Category: Politico News

The EU will “walk side-by-side” with Ukraine as it marches toward membership in the bloc, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola pledged before Ukraine’s parliament on Thursday. Appearing via video link before the Rada, Metsola marked Ukraine’s first “Statehood Day” — a public holiday inaugurated last year to commemorate 30 years of independence from the Soviet […]

A group of Turkish football fans chanted Vladimir Putin name during Wednesday night’s game between Istanbul’s Fenerbahçe club and Dynamo Kyiv, prompting Ukrainian officials to react. Fenerbahçe fans shouted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s name after Dynamo Kyiv scored during the Champions League qualification game. Kyiv defeated the Turkish team 2 to 1 to make it […]

A trip to Crimea by Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib when she was still working as a journalist is putting a strain on relations between Brussels and Kyiv, just two weeks after she was appointed to lead Belgium’s diplomacy. Lahbib traveled to Crimea in July 2021 to shoot a documentary. She later told Belgian media […]

Far-right leader Giorgia Meloni moved a step closer to becoming Italy’s next prime minister on Wednesday, after her rightwing coalition struck a deal that will see the party with the biggest share of the vote in the coming election get the top job. A right-wing alliance made up of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi’s […]

ROME — The European Central Bank may refrain from another robust interest rate increase at its next meeting amid the tepid growth outlook in the eurozone, Governing Council member Ignazio Visco has hinted. In an interview with POLITICO, Visco dampened hawkish hopes of another 50-basis-point (0.5 percent) hike in September, following the ECB’s first rate […]

Kyiv is banking on the British government to calm sea captains’ fears about navigating the heavily-mined waters of the Black Sea, as efforts get underway to implement a deal to assuage a global food crisis. Under the deal brokered Friday with the United Nations and Turkey, Moscow committed not to attack merchant vessels exporting grain […]

LONDON — Who’s the toughest on Beijing? That’s one of the central questions animating the contest to pick the next U.K. prime minister, as Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, and Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor, fall over one other to convince Conservative Party members they are true China hawks. It’s a contest in which Truss, […]

Russia’s overtures in Africa have left European officials anxious about the EU’s cautious pace to re-engage the Ethiopian government, despite accusations of war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was once a darling of the West and hailed as a reformer, even winning the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, but has been more […]

BERLIN — It’s a hot candidate for the German word of the year — and increasingly a synonym for the problems surrounding Berlin’s military support for Ukraine: “Ringtausch.” Unlike its literal meaning — the exchange of rings at a wedding — the word has come to encompass the tank-swap scheme German Chancellor Olaf Scholz proposed […]

Jonas Parello-Plesner is executive director of the Alliance of Democracies Foundation and a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.   Being the neighbor of an authoritarian regime is dangerous. And Russia’s war in Ukraine has destroyed the last remnants of naivete about the threat posed by dictators like President Vladimir Putin.  Still, despite […]