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Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda doesn’t think a conventional Russian attack on NATO territory is likely for now, but expects Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s provocations to continue.
“I don’t think Russia is currently ready for large-scale operations,” he said in an interview with WELT, which, like POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network. “Russia’s resources are tied up on the Ukrainian battlefield, and Russia is not succeeding there.”
“But Putin is testing us and moving ever closer to Article 5, NATO’s collective defense commitment,” he added.
According to Nausėda, the Russians want to observe how the alliance responds to so-called hybrid attacks, which are suspected to have included drone incursions, cyberattacks and arson, among other things.
The hybrid war will therefore continue, not only on NATO’s eastern flank but also in Germany, Denmark and other countries, Nausėda explained. Russia is testing “how determined we are and whether we will respond collectively when certain red lines are crossed,” the Lithuanian president said.
Nausėda, an economist who has led Lithuania since 2019, also sees no serious willingness in Moscow to enter into negotiations to end its war against Ukraine before next spring.
Moscow will use the winter months to keep up the pressure on Ukraine through air strikes on cities, he said. “The Russians will only pretend to negotiate. I don’t trust them.”
Putin will make demands that are unacceptable to Ukraine from the outset, he added. “If Ukraine gets through this winter, and I am convinced that it will, the chances of serious talks will improve in 2027. I don’t expect them any earlier.”
Joe Stanley-Smith contributed to this report.
The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, The Telegraph, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.
LONDON — Nigel Farage blamed Donald Trump’s midterms catastrophe on broken anti-foreign intervention promises Thursday, branding his decision to launch a war with Iran as “bizarre.”
The U.S. president’s right-wing ally in Britain echoed other high-profile conservative figures in lamenting the price-spiking conflict and warned against a fresh campaign of attacks in the Middle East.
Farage has long considered Trump a personal friend, but has come under pressure to distance himself from the U.S. president, who is deeply unpopular in the U.K.
The Reform leader has been more critical against a backdrop of global economic woes triggered by the war waged against Tehran by America and Israel.
Farage, leader of the insurgent right-wing Reform UK party, told reporters after a defense speech in London that he wouldn’t have supported a drawn-out conflict with Iran. He said it was “bizarre” that Trump, of all people, took such action, considering he took power on a pledge to avoid endless foreign wars.
Asked about the biggest lesson he took from the midterms carnage for the Republicans, Farage said: “Keep your promises.”
He praised Trump’s “very good” track record of staying faithful to the electorate during his first term, but said, “He broke a promise — that was no more foreign wars.”
“We’re eight months in, and the resultant rise in gas and diesel prices, more than anything else, is what did them in,” Farage said.
He later told broadcasters that he worries the U.S. president will “continue aggressively attacking Iran” now that he has lost Congress.
Farage was initially supportive after Trump launched strikes in February. He urged the U.K. government to “back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran!”
Senior figures in Reform UK have been trying to distance themselves from Trump in the wake of MAGA’s midterm drubbing at the hands of the Democrats.
One high-ranking adviser, granted anonymity to discuss transatlantic relations, said the party would continue building “good relations” with senior Republicans like JD Vance and Marco Rubio.
“Reform already has good relations with multiple Republicans, and that process will continue,” they added.
Others argued for greater network building with right-wing movements in Europe.
“I’ve never been a huge fan of Mr. Trump,” said one official. “He does speak for a particular slice of American society, but in practical terms what happens on the continent is somewhat more important,” the official added, pointing to the rise of right-wing parties in France, Italy and Spain.
“Given we have a PM that is committed on salami slicing us back into the EU,” they added. “Personally, I think that’s more important than America.”
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Data is redefining modern defense operations. The ability to master and manage it is now a decisive factor in military victory or defeat. Few people know that better than Jean Charles Ellermann-Kingombe, assistant secretary general for cyber and digital transformation at NATO.
George Teas, vice president of solutions architecture, Elastic
In a recent interview preceding NATO Edge 26, the Alliance’s annual defense innovation show, Ellermann-Kingombe is very clear on the kind of digital transformation effort it takes to get the right data into the hands of military leaders operating in high-pressure situations, at exactly the time and place they need it.
Data-sharing must be a core design principle, he says: “The bottleneck is often not technology, but permission: classification boundaries, national rules and trust decisions.” Once data is well managed, an even bigger opportunity arises to use AI as “an enabler of military effectiveness,” he says, assisting commanders and operators further.
He adds: “For NATO, the biggest difference AI can make is in decision advantage. Modern operations generate volumes of data that no human organisation can process unaided at the speed required. AI can help fuse information, detect patterns, support planning, prioritise scarce resources and accelerate staff processes, providing commanders with better insight, earlier warnings and more resilient options.”
As powerful as it is, AI can only reliably accelerate defense mission outcomes if it is built on vast, relevant and quality data. Data is the fuel that will power the shift to software-defined defense, an approach that delivers military capability through flexible, modular software rather than rigid, hardware-bound platforms.
THE CHALLENGES OF MASTERING DATA
Software-defined defense, AI and the challenge of mastering the data that powers both, will be hot topics for attendees at NATO Edge 26, due to be held in Izmir, Türkiye, in November and expected to attract over 3,000 participants and more than 270 technology partners, including Elastic.
We will be there because we know that many attendees will be looking to better understand what software-defined defense will demand of them in data management terms.
As powerful as it is, AI can only reliably accelerate defense mission outcomes if it is built on vast, relevant and quality data. Data is the fuel that will power the shift to software-defined defense.
Bringing data together from many intelligent systems and smart devices demands real rigor. After all, in order to make critical operational decisions, military personnel need to be able to see the big picture, quickly searching for information in both structured and unstructured data formats across a vast array of different systems.
Defense data naturally lives wherever operations happen — across land, sea, air, space and cyber domains — and is stored in different formats like images, audio transcripts, documents and geospatial, reaching across thousands of different mission systems.
These can include communications systems that keep troops connected in the field; systems used to manage artillery devices; reconnaissance systems; radar stations; and geographical information systems that support military leaders in tracking assets, planning missions and routes, and analyzing risks and threats, including potential ambush sites and minefields.
In order to make critical operational decisions, military personnel need to be able to see the big picture, quickly searching for information in both structured and unstructured data formats across a vast array of different systems.
On top of all this, organizations like NATO face an additional layer of complexity. Building a common operational picture across the digital environments of 32 member nations requires multi-intelligence fusion of massive volumes of data held in disparate systems, from legacy databases and classified networks to cloud platforms and security tools.
OPERATIONAL ADVANTAGE
Addressing these challenges means turning all this data into operational advantage and mission readiness, accelerating the ability of armed forces to respond to situations by increasing their situational awareness and decision speed.
The answer is a data mesh architecture. Rather than consolidating everything into a traditional data lake, a data mesh approach manages data where it originates and lives, without moving or duplicating it; so it can be searched, queried and analyzed from multiple access points across the entire environment, including allied partners such as NATO member nations. That is what turns scattered data into one unified operational picture with near real-time insights, and context, giving commanders the situational awareness and decision speed that mission-readiness depends on. In my view, it is the most flexible and scalable way to get there.
It also speaks directly to the permission bottleneck Ellermann-Kingombe describes. Because data stays under the control of the nation or system that owns it, access can be governed by policy at the source, with classification boundaries and national rules enforced where the data lives rather than negotiated away in a central repository.
Rather than consolidating everything into a traditional data lake, a data mesh approach manages data where it originates and lives, without moving or duplicating it.
A data mesh approach is sustainable because of its reliance on open standards. They enable defense organizations to connect systems that were never designed to work together, from legacy platforms to dispersed infrastructure, so data stays findable and can be effectively analyzed across the environment. Interoperability stops being a barrier as new partners and data sources join, and new tools can be integrated without rebuilding systems or making major investments. The architecture scales alongside the Alliance’s growth.
Without a unified view, the risk of losing operational advantage to adversaries extends from the battlefield into cyberspace. Zero Trust depends on connecting authentication logs, network traffic and application telemetry where they already sit, so that traditionally separate domains can be visualized and analyzed together. When a user accesses sensitive data, the system must verify not only who they are but also their device status, network path, and the time and location of access. If those checks are slow or impossible, threats can remain undetected and escalate through systems. A data mesh built on open standards connects the pillars of a Zero Trust architecture, allowing organizations to accelerate implementation without replacing the tools they already have.
When the manual efforts of military data analysts struggle to keep pace with the scale and speed of events on the ground, AI can work faster and more accurately.
The same logic is already visible in large government organizations: CISA’s new SIEM-as-a-Service platform uses open standards to give US federal civilian agencies a consistent approach to threat detection and response.
As AI’s value in supporting human decision-making becomes increasingly clear, a data mesh architecture provides the foundation to apply agentic AI capabilities holistically. It enables complex organizations to analyze the vast amounts of data their systems generate, find actionable correlations and separate signals from noise. When the manual efforts of military data analysts struggle to keep pace with the scale and speed of events on the ground, AI can work faster and more accurately. It also lets analysts ask questions across structured and unstructured data and rapidly receive answers grounded in reliable sources.
The numerous tech challenges facing the modern military calls for closer NATO-industry cooperation, and that’s why NATO Edge 26 is such an important event. All 32 sovereign member states that make up the Alliance use different systems, yet they rely on secure, trusted data-sharing with each other as the foundation for cooperating on military operations and sharing intelligence. It’s vital that they can turn to industry innovators to support their operational needs.
At a time of great geopolitical uncertainty, with data increasingly considered a primary defense asset, NATO members face growing pressure to turn it into operational advantage and readiness before adversaries do. We look forward to discussing how at NATO Edge 26.
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LONDON — Vladimir Putin won’t be at the G20 summit in the U.K. next year, Andy Burnham said in an interview published Thursday.
Pushed by the Economist magazine on whether the Russian president will be invited to the gathering of world leaders in Manchester next November, the British PM said: “No.”
He went on to clarify the guest list is “handled by the G20,” but stressed Russia would not be present “because of an outstanding sanction.”
Burnham’s decision to actively exclude Putin comes after U.S. President Donald Trump sparked a diplomatic row by inviting the Russian leader to America’s G20 summit in Miami this December.
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband previously told POLITICO Britain will not ditch its ban on directly engaging with Russia, but that it was for the U.S. to make its own decisions.
A photocall at the G20 foreign ministers meeting last week was canceled after politicians, including Miliband, refused to be pictured with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
The U.K. has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022 — a policy followed by all the five British prime ministers in post during nearly five years of war.
Burnham also told the Economist he’s keen to host Xi Jinping after the Chinese president visited Manchester in 2015, and said there’s a “real opportunity” for future U.K.-China economic collaboration after his predecessor Keir Starmer’s visit to Beijing earlier this year.
This story has been updated to reflect a full transcript of Burnham’s interview with The Economist.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s midterm election losses haven’t helped the U.K. economy — yet.
The Bank of England’s nine-member Monetary Policy Committee announced on Thursday it has overwhelmingly voted to increase interest rates to 4% from 3.75%, the first time since August 2023 to combat rising prices driven bythe war in Iran.
Unlike the U.S. Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, the Bank of England has been reluctant to raise rates for fear of denting the British economy.
Until now, Governor Andrew Bailey and other MPC members have preferred to wait and see whether higher energy prices spilled over more broadly.
But the Bank was forced to increase rates after U.K. inflation came in at 3.5% in September, while the economy posted better-than-expected growth figures — raising the risk prices could take off.
The MPC on Wednesday voted 8-to-1 to raise rates, arguing the energy shock since the war began has built “sufficient” inflation pressures to justify a hike.
The dissenting vote from Catherine Mann was for a larger increase of 0.5 percentage points.
But Bailey made no secret of the fact that the future health of the U.K.’s economy depends on what the U.S. does in Iran.
“Today’s increase shouldn’t be seen as the first in an inevitable long sequence of hikes,” Bailey said.
“But, unless the conflict in the Middle East is resolved, neither does it seem likely to be the last increase.”
The Bank projected inflation would pick up to nearly 5% by the second quarter of 2027, higher than its previous forecast, with greater spillover into wages and other prices.
Under an adverse scenario, in which prices stay higher for longer and the conflict in the Middle East continues to flare, inflation would hit 6.2% in the third quarter of 2027.
Thursday’s decision, which comes a week after Chancellor John Healey delivered his first budget under the specter of Brits paying the highest energy prices in three years, will further squeeze struggling U.K. households and businesses already hit with higher energy bills and mortgage rates.
The tougher financing backdrop could hurt the Burnham government’s promises to tackle the cost of living. Yet rampant inflation would also undercut that pledge.
Still, the Bank’s top brass also pushed back on market expectations that rates could by hiked to 4.75% or 5% in 2027 — which could help bring down decades-high government borrowing costs.
The Trump factor
The decision comes as the rout of Trump’s Republican Party at the U.S. midterm elections on Tuesday raised the prospect of a peace deal in the Middle East.
A thaw in the conflict could bring down fuel prices by easing pressure on oil supplies and improve the cost-of-living picture for U.K. households.
There were reports Trump could respond to his party’s losses by embarking on a bombing campaign in the Middle East, but the U.S. president appeared to accept on Wednesday that higher petrol prices affected his popularity and struck a more conciliatory tone on the prospect of peace negotiations.
U.S. Vice-President JD Vance blamed the Iran war for the electoral losses. And U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Wednesday that the elections create an opportunity to focus on the cost of living.
Oil prices fell sharply on Wednesday, amid expectations Democrats could also limit Trump’s funding for the conflict. The possibility of a ceasefire could yet be subject to Trump’s whims.
Regardless, U.K. consumers will feel the pinch through a rise in the energy price cap in January.
Even if falling oil prices persist over the next few weeks, the price cap is likely to rise substantially because of a lag in the way it is calculated.
The Bank forecast the cap will hit £2,150 in the first quarter of 2027. Food price increases, which have so far been muted, could hit 4.75% by mid-2027 as companies pass through higher costs.
Healey’s budget will knock 0.25 percentage points off inflation by the second quarter of next year, the Bank said, while tighter fiscal policy to bring down the deficit would likely detract from growth in the medium term.
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