Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.02-040204/https://www.ft.com/content/e0448bb9-8b75-441f-9cfa-28cd0846fe63

Ever since fleeing her Russian-occupied hometown of Melitopol three years ago, Kateryna has longed for a chance to return and see her mother again. 

But watching the Trump administration in America’s negotiations with Russia over how to end the war in Ukraine, the young schoolteacher has found herself rapidly losing hope.

“We can see that the question of the occupied territories is not even on the table,” Kateryna said. “So the outlook by this point is already pretty clear. We’re not going to see our parents any time soon.”

Kateryna is among hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who fled from the country’s south after Russian troops seized large areas in early 2022 and imposed their rule on the population through a campaign of violence and forced assimilation.

She left believing her departure would be temporary. Her parents stayed in Melitopol. “Then two weeks turned into three years,” she said. Now she fears she will never see them again.

The European Commission has charged the largest online platform providers in the EU a total of €58.2 million in supervisory fees last year, it disclosed in a report to the European Parliament and member states published on Monday.

The fees – charged to the largest online platforms with more than 45 million users per month – are meant to cover the Digital Services Act (DSA) enforcement activities of the Commission in 2025, as well as human resources and administration costs, the EU executive said. 

The fee for each individual platform may not be greater than 0.05% of the service provider’s worldwide profit in the preceding financial year.

Three online platforms – Meta, TikTok and Google – have together filed five court cases against the supervisory fees on their platforms, all of which are still pending.

If people insist that most things on the internet must remain ‘free’, the mechanisms that allow that to happen must continue too. 

Invariably that means more advertising alongside diminishing privacy, at least for those lucky enough to still have any left. Yet life could still be a lot worse, oddly enough by restrictions on advertising designed to hurt certain platforms while ensuring people are unable to profit from them.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.02-053327/https://www.reuters.com/world/us-officials-object-european-push-buy-weapons-locally-2025-04-02/

The Trump administration - like previous administrations - has pushed for European purchasesof U.S. weapons before, including at this year's Munich Security Conference. Some of the sources consider the recent messages from Washington as a continuation of U.S. policy.

Still, several sources said the U.S. emphasis on the matter has intensified in recent weeks as the EU has moved more decisively to decouple its weapons procurement.

"They are upset about ReArm proposal and that the U.S. is excluded," said one senior European source.

This rule has frequently been broken in the past, and is still being breached, according to the sources.

Since the boundaries between what constitutes work "necessary and directly linked" to the role of MEP, and what does not, are not crystal clear, “local assistants” often perform duties that are not strictly related to the MEP’s activity in the Parliament. 

“Some MEPs employ local politicians doing political activity in their constituency,” said one source in the Parliament, speaking freely on the basis of anonymity. “Then their calls and meetings are twisted to be reported as related, in one way or another, to the MEP’s parliamentary mandate," this source added.

Sometimes, this practice is revealed and has resulted in several episodes of embezzlement and misuse of funds in the last years.

Finland will begin the process of withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines and significantly increase defence spending over the next four years.

Prime Minister Petteri Orpo announced the decision at a government press conference on Tuesday. The move would reverse Finland’s 2012 accession to the international treaty and allow the return of landmines to national defence planning.

A framework agreement signed during King Frederik X's first state visit to France foresees 'the supply of 250 to 1,000 Mistral 3 missiles,' the Elysée said on Tuesday. This comes against a backdrop of America's push for Greenland, a Danish territory.

The US Army is investigating what happened.

The statement did not specify where the final soldier's body was found. The team had been working near the border with Belarus.

The M88A2 Hercules, one of the largest military vehicles used by the US Armed Forces, is designed to recover damaged tanks and other vehicles from battlefields.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.01-162021/https://www.ft.com/content/bd31d85a-7ccf-4598-9c01-bf0727f1398c

The EU antitrust watchdog has fined 15 large car manufacturers and the European Automobiles Manufacturers’ Association a total of €458mn for their role in a long-lasting cartel involving vehicle recycling.

Mercedes-Benz, which also participated, avoided a fine because it first alerted European regulators to the cartel in 2019.

Other companies involved included Volkswagen, Renault, Stellantis, BMW, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar Land Rover, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Opel and Volvo Cars, alongside the ACEA. All the companies admitted taking part and settled with the European Commission.

The UK government said Tuesday that anyone working in Britain for the Russian state will have to register on a new list launching in July or face jail.

Security minister Dan Jarvis told parliament that Russia would be subject to the most stringent restrictions of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (Firs).

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.01-121414/https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/trump-wants-nato-to-spend-more-europe-pitches-redefining-defense-to-get-there-d99fa2a3

People familiar with the discussions say one option under initial consideration is to include national spending to improve a country’s resilience to attacks on vital infrastructure, or hybrid attacks that aim to undermine public opinion and trust in democratic institutions.

Another possibility is letting countries include investments that are vital to military operations, such as transportation infrastructure that militaries rely on. NATO includes some military infrastructure in its spending total, but not civilian infrastructure that might be used by militaries in wartime.

Archive: none required

Some organisms mutate radically in order to survive. The current National Rally (RN), for example, a political entity founded 56 years ago as the National Front by former members of the SS, a handful of anti-Semitic collaborators and former OAS terrorists — the organization opposed to the French exit from Algeria that tried to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle — is today a mainstream political party. But the road to so-called normalization has been plagued by resignations and in-fighting. After denying its origins, expelling its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and rebranding itself as pro-Israel, the party could now complete its transformation by eliminating the Le Pen name from its ranks.

The far-right party suffered its biggest blow to date on March 31 when its leader, Marine Le Pen, was sentenced to four years in prison — with two of those years suspended and two to be served outside jail with an electronic bracelet — and a five-year ban on running for election. Should the appeals she will file fail or be resolved too late, Le Pen will be out of the 2027 electoral race, just when she was closest to achieving the long-held family dream of moving into the Élysée Palace.

In the event, the figure of Jordan Bardella, 29, her protégé and president of the RN, will be propelled to the fore, a radical change for a party based largely on family ties, whether blood or sentimental. “We are a political party and to nominate a candidate there has to be a congress. But if Marine has chosen him, he can’t be left in the gutter in case he has to run,” Louis Aliot, vice president of the party and ex-partner of Le Pen, told EL PAÍS after being convicted along with Le Pen.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.01-101737/https://www.ft.com/content/19ee5f60-106c-4dd9-a55d-f7e4d36861b5

Ursula von der Leyen told the European parliament on Tuesday that the bloc was prepared to hit services exports including those from Big Tech companies if US President Donald Trump imposed “reciprocal tariffs” on all imports into the US.

Brussels would negotiate “from a position of strength”, she said. “Europe holds a lot of cards. From trade to technology to the size of our market. But this strength is also built on our readiness to take firm countermeasures. All instruments are on the table,” she said. 

The EU has the ability to hit services exports, where the US has a surplus. That could include suspending some intellectual property rights and excluding companies from public procurement contracts under its Enforcement Regulation.

A further escalation would be to use the “anti-coercion” instrument for the first time. This allows even tougher action on intellectual property and public procurement. The bloc could reduce access by US financial services companies to its market.

Poland has signed an intergovernmental agreement with the United States, worth almost $2 billion (7.7 billion zloty), that will see the US provide logistical support and training for the Patriot air defence systems protecting Polish skies.

“Poland is a model NATO ally and a leader in advanced air and missile defense,” said US chargé d’affaires Daniel Lawton at a signing ceremony in the military base in Sochaczewo, attended by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

“We are proud to celebrate another step in US-Polish defense cooperation – strengthening NATO’s eastern flank and deepening our strategic partnership,” added Lawton.

As Ukrainian cities are bombed almost nightly by Russia, the idea of holding elections here might seem fanciful.

But in the streets and offices of the capital, Kyiv, the prospect of the country going to the polls is once again being discussed.

Election rumours have come and gone in the three long years of Russia's full-scale war.

Each time they have been dismissed by government, opposition and public alike, arguing unity of effort against the Russian invader must come first.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.01-032202/https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/le-pen-verdict-fuels-claims-that-europes-elites-are-colluding-against-populists-c08493e2

The case of Le Pen still raises thorny questions for democracies: Should the rule of law apply always, or only most of the time? And when it comes to politicians, how can we trust the law is being applied without political considerations? 

For many, the debate boils down to whether one trusts the democratic institutions such as courts and regulators taking those decisions. In many cases, they are trustworthy; in other cases, they might be less reliable. 

The disqualification of Le Pen risks deepening the polarization of France’s electorate, divided between urbanites who are broadly supportive of institutions such the judiciary and rural, working-class voters who see Le Pen as a change agent.

Those voters mistrust institutions. That narrative gathered steam after last summer’s snap parliamentary elections, when disparate parties—ranging from President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-business ranks to the far-left France Unbowed—cooperated to keep Le Pen’s candidates from winning seats by withdrawing underperforming candidates from individual races so that voters could coalesce behind a single candidate opposed to Le Pen.