Month: August 2022

The EU is opening a new liaison office in California’s Silicon Valley to ease communication with US tech companies, as new laws are set to come into effect that will increase regulatory scrutiny of companies like Apple, Goole and Meta in Europe. The EU’s executive branch and the European Commission will jointly run the new […]

Russian oil flows via the Druzhba pipeline through Ukraine to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia stopped last Thursday, the countries said Tuesday. Russian firm Transneft blamed Ukraine and EU sanctions for the outage, saying Ukraine had returned its July gas transit-fee citing European restrictions. The EU is phasing out Russian oil purchases by the […]

Turkey has resumed gas exploration in the Eastern Mediterranean, in an area criss-crossed by competing Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot territorial claims. But its drillship, the Abdullhamid Han, which sailed Tuesday, will stay in Turkish-only waters, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said. “The survey and drilling work we are conducting in the Mediterranean are within our sovereign […]

An EU accord to reduce gas consumption by 15 percent from August to March next year due to Russia-war linked cut-offs entered into force Tuesday, with Germany saying the move could also help stabilise prices. “If all countries in Europe save gas, this can stabilise the price so to speak, maybe even reduce it,” the […]

A dispute between Lithuania and Russia over freight-rail transit to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad risks flaring up again, after the Kaliningrad governor said EU-agreed quotas of some 500,000 tonnes/year of goods allowed to be moved despite Russia sanctions had already been reached. “We’ve already exhausted the limits set by Europeans for the transportation of […]

Russia’s war in Ukraine is to cost Germany’s economy some €260bn by 2030 according to a study by the Institute for Employment Research. Its GDP will fall by 1.7 percent by next year, putting 240,000 Germans out of work, due to high energy prices, which will hurt the chemicals and metals industries, it noted. Inflation […]

Finnish and Estonian leaders want EU countries to stop issuing tourist visas to Russian citizens in protest at the war against Ukraine.

Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou said an investigation was needed into the wiretapping scandal of a political opponent of Greece’s prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. In a statement, Sakellaropoulou said that the right to privacy was a fundamental condition of a democratic and liberal society. “It requires the immediate and full clarification of the wiretapping case,” she […]

The EU Commission says Poland still needs to enact judicial reforms in order to unlock €35bn in Covid-19 recovery money, despite threats by Warsaw.