Europe

Archive: https://archive.ph/2025.07.27-200519/https://www.ft.com/content/85d57e0e-0c6f-4392-a68c-81866e1519c3

https://archive.ph/59LGG

Trump spent the night at his family-owned Turnberry golf resort on a private visit, but took time to criticise European leaders over wind turbines and immigration claiming there won’t be a Europe unless they “get their act together”.

“I say two things to Europe. Stop the windmills. You’re ruining your countries. I really mean it, it’s so sad. You fly over and you see these windmills all over the place, ruining your beautiful fields and valleys and killing your birds,” he said.

“On immigration, you better get your act together,” he said. “You’re not going to have Europe anymore.”

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/3732125

Archived

Russian propagandists are flooding the internet with fake claims targeting the Eastern European country of Moldova, which has a population of 2.5 million, in a concerted effort to discredit its pro-European Union government ahead of upcoming parliamentary elections.

Promoting claims including that Moldovan President Maia Sandu embezzled $24 million and that she is addicted to “psychotropic drugs,” one Russian campaign alone targeted Moldova with 39 fabricated stories in just three months, compared to zero in the entire previous year, NewsGuard found.

The 39 false claims were spread by a Russian influence operation known as Matryoshka, named after the Russian nesting dolls, which has previously targeted the U.S. 2024 presidential election, the February 2025 German elections, and Ukraine. The false Moldova narratives identified by NewsGuard from mid-April to mid-July 2025 took the form of fabricated video news reports and articles that mimicked 23 legitimate media outlets, including the BBC, The Economist, Fox News, Euronews, and Vogue. Collectively, they gained nearly 2 million views on Telegram.

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The false narratives are spread in Romanian, which is the majority language in Moldova, in Russian, which is regularly spoken by about 20 percent of the population, and in English.

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In a related finding about Matryoshka taking aim at Sandu, Finnish software company CheckFirst and international non-profit Reset Tech said in a June 2025 report that during May, the Moldovan president was targeted far more than Russia’s arch enemy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and French President Emmanuel Macron, Ukraine’s most ardent advocate in Europe. CheckFirst’s analysis found that the emails they received from Matryoshka in May mentioned Sandu 75 times, compared to 28 mentions of Macron and 22 mentions of Zelensky.

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Among the false narratives aimed at Sandu’s government, one of the most viral attacked her legitimacy as president, claiming she won the presidential election by rigging absentee votes. The claim followed a well–trodden Matryoshka path. It first appeared in late May 2025 on a pro-Kremlin Telegram channel that shared a video falsely bearing the BBC logo to claim that 42 percent of absentee ballots in Moldova’s November 2024 presidential election were cast fraudulently using the identities of dead people.

The video attributed the claim to Bellingcat and quoted Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins as stating, “This information will be very revealing for citizens of Moldova, who should take note of it and take action.” The video was entirely fabricated, Higgins told NewsGuard, and the claim is baseless.

The fabricated video was then amplified in late May 2025 across social media, including Instagram, Telegram, Facebook and X. By early June, the false claim was picked up by the Pravda network, which published four articles repeating the claim in English and Romanian.

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[Edit typo.]

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/34703712

This cautious approach is necessary to protect sensitive information and prevent foreign influence in research, Universities explained [according to Danish broadcaster DR].

Aarhus University is the one for which the Danish broadcaster managed to get the most information. Here, in 2025 alone, 24 research applications have been rejected for security reasons. According to DR’s story, the university now automatically subjects candidates from China, Russia, and Iran to rigorous background checks.

Whenever Aarhus University receives an application from one of these countries, it triggers a thorough investigation into the candidate’s background. The university examines their previous research collaborators, institutions, and research fields to assess any risk of exposure to foreign pressure or espionage attempts. The goal is to prevent sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.

Brian Vinter, pro-dean of the technical faculty at Aarhus University, explained to DR that these rejections are not due to poor qualifications but because the candidates are deemed potential security risks. “They are rejected based on the possibility they could be pressured by their home countries to leak information,” he said.

A very cautious approach, that’s for sure, which may exclude skilled applicants — profiles the country is otherwise extremely interested in — but on the other hand, it seems necessary to protect Denmark’s interests and the university’s employees from foreign coercion.

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Aarhus University has hired five specialists fluent in Russian, Chinese, and Persian solely to evaluate applicants. According to the DR story, the university plans to expand security measures to include physical protection of facilities, new travel policies, and issuing specially secured devices to staff traveling to risk countries.

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The drug is expected to be formally approved by the European Commission this year.

Archive: https://archive.ph/2025.07.25-191407/https://www.ft.com/content/d8c2bb18-b62a-47af-8ede-984d75ab1acc

The UK government’s ban on Palestine Action is at odds with international law, according to the UN human rights chief.

Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said on Friday that the UK’s decision to proscribe the campaign group as a terrorist organisation was “disproportionate and unnecessary” and called for the designation to be rescinded.

He said: “UK domestic counter-terrorism legislation defines terrorist acts broadly to include ‘serious damage to property’. "But, according to international standards, terrorist acts should be confined to criminal acts intended to cause death or serious injury or to the taking of hostages, for purpose of intimidating a population or to compel a government to take a certain action or not.

“It misuses the gravity and impact of terrorism to expand it beyond those clear boundaries, to encompass further conduct that is already criminal under the law.”

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/3720302

Archived version

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“Ideological attacks against the LGBT community and the gender question in general are not specific to Hungary or Russia. This is a global movement — a political, radical, conservative movement,” says Zsuzsanna Szelényi, program director of the CEU Democracy Institute Leadership Academy and author of Tainted Democracy: [Hungary PM] Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary.

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In 2011-2012, after Vladimir Putin announced that he would be running for a third presidential term, Moscow saw its largest protest wave since before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In response to the Bolotnaya movement, the Russian authorities decided to curb the opposition's traction at any cost, launching a brutal crackdown on political events while arresting — and even assassinating — key opponents. The symbolic prosecution of participants in the Bolotnaya protests demonstrated to would-be demonstrators that no one who took to the streets in opposition to Putin was immune to prosecution — not even those who did so peacefully. Could Orbán, who closely studies and borrows from the experience of his “big brother,” follow the same path? Experts interviewed by The Insider believe this is unlikely to happen.

And the first consequences of the Pride march seem to confirm this. On July 3, the first administrative case was opened against a Pride participant — a young activist named Lili Pankotai. However, by July 9, the case was dropped, and the police officially announced they would not prosecute Pride participants.

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Archive: https://archive.ph/2025.07.25-152009/https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown-starlink-satellite-service-ukraine-retook-territory-russia-2025-07-25/

The German car manufacturer Volkswagen has said Donald Trump’s US import tariffs have cost it more than £1bn in the first half of the year.

Volkswagen said it had made strong progress realigning the company, which is considering cutting 35,000 jobs by 2030, but that it had suffered a €1.3bn (£1.13bn) “decline in operating result primarily due to high costs from increased US import tariffs”.

The company has also reduced its profit margin range to be between 4% and 5% for the year, based on an assumption that tariffs of between 10%, at best, and the current 27.5%, at worst, will be made permanent by the US president.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/3716282

Archived version

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The ongoing Russian occupation of Ukrainian regions raises concerns about Russia’s strategy to socially and culturally integrate the population in the occupied territories. The DFRLab and OpenMinds recently published a report, Digital occupation: Pro-Russian bot networks target Ukraine’s occupied territories on Telegram, which examines how integration is promoted and supported by Telegram bot comments that manufacture public acceptance of Russia and the occupation, while seeking to create distrust towards the Ukrainian government.

Similar behavior is also unfolding on other platforms, albeit tailored to each platform’s infrastructure. On TikTok, for instance, pro-Russian actors capitalize on the platform’s audiovisual features. Videos that pan through allegedly rebuilt cities in occupied eastern and southern Ukraine rely on the power of visual persuasion—after all, seeing is believing. TikTok’s preference for direct-to-camera influencer-style content has also been repurposed to promote Russian narratives. In 2024, an organization tied to the Kremlin, the Donbass Mediacenter, launched a specialized school for bloggers, specifically targeting influencers operating in the occupied territories. These schools help new creators develop skills to establish an audience while ensuring their content reflects the Kremlin’s messaging on key topics. The practice of using influencers local to the occupied territories to reach a more niche audience is not new; Russia has used Instagram and YouTube to advertise the alleged benefits of life in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic since the initial occupation in 2014.

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Following the Russian army’s occupation of [the Ukrainian city of] Mariupol and the establishment of an occupation administration, an ecosystem of influencers emerged in the city. Their videos promote the idea that the city is undergoing a successful renovation, that the quality of life is significantly higher than it was under Ukrainian management, and that the Russian government and the newly established local administrations are responsible for this improvement.

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Ukrainian and Western media outlets have reported on the reconstruction efforts [in Mariupol], noting that much of the city remains in ruins, but any messaging disparaging Russia is seen as suspicious by those with pro-Russian tendencies. Even among those who support Ukraine, anonymized witness testimonies can carry less evidentiary weight than satellite images or video documentation. Providing a systematic account of the current state of infrastructure in Mariupol, featuring ample evidence and unbiased assessment, is currently not possible, as even if international organizations were allowed into the city.

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Occasionally, other accounts on TikTok showcase parts of the city not typically featured in propagandist content, painting a picture of destruction and a lack of progress in reconstruction. These accounts, however, are few and far between, due to a fear of surveillance and punishment.

At times, however, even the propagandist accounts and videos contradict themselves, accidentally showing damaged and abandoned buildings in the background while showcasing the newest public square.

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Russia, through its complex system of control over the information environment in the occupied territories, which includes local micro influencers, actively makes use of this environment of uncertainty, promoting the publication of multiple videos showing the image of Mariupol it wishes to be out there in the world and capitalizing on the fact that these are some of the only photos and videos available to the average user. Additionally, this content crowds out any videos showing the less curated parts of town, which are not yet reconstructed or have been entirely abandoned due to excessive damage. For those already skeptical of the Ukrainian government or sympathetic to Russia, such content may solidify existing biases. For more neutral observers, it could introduce the initial seed of skepticism.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/3715609

Archived

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A current paid ad campaign running across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube portrays [Hungarian opposition politician Péter] Magyar and [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky as garbage to be thrown away. The same imagery now covers public spaces across Hungary—hundreds of posters featuring the two politicians holding Ukrainian flags, a clear attempt to discredit Magyar by associating him with support for Ukraine, which Orbán allies portray as shameful.

While the exact cost of the street campaign is unknown, even the most conservative estimates suggest it exceeds hundreds of thousands of euros. At minimum market prices, a national campaign using 500 billboards and 1,000 so-called citylight posters would cost around HUF 107.5 million (€270,000).

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March 2025, a Facebook page called Aktuális started running ad campaigns attacking both Ukraine and Péter Magyar. The page and brand were already active during the 2022 elections. Back then, Aktuális Media Non-Profit Ltd., founded by another pro-government media pundit, ran a similar wave of ads funded by unknown sources—then dissolved the company just before the election.

After a years-long hiatus, Aktuális returned with headlines like:

• “Péter Magyar and his allies aren’t just applauding the war—they’d send weapons.”
• “TISZA would admit Ukraine to the EU! Is that okay with you?”

In March 2025 alone, Aktuális spent HUF 14.8 million (€37,100) on Meta ads. In April and May, this more than doubled to HUF 31.8 million (€77,700), followed by a smaller June campaign of HUF 3.3 million (€8,270).

Who funds these ads remains a mystery. In Meta’s Ad Library, the sponsor is simply listed as “Aktuális”—despite the fact that the registered company no longer exists. Nearly all of the 2022 ads from Aktuális were eventually removed by Meta for violating policies on political advertising. Most likely, they breached rules against false representations of individuals or failed to disclose funding sources. But by the time they were taken down, the ads had already reached millions of users—and Meta had pocketed the ad revenue.

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According to company registry data obtained by Átlátszó, the other company running similar ads, Resistance Movement Non-Profit Ltd. was founded in 2024 and is solely owned by Bence Apáti, a pro-government media personality. Its registered address is a Budapest law firm’s office once owned by current Minister of Justice Bence Tuzson. According to the documents, Apáti can use the law firm’s office rent-free.

In its most recent financial report, the company posted a balance sheet total of HUF 22.45 million (€56,300) and a net profit of HUF 19.4 million (€48,640). The source of this revenue is not identified—and now, the company has somehow gained access to significantly more funds.

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Initially, the company [Resistance Movement Ltd. ] tried to hide its spending by categorizing its ads as “business ads,” which don’t fall under Google’s political ad transparency rules. The classification was later corrected, revealing the real figures. But delayed enforcement means the rules have little practical effect: by the time action is taken, the damage is done.

Even repeat violations carry no real consequences. Despite having hundreds of ads removed for policy breaches, the Aktuális page continues to run similar campaigns unhindered.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/3713310

Archived

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Given the Western Balkans’ complex socio-political structure, the EU’s ongoing dilemma of stability vs democratisation has consistently favored the former. This trade-off has enabled [President Aleksander] Vučić to consolidate his power while fostering a form of ‘stabilitocracy’.

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Despite pouring an enormous amount of money into Serbia, the EU has lacked a coherent strategy to transform its support into political influence, failing to break Belgrade’s long-lasting ties with Moscow. This gave Russia a safe space to fuel regional instability and spread anti-EU propaganda – reflected in Serbian public opinion that the West – not Russia – is to blame for the war in Ukraine.

Serbia’s facade of neutrality, reluctantly condemning the invasion but refusing to join EU sanctions, coupled with Vučić attending the Liberation Day celebrations in Moscow and the recent halt of arms sales to Ukraine due to Russian pressure, highlight its ongoing resistance to adopting EU positions.

Though such moves guarantee Russia’s diplomatic support (and cheap gas), it’s actually China that’s emerged as the EU’s main economic challenge in Serbia.

Beijing giving billions in infrastructure projects without conditions is very alluring, compared to the EU’s long list of requirements. Yet these deals often overlook labour rights, environmental degradation, transparency and corruption, which in turn have undermined the objectives of the Fundamentals cluster – a key EU accession pillar.

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The global critical raw materials race has also led the EU to sideline good governance principles and support Rio Tinto‘s controversial lithium project in Serbia. This is despite the company’s largest shareholder being China’s Chinalco, and more importantly, the EU has ignored mass environmental protests in Serbia.

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Being ‘deeply concerned’ isn’t enough

The EU should impose concrete forms of accountability. Government officials and police chiefs [in Serbia] who order the violence should face targeted restrictive measures such as asset freezes and visa bans. This could prompt them to reconsider their loyalty to the government.

While systematic reforms take time, immediate financial pressure can signal the EU’s disapproval ... Likewise, withholding payments and reducing or redistributing funds should follow.

The EU’s focus should also shift to civil society, hearing Serbian voices for free and fair elections. Coupled with support from international monitoring institutions, this will help to restore citizens’ trust in the democratic process.

Finally, Serbia’s domestic turmoil mirrors its broader geopolitical drifts. With Hungary likely to block collective action, Member States should downgrade bilateral meetings due to Serbia not following the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. The EU must also explicitly clarify that any progress towards opening Chapter 31 of the accession process will depend on Belgrade cutting ties with Moscow.

To ensure its credibility, the EU must act quickly, honestly and substantially in its response to the rapid deterioration of democracy in Serbia, balancing incentives with the strict and firm approach that underpins EU enlargement policy.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/3712854

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he has submitted a draft law to reinstate the freedom of two anti-corruption bodies in Ukraine - days after nationwide protests broke out over changes curbing their independence.

Kyiv's Western partners had also expressed serious concerns over the legislation.

On Thursday, Zelensky backtracked, saying the new bill was intended to safeguard the independence of Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau (Nabu) and Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (Sap), and to protect them from Russian influence.

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Nabu said that the new bill "restored all procedural powers and guarantees of independence" of the two bodies.

The law passed earlier this week brought Nabu and Sap under the control of the prosecutor general, who is appointed by the president.

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