the cordon sanitaire, a measure normally directed at keeping out fringe outliers, is now being used to keep out parties that are gaining majority-level support.

Such parties include the Alternative for Germany, France’s National Rally, Austria’s Freedom Party, Spain’s Vox, and the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom.

They all deny being “far-right” as they are often dubbed by media, opponents, or academics, but their political opponents regard them as beyond the pale and have formed coalitions on the promise of shutting them out of governance.

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Professor Of War Warns Many European Countries Are In A ‘Pre-Civil-War’ State

One of the globe’s leading experts on war has warned that many European countries are on the verge of civil war and may already be past the point of no return.

David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London, says his research shows is a statistically significant chance of a civil war breaking out within five years in a major European country, with a distinct possibility that the conflict could spill over to neighbouring Nations.

Speaking to documentarian Andrew Gold, Betz further noted that it is likely too late to prevent things getting “very much worse” in Europe, and that governments may only be able to better prepare for the inevitable.

“I would probably avoid big cities. I would suggest you reduce your exposure to big cities if you are able,” Betz chillingly urged.

He added, “there isn’t anything they can do, it’s baked in. We’re already past the tipping point, is my estimation… we are past the point at which there is a political offramp. We are past the point at which normal politics is able to solve the problem.”

Betz emphasised that “almost every plausible way forward from here involves some kind of violence in my view.”

“Anything the government tries to do at this point… you can solve one kind of problem, but it will aggravate another kind of problem in doing so, and you get back to violence,” the professor continued.

“The question really is about mitigating the costs, to my mind, not about preventing the outcome, I’m sorry to say… I have not heard a credible political way forward and I don’t see a single political figure who is credible in the role of national saviour, or even inclined to do so,” he added.

“The bottom line is I don’t think there is now a political solution to this which takes the form of everything just working out OK after some period of difficulty,” Betz grimly concludes, noting “Things are bad now, but they are going to get very much worse.”

“Hopefully after they will get better, but you will have to go through the period of very much worse before you get there,” he predicted.

It’s a downward spiral, essentially.

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