Europe

The Prime Minister has long said that he would like to grow the population of Hungary without bringing in immigrants. In recent years, however, not only has the number of births fallen, but the number of people leaving the country has also soared. According to a comprehensive data analysis by Direkt36, many young people left as well, which poses huge risks for the country.

• Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is one of Russia’s allies in Europe. He claims that the EU is helping Ukraine at the expense of European interests and that Hungary will not quit Russian oil and gas. Experts and the press suspect that the Russian authorities have given Orban’s inner circle the opportunity to earn hundreds of millions of dollars from energy commodities trading.
• At the center of attention is the mysterious trader of Russian oil, Normeston Trading, which in 2009 got half of a gas trader created by Hungary’s largest oil and gas company, MOL, and then transferred its stake to Orban’s friends and their partners.
• Normeston Trading itself, on the Hungarian side, is co-owned by people affiliated with Orban’s friends. For years, the press and experts have tried to understand how Normeston could be connected to Russia’s top political circles.
• IStories found out that the former Russian owner of Normeston — race car driver Lev Tolkachev — was also a business partner of Gennady Timchenko’s top-managers. Vladimir Putin's close friend Timtchenko was the biggest Russian oil trader before 2014 sanctions. One of his former managers, Aleksandr Zhuravlev, still sits on the boards of some companies in the Normeston group together with the race car driver.
• In 2017 and 2018, Cyprus-based Normeston Trading was “under common control” with the Russian company of the race car driver, which was half-owned by another Timchenko top manager — Sergey Gzhelyak. In Cyprus, “common control” means that the companies are owned or their finances are controlled by the same parties.
• After the race car driver, the Russian businessman Valery Subbotin became a co-owner of Normeston. Subbotin is a former vice president of Lukoil, who fled from Russia in 2016 and settled in Europe, but established business ties with Putin’s friends and the entourage of former pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Fawning for Trump’s favor, European leaders are ramping up military spending at the expense of public benefits.

European Union member states led by France and Germany are walking back on their commitment to protect human rights and the environment in global supply chains, Human Rights Watch said today. On June 23, 2025, member states agreed on a European Council position that, if it becomes law, would hollow out an EU directive on protecting rights in supply chains.

The directive, known as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), was designed to protect victims of human rights abuses as well as the environment while creating a level playing field for companies. It marked an important shift from voluntary standards to holding companies legally accountable for human rights and environmental abuses in their entire supply chain. It entered into force in July 2024 as part of the European Green Deal, the EU Commission’s flagship project to make the EU more sustainable and climate neutral by 2050.

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The student protests in Serbia have persisted for seven months, yielding widespread and diverse effects. All state universities are still blocked and primary and secondary school teachers ceased work from January to April 2025. Lawyers went on strike throughout the whole of February, while farmers and university professors have also voiced their support. Roads have been blocked and students have organized marches not only across many parts of the country but also to EU institutions in Brussels and Strasbourg. Notably, national minorities reported feeling equal to Serbian citizens for the first time.

However, the most significant outcome of the student protests has been the substantial delegitimization of Aleksandar Vučić’s populist Serbian Progressive Party (SPP) government. After half a year of struggles, it has become clear that the government’s legitimacy is not only questionable but non-existent.

Yet the SPP remains in power and appears to be growing more repressive. The government has illegally cut the salaries of university professors who support the students. Without evidence, it has accused and imprisoned six opposition activists, including students. At the largest peaceful protest held in Belgrade on 15 March, the government used a non-lethal weapon, the ‘sound cannon’, against them.

Oppression is known to increase proportionally with declining legitimacy, but the question of what it means to govern without legitimacy remains unaddressed. The problem that this question raises is the reality of power without legitimacy – the violence under which all institutions of democratic society and political communities as we know them are currently being dismantled.

Asmat Shanava, owner of the Pirosmani restaurant in Karlovy Vary, is an indispensable figure for both Russian organized crime and the Russian state. She works as an intermediary, securing payments, setting up companies, and coordinating meetings. She arrived in Karlovy Vary with her husband in the late 1990s. He died shortly afterwards. However, Asmat Shanava stayed and expanded her connections to include the mayor of Karlovy Vary. Russian citizen Alexandr Franchetti also contacted her for help. Franchetti was arrested in Prague in 2021 on suspicion of forming an armed group during the annexation of Crimea, he urgently sought someone to pay his lawyers for his defense.

Ukrainian scientists confirmed that after the Russian oil spill in the Kerch Strait, all Black Sea countries have found themselves in a risk zone. For some, these are oil spills, for others – birds in fuel oil or fish and water, polluted with toxins. But pollution affected all the coasts.

Several days later, oil clots and dead fish were found in almost all the Black Sea countries, but it turned out to be complicated to prove that these were the consequences of the spill of that very Russian oil. Yet, Ukrainian scientists developed a model to forecast the movement of oil in the sea and proved this fact. They also forecast that the swimming season will not pass without surprises – oil that went to the bottom in the cold season rises to the surface in summer.

The “James Bond-like” Russian Duma politician Leonid Slutsky and his Russian Peace Foundation helped arrange the Moscow visit of David Lindtner, a close ally to and advisor of Robert Fico, our investigation has found. Slutsky and his foundation have close ties to the GRU—and routinely pass information about their guests to the agency’s European espionage department.