LONDON — Some European leaders wanted a superhero negotiator to take on Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, secure a fair peace deal for Ukraine, and safeguard the continent’s own security, as ceasefire talks gather pace. 

They were never going to find one. 

That had already become the view of diplomats and officials close to the discussions, granted anonymity to comment on the sensitive Ukraine peace process that’s dividing opinion in European capitals, even before the EU decided on Friday that it would have to be a team effort. 

The push to identify one representative to speak for Europe was understandable. The appeal of having a single, respected leader taking the reins is largely based on a desire to project European strength and unity — as well as an interest in making negotiations with Russia, the U.S. and Ukraine efficient and effective. 

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself said this week he wanted Europe to identify within days who will take its place in the talks, and suggested he’d prefer it was one person (he even indicated that he had a preference, though would not reveal a name).

He didn’t get his way. Instead, leaders at a summit in Dublin on Friday, decided that the “E5” made up four big EU countries ― Germany, France, Poland and Italy ― and the U.K., plus officials from the European Commission and Council, would take the work forward as a team.

Technical discussions

The search for a top representative to fill Europe’s seat at the negotiating table at the next round of peace talks had become a political obsession in Brussels that missed at least two big points. 

The first is that the leadership level is not currently where the negotiations are at. Talks this week in Abu Dhabi were technical discussions between senior officials. The big political players like Putin and Zelenskyy were not there, never mind Trump. Russia sent a Kremlin aide to lead its team and Ukraine tasked its intelligence chief with making its case. 

If these officials make progress toward a deal, leaders will no doubt want to get involved. Ultimately, it will be leaders who sign any peace agreements that follow — and there’s no limit on the number of EU presidents or prime ministers who could join such a meeting as signatories or guarantors of the final deal. 

The next thing that needs to happen, according to both Ukraine and the U.S. envoys mediating the talks, is for Europe to join the discussion with Russia — at this technical level. 

‘Not a superstate’ 

The second point some member states and Brussels insiders were missing is structural: There are just too many European stakeholders with equally important but very distinct interests and remits, making consolidation of all the different strands under one person impossible. 

The Commission can’t negotiate Europe’s future security architecture — that’s for NATO members and national capitals to decide. But equally NATO, Paris and Berlin cannot negotiate EU sanctions or Ukraine’s accession to the bloc — these are in the Commission’s remit. 

And the idea that the “E3” — Europe’s big economic and military beasts of Germany, France and the U.K. — would let either the Commission, the European Council or NATO do it all on their behalf is not realistic. 

As one EU diplomat put it: “The reason why Europe hasn’t found one person who can represent the whole of Europe is that Europe is not a superstate.” 

In the context of the Ukraine talks, European interests encompass many EU member states but also countries like the U.K., and Norway, as well as Turkey and Moldova, the diplomat said. “Who can promise troops on the ground on behalf of the rest of Europe? Who can offer billions in financing? It’s difficult.” 

The conclusion some officials involved in the Abu Dhabi process reached was that Europe would have to be represented by a team, much as it has been already, albeit at one step removed from the main negotiating room so far. Different members of that team will own different issues. 

What Putin wants

Then there’s the question of content: What will be discussed and what will Team Europe’s collective position be? 

“What we actually say is more important than the exact configuration of the people in the room,” Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on his way into Friday’s meeting of EU leaders.

The reason why American and Ukrainian officials want Europe’s participation is because they believe beginning a discussion about reshaping the continent’s security structures could unlock a more cooperative approach from Russia. 

Russia’s top negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said Europe’s security framework was the main topic discussed in Abu Dhabi this week: “The conflict in Ukraine showed that the entire security system operating after Yalta and Potsdam is working poorly, and an abscess broke through in Ukraine,” he said. 

Ukraine’s team noted that the hardline Russian approach softened a little when Moscow’s representatives saw the chance to talk about their wider demands on European security.

But Europe itself wasn’t part of that conversation.

Timing is still everything

The first thing to resolve will be on the sequencing of the negotiations — most significantly, when should Europeans allow themselves to discuss Russia’s demand to overhaul regional security? This is a critical and potentially existential question for European countries. And it is already a subject on which top EU officials are weighing their positions with care. 

Those close to the talks believe a clever way can be found to offer Russia a conversation about regional security as part of careful sequencing of the negotiations, without binding the issue completely into the final peace agreement for Ukraine. 

But different EU spokespeople are saying different things on this sequencing point, in what is either a clever strategy, or a sign of continuing disarray.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top centrally contracted diplomat, said there must be no discussion of wider European security architecture — such as NATO configurations, troop deployments and working forums for consultations with Russia — until after the peace deal is finalized. 

But in Abu Dhabi, EU officials signaled their readiness to allow parallel tracks in the talks,  so Ukraine’s peace settlement and Europe’s future security structures could be discussed at the same time. 

Officials in national capitals also agree that the “sequencing” of the negotiations on this point is key. Behind the scenes different countries and factions have different views on what the right strategy should be, just as they struggle with the question of whether it’s right to engage directly with Putin at all. 

And of course the question of Europe’s role may yet be moot. The U.S. envoys said on Thursday night that Putin had consented to letting Europe join the talks, but the Kremlin called this into question on Friday. 

After the negotiations in Abu Dhabi concluded this week, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior envoy, acknowledged the twin problems he faces. “If Europe could identify one person to speak on their behalf, that would be a bigger achievement than getting the Russians to include them in the negotiation,” he said.

PARIS — Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said she would be prepared to hold talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Brussels, in the wake of her promises to stop French financial aid to Ukraine.

Speaking on the sidelines of a trade fair in Paris, Le Pen said a meeting in Brussels would be “justified” because “the topic of Ukraine financing is rattling Europe.”

“The German chancellor is starting to threaten people, it’s starting to be an issue in Europe and it would be interesting to discuss this,” she said in a reference to Friedrich Merz’s threats to cut EU funds for countries who refuse to support Ukraine financially.

Le Pen said she would offer to hold talks with Zelenskyy when she meets the Ukrainian ambassador in France on Monday.

The far-right leader is the front-runner ahead of next year’s presidential election and has repeatedly said France can no longer afford to keep financing Ukraine’s war effort. She has estimated that French aid amounts to €6 billion per year, a figure Zelenskyy has challenged. He said the military partnership with Paris is “a win-win” relationship.

Zelenskyy also invited Le Pen to Kyiv, telling French weekly l’Express that Le Pen would “change her mind” if she met Ukrainians.

Financial aid to Ukraine has become an issue in next year’s presidential election amid difficult budget negotiations. This month far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon also courted controversy when he said that a post-war referendum on the future of the Donbas should be held in the area, which is mostly under Russian occupation.

BRUSSELS — Some 71% of Europeans want the EU to have its own army, according to new polling results seen by POLITICO that reveal growing unease about Washington’s reliability and deep divisions over Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The 2026 Trends report by security think tank GLOBSEC found that support for the European Union to have its own army was strong across the member countries surveyed, reaching 82% in Romania followed by Lithuania at 78% and France at 75%.

Even in countries traditionally wary of European defense integration, majorities backed the idea with some 70% of respondents in Poland and Bulgaria in support of an EU army, alongside 69% in Germany.

The findings come as European governments debate how to strengthen their military capabilities amid Russia’s continued aggression and growing uncertainty over the United States’ commitment to European security.

GLOBSEC surveyed respondents in 14 countries across the transatlantic space, including 11 EU member states, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The enthusiasm for European military capabilities did not appear to be a rebuke of NATO. Some 77% of respondents in the NATO countries surveyed said they would vote to remain members, while 78% of respondents in the EU countries surveyed supported developing the bloc’s own defense capabilities alongside the alliance.

There was also strong support for the most direct form of contribution to national defense: a draft. Among respondents in countries without compulsory military service, 64% favored its reintroduction, according to the report, with the highest numbers found in Czechia, France, Germany and Slovakia.

German exception

Attitudes toward Washington revealed a growing transatlantic divide. More than one-third of respondents across the European countries surveyed now consider the United States a security threat. Around half of respondents in Germany, France and Britain held that view, compared with roughly one-third in Central and Eastern Europe.

Germany was the only country surveyed where a majority regarded Washington as a security threat.

The country also stands apart for attitudes toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some 40% of German respondents agreed with the claim that Ukraine’s treatment of Russian speakers justified the invasion, while 39% believed the West provoked the war.

Those views coincided with softer support for Kyiv. Just over half considered Ukraine’s fight important to German security, while nearly six in 10 would accept Ukrainian territorial concessions in exchange for peace.

The findings appear to highlight a political paradox — voters want a stronger European military, but remain committed to NATO even as confidence in its most powerful member erodes.

DUBLIN — EU leaders gathering in Dublin on Friday will continue arguing over who should represent them in talks about Ukraine’s future after a day of ferocious diplomatic activity.

As Donald Trump’s administration intensifies its efforts to broker an end to Russia’s war and Europe may have secured a place at the table, bickering over who will speak on behalf of the bloc already looks like overshadowing the summit in the Irish capital — that wasn’t even supposed to be about Ukraine in the first place.

“You could even have a TV show about it,” Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal joked to POLITICO in an interview on Thursday, in a sign of just how stark the divisions have become among leaders. “But we are saving the best part for tomorrow.”

Russia’s full-scale invasion started in February 2022 and as Trump’s enthusiasm for brokering peace has ebbed and flowed, the EU has found itself edged out of the picture ― despite increasingly picking up the tab.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who met with about 50 EU and non-EU leaders in Dublin on Thursday, warned that Russia was seeking to reshape Europe’s security architecture and insisted that European governments must have a voice in the negotiations, following two days of Russia-Ukraine-U.S. negotiations in Abu Dhabi that largely left out the EU.

Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, discussed the issue with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow earlier on Thursday before the American pair touched down in Dublin in the evening to offer Zelenskyy their thoughts.

The EU is united over the need to have a seat at the table as Ukraine’s main backer, but not on who it should send, with diplomats and officials telling POLITICO that the bloc has split into at least three camps.

In one, there is growing support for European Council President António Costa, whose role makes him the natural candidate to represent the bloc. In another, there’s France and Germany, both of which are reluctant to surrender their own places at the negotiating table to Brussels.

And then there’s the loneliest camp of all, the backers of Kaja Kallas. The bloc’s top diplomat would be the obvious pick, if not for her hawkishness on Russia, which some diplomats say could put off the Kremlin and make her a liability.

Costa is accountable

When it comes to speaking for Europe, there’s one man who’s already got that in his job description.

Costa is emerging as the most broadly acceptable candidate among EU capitals. His institutional role gives him a mandate to represent the bloc’s leaders on the world stage, while his position and background as a former Portuguese prime minister afford him some neutrality, according to a European diplomat, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the discussions.

Estonia’s Michal was the first leader to come out in support of Costa, telling POLITICO his “mandate comes directly from the [European] Council” and makes him “accountable” to the EU’s member countries.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who called for the issue to be added to the agenda of Friday’s talks, said she would be OK with Costa, while Luxembourg and Poland’s leaders also backed him in remarks to reporters Thursday.

Costa himself has also made it clear that the EU is represented internationally by its institutions — meaning him.

Kallas, however, is a much more divisive proposition.

Some diplomats see the former Estonian prime minister, who an EU official once said eats “Russians for “breakfast,” as an unacceptable interlocutor for the Kremlin.

“That’s a joke, right?” another European diplomat said of the prospect of Kallas representing the EU in the high-stakes talks, describing her as “probably the worst person you could pick.”

But others argue that it’s precisely this hawkish reputation that makes her the right person for the job. “It would make much more sense,” a second senior European diplomat told POLITICO. “That’s what Putin would do. He would pick whoever you don’t want to talk to.”

Michal argued Kallas’ role makes her a natural second to Costa, and that both will presumably be in their positions until their terms end in 2029, making them more reliable than a national leader. “Putin doesn’t have to like it,” he added.

Paris and Berlin are less keen

The biggest obstacle to choosing a negotiator, though, might not be Putin but the EU’s two biggest capitals.

France and Germany are unlikely to welcome an arrangement that gives Brussels a monopoly on representing Europe in negotiations, two European diplomats and an EU official told POLITICO.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made his opposition clear Thursday, calling the participation of the E3 countries in talks on Ukraine “a well-established format.”

“We are also working together on this task with five representatives — from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Poland. I see absolutely no problem with keeping it that way,” he said.

Paris also has little incentive to hand over its seat at the table. France is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and possesses Europe’s only nuclear arsenal, giving it diplomatic and military leverage that no EU institution can replicate, French MEP Fabrice Leggeri of National Rally told POLITICO, adding he could “hardly imagine” Costa or Kallas speaking for Paris.

“France, Germany, and the U.K.,” the E3 countries, “will always be France, Germany and the U.K.,” Estonia’s Michal argued, adding nothing stopped them from talking bilaterally to Moscow. But on decision-making affecting the whole continent, they needed to get on board with “consensual politics.”

“This is what the European Union is,” he said. “This is the basis of having this kind of consensual politics and keeping everybody together on the same page against Russia.”

EU leaders are unlikely to formally appoint an envoy at Friday’s gathering, but discussions could produce a broader “understanding” about how Europe should be represented, a senior EU official said.

Irish Foreign Minister Helen McEntee told POLITICO that at Friday’s talks, leaders will still need to “tease through” the issue “a little bit more.”

They may not have that much time, though. Zelenskyy this week urged the EU to hurry up and pick someone — anyone — to speak for it. “I think that in November, not later, we need to accept who will represent Europe in negotiations,” he said.

Giorgio Leali, Hans von der Burchard, Jacopo Barigazzi and Caroline Hug contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS — It takes an 80-year-old German diplomat to put the Jensen Huang spy scandal in proper historical context. 

Asked about allegations that the Nvidia CEO was lured into an intimate relationship with a Chinese spy, Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany’s former ambassador to Washington, pointed to the past. “In World War I, you had female spies who used the honey trap to talk to a general, and maybe sleep with him and extract some secrets,” he told POLITICO.

As Europe’s 27 leaders meet for their first conversation on AI the day after Huang’s resignation, his fall from grace is a reminder that it’s American tech bros — not European military men — who now hold the secrets that can decide the fate of the world.

Friday’s roundtable of European leaders in Dublin must reckon with the reality that the pursuit of AI superiority remains a two-horse race between the U.S. and China — and that Nvidia’s leadership drama doesn’t change the fact that a single American company’s chips will continue to drive the artificial intelligence boom.

With the meeting meant to help forge a new direction for Europe on AI, leaders will mostly be in listening mode, with presentations by Arthur Mensch, CEO of French AI company Mistral, and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the “godfathers of AI” and an advocate for more stringent safety measures. 

“We’re not going to pretend that we are experts,” an EU official said.

The session comes as Europe struggles to find its place in global AI. The rise of advanced U.S.-built proprietary models and open-weight artificial intelligence progress in China has created a new range of national security issues — and while the EU has proven to be a leader in regulating the technology, its own would-be frontier AI labs continue to play catch-up.

Although this week’s events are a reminder to European politicians that they are spectators in the AI race, an emerging split between top industry leaders in Europe is also dampening momentum on a bloc-wide effort to take on the competition.

“Switching dependency from California to France doesn’t solve Europe’s sovereignty problem, right?” Uljan Sharka, CEO of leading Italian company Domyn, said in an interview.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty and security are the main arguments for Europe not to abandon efforts to develop its own frontier AI models. In the past year, EU officials and companies have struggled to access the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which drive much of the current risks around the technology. 

“How can Europe become a leading and sovereign player in strategic areas of the AI value chain?” European Council President António Costa asked EU leaders in his invitation letter. 

Yet in classic European fashion, officials disagreed ahead of the meeting on how to catch up across many layers of the AI supply chain, from chips and cloud services to cutting-edge models.

“We cannot abandon the frontier ambition. It’s an issue of our sovereignty, it’s an issue of our competitiveness,” Malgorzata Nikowska, head of unit at the European Commission’s Artificial Intelligence Office, said at an event last week. 

It was a moment of clarity in a frantic debate about whether Europe should still chase the frontier in AI, which would require ploughing billions of euros into compute power — or focus on deriving value by applying the technology in key industries. 

Mistral’s Mensch has been a key voice in that debate, warning that giving up the frontier would be “a fundamental mistake” in an essay titled “Build or Surrender.” 

Two European PMs — Finland’s Petteri Orpo and Estonian Kristen Michal — came out swinging ahead of Friday’s meeting, saying “Europe can compete at the frontier” and that the bloc’s ambition “must go beyond adoption of AI,” in a letter exclusively seen by POLITICO.

These statements, and Mensch’s presence at the table Friday, suggest EU leaders will commit to continuing to build competitive frontier models. But how to get there is a far more vexed question — and European industry executives are offering different answers. 

Mistral has taken the route of building large open models. Its latest Large 4 model crossed the 1-trillion-parameter mark, allowing it to rival some of the world’s best open models such as from China’s Moonshot AI. 

To get there, the French company relied on President Emmanuel Macron as its best-placed salesman, and multi-billion euro funding rounds valuing the company at over €21 billion. 

But Mistral’s European rivals don’t necessarily agree with Mistral’s approach of training large models through vast amounts of compute power. 

Sharka — whose company was chosen to lead an EU-backed consortium to develop an open-source AI model that can cover the 24 EU languages by next year — argues Europe should not follow the example of OpenAI and Anthropic to use ever-more compute power for ever-larger models.

Instead, Sharka argued, it should aim to optimize the training runs of the models. “To build the European frontier, we need to be original,” he said. “I think we need to shift away from the concept of copy-pasting like unfortunately some players are pushing.” 

He argued that the typical AI scaling laws, which claim that a model performs better if it is larger and has more compute power, have “plateaued.” 

“There’s only one way, and it’s not the Mistral way to be clear,” he said, adding that there’s a “lot of space for optimization.” 

Mistral did not respond to a request for comment.

The Nvidia problem

Sharka was joined in his assessment by Aldo Podestà, CEO of Swiss AI model provider Giotto.ai., who argued there are ways to be more efficient about “pre-training,” typically the most compute-intensive part of building an AI model.

“We have the opportunity to be at the frontier without having that massive pre-training cost,” Podestà said. “My bet would be to have one very strong common open-source pre-training exercise” — after which different companies can tweak the outcome to their needs.

Under any scenario, Europe will still rely on the U.S. for the hardware components that power its AI models — especially Nvidia’s AI chips — since the continent has little design or production capacity of its own. 

Podestà said the bloc shouldn’t worry merely about building its own models.

“We need to open up a serious discussion about the hardware dependency we have,” he said. “Today it’s a monopoly for a single company.”

KYIV – Limitations affecting Starshield, the military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system, appear to be back in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday.

“Unfortunately, our units have been recording significant disruptions to Starshield’s operations over the territory of Ukraine for several days now – along the entire front line and in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said in a statement.

About a month ago, Ukraine reported a drop in connectivity for objects traveling faster than 161 km/h, which prevented its defensive systems, especially its interceptors, from working properly. The restriction was lifted on Oct. 24. In his statement, Zelenskyy said the disruptions were not due to a malfunction, but once again to a systematic speed restriction.

“For us, this primarily means a significant complication in intercepting Russian jet-powered drones,” Zelenskyy said.

The latest restrictions have already allowed several Russian drones to get through Ukrainian air defense and kill more Ukrainians, he added. 

“Connectivity issues have resurfaced,” said Serhii Bezkrestnov, an advisor to Zelenskyy on defense technology, “specifically regarding communication with helicopters pursuing ‘Shahed’ drones, as well as with jet interceptors tasked with shooting down jet-powered ‘Shaheds’.”

A European official with first-hand knowledge of the situation, who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter freely, said the Starshield limits were first noticed three days ago, when negotiations between the U.S. and Russia began in Abu Dhabi. Ukrainian officials believe this is not a coincidence, but a pressure tactic, they added.

The U.S. Congress bipartisan Ukraine Caucus on Thursday demanded in a statement “a full accounting from the Trump Administration and SpaceX on how and why this occurred and immediate action to restore full access to Starshield.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said last Sunday that he couldn’t tell who slowed down Starlink for Ukraine for much of October, and wasn’t even sure it had been throttled.

“It wasn’t me …. The system is a very good system. And it was perhaps turned down. I don’t even know. It hasn’t been proven to me that it was turned down,” Trump said on 60 Minutes.

“There’s a lot of lies going on with that war. But I know this, that when I heard about it, it went back up,” Trump added.

Kyiv is seeking urgent talks to renew its contract with Starshield, which is ending in mid-2027, a Ukrainian official told reporters last week.

The U.S. Department of Defense and SpaceX, Starshield’s parent company, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This story has been updated.

In September, a Russian court condemned a middle-aged man in Yaroslavl to 14 years in a penal colony — a sentence usually reserved for the country’s most twisted killers. His crime? Taking photographs of gravestones of Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine.

With the Kremlin coy about battlefield casualty figures, independent journalists and activists have used photography to document the war’s true death toll, revealing losses far greater than Moscow has publicly acknowledged.

“The multiplying number of graves — that must be a sight that’s bothering the authorities very much because it reminds them of the failure of Putin’s war,” Jan C. Behrends of the German-based Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History said. “So many people have died.”

In recent months, Russian authorities have issued warnings that taking photographs of military graves could result in life imprisonment, while the Federal Security Service has patrolled the country’s cemeteries in search of offenders. Since the summer, several dozen people across Russia have been arrested. The official charge in these closed trials is treason — specifically, cooperation with Ukrainian intelligence services.

Russia’s losses since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine are staggering. Russia 200, a casualty-tracking database created by independent outlet Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian service, lists the names of nearly 283,000 dead soldiers, including details about the circumstances of their deaths. But Mediazona, which draws on open-source information like social media posts and reports in local media, does not have the resources and access to document every battlefield fatality.

Other organizations estimate the death toll to be significantly higher. The U.K. Foreign Office and Dutch intelligence services estimate Russia’s losses to stand at more than half a million, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced in July that 700,000 Russian soldiers had died fighting in Ukraine.

Even the most modest estimates of Russian losses in Ukraine far surpass Soviet casualties in Afghanistan, a conflict that lasted nearly a decade from its launch in 1979. Then, as now, the Kremlin strove to hide the true costs of war.

Relatives of those who died in Afghanistan were forbidden from engraving the place of their loved ones’ deaths on their gravestones. “You could not mark the grave in any way that indicated that the person had died in the war,” Jeff Jones, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, said. “Some [relatives] were actually forced to hold funerals at night so that it wouldn’t draw attention,” he added.

Later, relatives were permitted to engrave the words, “died heroically while fulfilling an international duty,” but “died in Afghanistan” was never allowed.

At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin wasn’t quite so guarded. In September 2022, six months after the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said 5,937 Russian soldiers had died in the conflict.

Since then, there have been few official pronouncements about Russian casualties. As its “special military operation” turned into a protracted conflict, Moscow has ramped up efforts to conceal the numbers, shutting down new avenues of investigation for anyone trying to document casualty figures.

In April 2024, a Kremlin spokesperson reminded journalists that information on casualties is a “state secret” and reporting on losses remains the “exclusive prerogative of the Ministry of Defense.”

Later that year, Rosstat, Russia’s official statistical body, barred access to its data on the country’s excess death rate, which had been accessible since the 1990s as part of liberalization efforts under perestroika and glasnost.

The Rosstat data was an invaluable source for verifying information on casualties — and for refuting government claims, says Dmitry Treshchanin, Mediazona editor and co-author of Russia 200.

“We can count everyone name by name, but someone from government would always say ‘it’s fake,'” Treshchanin said. “But when you have official data confirming our calculations, nothing can be done with it.”

Moscow has also stifled information on court cases concerning dead soldiers. In early 2025, Russian journalists noticed an unprecedented uptick in the number of court cases emerging about soldiers being declared missing in action or dead. Military units normally ask courts to declare soldiers dead when they do not return from a battlefield for months.

“It was growing exponentially — it was big news,” Treshchanin said. “You start with 40,000 cases, then four months later you have 70,000, and two months after that, 90,000. I mean, just how many of these people could there possibly be?” 

Russia 200 recorded almost 90,000 such cases in 2025 — a more than tenfold increase compared to earlier years of the invasion.  “And at some point, they just classified it,” Treshchanin said, referring to the government’s decision to restrict access to these court proceedings at the end of 2025.

As for graveyard photography, Treshchanin and his colleagues are now cautious about using such methods.

“Photos of graves and videos of the funerals were an important source of information for us at the very beginning of the Russian invasion, when not much other info was available,” he explained. But once the Kremlin got wise to the technique, it became too dangerous. “Our volunteers were attacked at the cemeteries,” he explained.

The reason the Kremlin guards information about its losses so jealously is to more easily hire soldiers for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ian Matveev, a Russian military analyst and an associate of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, said.

“This is a way to deceive potential recruits. If people could easily find out what percentage of contract soldiers survive at the front — or how long a new recruit is likely to last — it would be extremely difficult to enlist even 30,000 troops per month,” Matveev said. By concealing losses, Moscow may also try to impress an “external audience — specifically, at Donald Trump — to convince him that Putin’s army is on the verge of winning the war,” he added.

With each new restriction from the Kremlin, journalists are forced to adjust their methods. “Russia is big,” said Treshchanin. “If something gets stifled in one place, it means that, conversely, something else ends up growing elsewhere.”

BERLIN — Most cases of sexual misconduct in Germany’s armed forces go unreported, according to a major study presented Wednesday, as Defense Minister Boris Pistorius acknowledged a “systemic problem” in how the military handles complaints.

The report found that sexual misconduct was three to six times more common than official figures suggest. The findings come as Germany tries to recruit more soldiers, including more women, as part of efforts to rebuild its military.

Four in 10 female soldiers and roughly one in five male soldiers said they had experienced at least one form of sexual misconduct in the previous year.

That includes unwanted sexual comments, sexual images, unwanted touching and sexual violence. Over the same period, 2% of both women and men reported experiencing sexual violence.

More than 8,100 soldiers completed the July 13 to Aug. 27 anonymous survey, about 18% of those contacted. The researchers said they had adjusted the results to reflect the makeup of the military.

The study found that only one-sixth to one-third of sexual incidents were reported, depending on the type of misconduct, with many victims saying they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. Others feared consequences or doubted that reporting an incident would lead to action.

Pistorius presented the findings to the defense committee in the country’s parliament alongside Germany’s top military officer, Carsten Breuer. Speaking afterward, he promised “zero tolerance” for sexual misconduct.

Pistorius called the handling of complaints a “systemic problem.” He said military structures and the traditional responses of some commanders to complaints were partly to blame.

He announced a 34-point plan to improve protection for victims and make it easier to report incidents, including a new advice service outside the usual military chain of command. The service is currently available daily but is expected to become available around the clock.

Commanders will also be assessed on how they respond to complaints, and victims will receive more information about investigations. Commanders who tolerate misconduct or fail to deal with it properly “will no longer hold a leadership position,” Pistorius said.

The study also found that women had reported less misconduct in units where they made up more than 15% of personnel.

Asked what he would tell a mother worried about her daughter joining the military, Pistorius insisted the Bundeswehr remained a “safe employer” because it was taking action.

This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was adapted from Saira Mohamed’s What a Country Owes Its Soldiers.

Despite Donald Trump’s promises that he would be the peace president, the United States continues to be very much at war, from the forcible abduction of the Venezuelan president to the devastating conflict in Iran. As ever, the country professes its support for the troops, but we hear little about the military personnel in these operations — a day or two of stories on the horrendous conditions on board the USS Lincoln or the losses of American service members in the war in Iran. Typically, the deaths and the injuries are accepted as inevitable, perhaps as tragedies. War is necessarily life-threatening for those who fight it — theirs but to do and die, in Tennyson’s words. Such is the nature of military service, right? And so we thank soldiers for their service and call what they endure a profound sacrifice.

But this is not the only way to think about the military. In some countries, there’s a limit on what military personnel are expected to endure, and governments have a duty to take care of their service members — not just as veterans, but during the course of their service. There’s a basic understanding that even though war is necessarily life-threatening, not all threats to the lives of soldiers are necessary.

Here in the United States, by contrast, there is no such understanding. During these last two decades of war, hundreds of U.S. service members have died in accidents outside of combat, from rollovers of armored vehicles to collisions of ships to crashes of deteriorating aircraft. Untold numbers suffer traumatic brain injuries when they fire their own weapons because commanders won’t implement safety protocols. They develop deadly cancers because of toxic gases their leaders knew were spewing from the burn pits on bases. These are injuries and deaths that even the military admits are preventable. And this is to say nothing of those who have lost their lives in the Iran war (the number of which the Pentagon refuses to disclose), an avoidable conflict for which the administration cannot articulate a coherent rationale). In a country that claims to honor its service members, these kinds of harms should be staggering. But instead, they’re hardly noticed.

Die Bundeswehr soll wachsen, doch eine neue Dunkelfeldstudie offenbart eine erschütternde Realität für Frauen in der Truppe. Wenn 70 Prozent der befragten Soldatinnen von sexualisiertem Fehlverhalten berichten, wird das Kulturproblem zur existenziellen Gefahr für die Einsatzbereitschaft. Verteidigungsminister Boris Pistorius steht vor der drängenden Frage, wie die Armee weiblicher werden soll, solange interne Strukturen versagen.

Im 200-Sekunden-Interview ordnet die CDU-Bundestagsabgeordnete und Berufssoldatin Vivian Tauschwitz den Schaden für die Bundeswehr ein. Sie erklärt, warum Täter sich im System bisher zu sicher fühlen und welche konkreten Führungsinstrumente sowie Ermittlungen jetzt greifen müssen, um das toxische Verhalten zu brechen.

Währenddessen verbringt Friedrich Merz seinen 71. Geburtstag nicht auf der Weltklimakonferenz, sondern im harten Ringen um die heimischen Finanzen. Rasmus Buchsteiner analysiert die Verhandlungen vor der Bereinigungssitzung des Haushaltsausschusses und beleuchtet, warum die Abwesenheit auf dem internationalen Klimaparkett ein politisches Signal ist.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

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**(Anzeige) Eine Nachricht von YouTube: Verlässliche Finanzierung für Qualitätsjournalismus: Damit unabhängige Berichterstattung im Netz wirtschaftlich tragen kann, braucht es faire Erlösmodelle. Laut einer Studie von Oxford Economics geben 76 % der Medienunternehmen mit YouTube-Kanal an, dass die Plattform eine wichtige Einnahmequelle für ihr Geschäft darstellt. Hier klicken für mehr Informationen zum wirtschaftlichen Beitrag von YouTube.**

Poland’s defense minister said Tuesday that the Pentagon had given a “green light” to plans for a permanent U.S. military base in the country, with President Donald Trump expected to make a final decision in early December.

Speaking after talks with U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in Washington, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said his American counterpart told him that “everything is moving in the right direction.”

“We interpret that as a green light from the Pentagon,” he said. The project has not yet received formal U.S. approval.

The Pentagon’s own account stopped short of endorsing the base or confirming the December timetable, but acknowledged ongoing talks about strengthening the permanent U.S. military presence in Poland.

Hegseth praised Poland’s military buildup, calling its army “one of the most formidable” in Europe. He also pushed for European NATO allies to take greater responsibility for their own defense, potentially allowing Washington to reduce its troop presence on the continent.

Poland already hosts thousands of American troops, largely on rotating deployments. But Warsaw is pushing for a permanent base as the Pentagon reviews its military presence across Europe, with other NATO allies fearing Trump could withdraw thousands more troops. The review is expected to conclude by December.

The project is also a rare point of agreement between Poland’s feuding leaders. Prime Minister Donald Tusk and President Karol Nawrocki — a Trump ally whom the U.S. president backed in last year’s election — agreed last week to cooperate on securing the base, despite their bitter confrontation over control of Poland’s top court.

Nawrocki has embraced the proposed name “Fort Trump,” first floated by his predecessor, Andrzej Duda, in 2018.

The U.S. Department of Defense didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This article has been updated.

LONDON — The U.S. has evacuated refueling aircraft from an RAF base in Britain after registering an alleged threat from Iran.

At least 10 U.S. planes left RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk on Monday, according to the BBC, and landed at other American bases in Europe and at Prestwick Airport in Scotland.

The operation was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by two U.K. officials briefed on the matter.

A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: “We do not routinely comment on the activity of other nations. Aircraft and other assets move regularly ​according to operational ​requirements.”

It comes weeks after an Iran-linked security incident at RAF Fairford, which saw the U.S. pull its bombers out of the base and return them to America.

A major incident was declared after three suspicious vans were seen near Fairford, which led to eight arrests. Two British nationals appeared in court in October in connection with an alleged plot connected to Iran.

U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s spokesman said: “The U.S. is one of our top security partners. We’re in constant communication with them, sharing intelligence and accessing threats together. Aircraft and other assets move regularly according to operational requirements… The protection of our bases, both in the U.K. and across the world, is a top priority.”

Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch said on Tuesday that the latest U.S. withdrawal of assets is “very concerning, and our government’s got absolutely nothing to say about it.”

Head of the MI5 intelligence service Ken McCallum said last month that threats from foreign adversaries against the U.K. had quadrupled in the last decade, including an increase in Iran-sponsored aggression against Jewish sites and military bases.

This story was updated to include a comment from the U.K. prime minister’s spokesperson.

LONDON — Democratic wins across the U.S. brought a brief rush of excitement to Britain’s left-wing establishment last week — but they also contained warnings for Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government.

Labour insiders privately cheered the midterm results, interpreting the outcome as a damning verdict on Donald Trump’s politics and a win for Democrats’ unifying strategy of focusing on living standards, despite ideological differences across their slate of candidates.

It’s left Burnham’s followers cautiously optimistic about his approach so far as prime minister, which has included incremental measures to lower costs, such as reducing food tariffs and offering money off energy bills.

A Labour MP, granted anonymity like others in this article to speak frankly, said their own engagement with Democratic New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s team had hammered home “the politics of trying.”

“If people think you’re not even trying, which obviously is what they thought about Trump, then you’re just going to get blown away,” they said. By making small adjustments, the MP argued, Burnham has begun to “develop a coherent argument — which is actually voters have to see you trying on the cost of living.”

Yet beyond this apparent vindication of the PM’s basic strategy, members of his party see clear warning signs for the incumbent British government in the U.S. political shift. An administration only just coming out of a dire stretch in public opinion polls, they worry, could take the wrong lessons from the Dems’ triumph across the pond if they don’t heed the deep anti-incumbent sentiment that drove it.

Reasons to be fearful

Burnham has badged his fledgling administration as a “cost of living government” since he replaced Keir Starmer at the top of Labour earlier this year.

Yet he has faced criticism from some quarters that a government-wide budget unveiled last month lacked real ambition — and now the pressure is on to deliver before a general election, due by 2029.

Claire Ainsley, a former adviser to Starmer who works for the Progressive Policy Institute think tank on both sides of the Atlantic, told POLITICO that, despite arguments about the future direction of the Democratic Party, “what they’ve all had in common is a real focus on affordability.”

“They’ve really focused on bread-and-butter issues for everyday Americans, and clearly that’s the path to be building and hopefully winning in 2028,” she said.

Ainsley highlighted striking moves by a host of prominent Democratic politicians, including Mamdani, who has offered childcare support to New Yorkers, and New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill — who declared “a state of emergency” on utility bills. Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger has targeted the cost of prescriptions.

“You’ve still got people who are worried here and wouldn’t necessarily say the cost of living is being relieved,” Ainsley warned. “You’ve got interest rates going up and there are lots of warning signs on our dashboard.”

Adam Terry, executive director of the Future Governance Forum think tank, argued likewise that Burnham’s action on the “little things” was part of the answer — but that he has not yet tackled “the big structural questions, namely: why is the economy so sluggish?”

That need to provide deeper solutions to Britain’s woes only raises the stakes for Burnham’s promised ten-year plan and his broader strategy for rewiring the British state, Terry said.

The same Labour MP quoted at the top of the piece — while broadly positive about Burnham’s impact so far — said: “It’s not a coincidence that basically every government in Britain since Brexit has failed usually within 18 months — and I would include in that Keir Starmer’s. Clearly systemic change is definitely required.”

Deborah Mattinson, a Labour member of the House of Lords and pollster who has worked in both the U.S. and U.K., cautioned progressives against believing the age of Trump-style politics is over, “because until things that encourage Trumpism are fixed, it won’t happen.

She added that in the U.S. — and in Germany and France, too — “working people feel the contract that they made with the state has fallen down.”

“The U.K. needs to be really mindful that if you don’t fix those fundamental grievances that people have, then you continue to be in a bind,” Mattinson added.

Up against it

Even those at the top of Labour sense that the PM is up against it if he is to buck the anti-incumbency trend demonstrated by the punishment of Republicans right across the United States.

A senior Labour aide observed that the midterm results strengthened the Democrats as they begin to target the White House in 2028 — but in the meantime they face a similar dilemma of delivery as Burnham.

No.10 Downing Street knows it needs to improve people’s lives, the aide said — but it remains “very difficult” to pull one lever that makes a substantial difference without upsetting financial markets.

Burnham has already been quick to draw a direct line between the U.S. electoral shift and politics closer to home. “I can’t get people’s cost of living pressures down until the conflict in the Middle East is resolved,” he said last week — while urging world leaders to “unite” around efforts to wind down the war.

Here, too, the prime minister may be testing the limits of his own country’s ability to shift the diplomatic dial — while few expect a calmer international picture in which Burnham can really bear down on costs.

Britain will stick to a steady drumbeat of quiet diplomacy for the rest of the year, two people inside government said, including talks with G7 and G20 partners, ongoing contact with Gulf allies, and a bid to maximize the U.K.’s G20 presidency starting in January. 

But a minister in Burnham’s government predicted that when it comes to international relations, and especially military action, Trump’s election drubbing “will not make much difference” to his mindset. 

Anxiety in London over Trump’s next move has certainly not been quelled by initial post-election ripples within the White House, either. Ministers and aides are watching nervously for further news of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s future — generally seen as a reliable interlocutor with the U.K. — while one serving British diplomat said Stephen Miller’s installation as Trump’s chief of staff represented a “red flag.” 

The senior party official quoted above said: “The U.S.’s relationship with every single country in the world has just been thrown into a level of uncertainty and fluidity.”

PARIS — EU diplomatic chief Kaja Kallas has another enemy who wants her out: Marine Le Pen. 

The far-right French leader wants to dismantle, or at the very least drastically reduce, the EU’s diplomatic arm if she wins the 2027 presidential election, according to four National Rally officials. 

“The reality is that [Kallas’s] usefulness is very limited, and she duplicates the diplomacy of member states,” said Charles-Henri Gallois, adviser to National Rally President Jordan Bardella. “No one recognizes her legitimacy, particularly not the United States, nor China.”

The comments reveal growing tensions over the EU’s power as nationalist parties from France to Germany and Poland seek to wrest power back from Brussels, with foreign policy among their top targets. They also put extra pressure on Kallas and the European External Action Service, which has been locked in a protracted turf war on foreign policy with the European Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen.

The view inside the National Rally is that the EU’s diplomatic service is not only a waste of taxpayer money but also gets in the way of European nations being able to flex their muscles on the world stage. 

One example is Ukraine, on which Kallas and Le Pen are deeply divided — although they have not clashed publicly. The former Estonian prime minister is one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics and a staunch supporter of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, while Le Pen is pushing for an international peace conference to settle the conflict and says Europe has run out of money to give to Kyiv. 

Kallas has “used very warrior-like language on Ukraine,” said National Rally MEP Jean-Paul Garraud. “We support Ukraine but if we expressed ourselves like that we would be in total war” with Russia, he said.  

Le Pen has directed her most vicious attacks against von der Leyen, who has long been accused by the far right of exceeding her powers. But it’s Kallas and the EEAS that risk becoming collateral damage under a far-right presidency in France.

Le Pen is the front-runner ahead of next year’s presidential election. In a recent visit to Brussels, she vowed to downsize the European Union if she comes to power. 

“France will no longer accept that the Commission exercises diplomatic competences, and even less military or intelligence competencies,” she told reporters. This shrinking of EU institutions would include snipping the wings of the EEAS, according to the four National Rally officials, who were granted anonymity to speak freely.

The move would put the National Rally on a collision course with pro-European parties, which see the EU’s diplomatic arm as an essential tool as the global stage becomes more competitive and more aggressive. 

“If Marine Le Pen becomes president of France, she will quickly realise that … France is a medium-sized country on the global stage,” said Irish Renew MEP Barry Andrews, who chairs the European Parliament’s development committee.

 “Without the collective power of Europe, France has no chance going up against the U.S. or China alone,” he said.

The EEAS snapped back at the criticism. “Across Europe, the far right is against the very idea of European cooperation,” said an EEAS spokesperson. 

“EU diplomacy defends European interests, including those of France. The EU’s global delegation network is a major strategic asset,” the official told POLITICO in response to Le Pen’s comments.

Money matters

The push against Kallas and her diplomats also comes as the National Rally limbers up for a fight with the Commission over France’s EU budget contribution, if they win the election. Last month, the National Rally unveiled its plans for a €11 billion cut to France’s EU contribution for 2027, which is currently expected to total approximately €30 billion. 

POLITICO’s Poll of Polls puts Le Pen on 34% in the first round, well ahead of far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon on 17% and center-right hopeful Edouard Philippe on 16%. Polls also suggest she would beat most of her potential rivals in a runoff.

While France could not unilaterally cut the EEAS’s budget, the National Rally says it sees allies in Italy, in Spain’s nationalist party Vox (which could end up working with the center-right after this month’s election), and in Andrej Babiš’s Czech Republic. 

The offensive could get nasty as the Commission and Le Pen arm-wrestle over money. 

“The EEAS is great for friends of friends, who want jobs,” said one National Rally official. “The real estate bought or rented by the EEAS is a waste of money. I’m shocked to see the amounts involved in local contracts; it’s unbelievable,” said a National Rally MEP. 

Le Pen’s criticism coincides with criticism from European governments about the efficiency of the EU’s foreign policy apparatus, with France and Germany jointly pitching plans to reform the EEAS.

The concerns voiced by senior diplomats in both countries focus on the fact that the EEAS lacks policy tools to influence foreign relations. The Franco-German initiative suggests integrating the EEAS with the Commission, which has a larger budget as well as control over trade and tech policies.

It also coincides with proposals to severely cut back on the EU’s foreign policy budget. Commission officials have internally simulated slashing the bloc’s Global Europe budget — worth €200 billion in the last long-term budget — by as much as 40% in the next budget.

The EEAS itself, which has an annual budget of close to €1 billion and employs more than 5,200 people globally, is working on internal reforms that Secretary-General Kajsa Ollongren is expected to present to staff later this month.

Major budget cuts would have the effect of gutting the EU’s network of more than 100 global delegations, which are staffed by diplomats as well as Commission personnel from external-facing units like DG MENA (the Directorate-General for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf).

International organizations have pushed back forcefully against plans to slash the EU’s development aid budget, with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres writing to the heads of the Commission and Council and urging them to preserve the funding.

Giorgio Leali contributed reporting.

Eingeklemmt zwischen Kaliningrad und Belarus liegt die verwundbarste Stelle der NATO. Genau hier entsteht mit der Panzerbrigade 45 das wohl wichtigste Projekt der deutschen Zeitenwende. Bis 2027 sollen fast 5.000 deutsche Soldaten dauerhaft in Litauen stationiert werden.

Doch die Bedrohung durch Russland ist längst nicht mehr nur theoretisch: Drohnen, Desinformation und brennende Infrastruktur zeigen, dass der hybride Krieg Litauen bereits erreicht hat. Im Gespräch erklärt der litauische Verteidigungsminister Robertas Kaunas, wie real die Gefahr einer Invasion ist.

Die Folge beleuchtet, wie sich die baltischen Staaten wappnen und was Europa tun muss, falls die USA als Schutzmacht ausfallen. Eine präzise Einordnung, warum die Abschreckung an der Ostflanke über das Schicksal des Kontinents entscheidet und die Sicherheit in Vilnius letztlich die Sicherheit in Berlin bedeutet.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH
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BRUSSELS — NATO allies face a €7 billion funding gap for Ukraine this year as Russia steps up its bombing campaign and Kyiv calls for more air defenses.

NATO’s 32 member countries agreed in July to provide €70 billion in military aid to Ukraine in 2026 and an equivalent sum in 2027.

But the alliance now faces a shortfall of around €7 billion, with less than two months until the end of the year, according to three alliance diplomats, all of whom were granted anonymity to speak freely. It is unclear where exactly the current gap is coming from, but it is likely to hamper Ukraine’s ability to buy vital equipment to fend off Russian missiles and drones this winter.

The shortfall comes ahead of an alliance meeting on Nov. 17 where European capitals are expected to examine ways to boost funding and increase the transfer of critical weapons to Ukraine. While new NATO funding pledges are still expected, it’s possible that allies may fail to meet this year’s target, the diplomats said.

A NATO official speaking on behalf of the organization said that “allies continue to provide essential military support to Ukraine” to fulfill the pledge and “are working to ensure that Ukraine has the support it needs now and into the future.”

The target combines bilateral contributions throughout the year and €30 billion drawn from the EU’s €90 billion loan to Ukraine.

Kyiv has repeatedly urged allies to step up their funding as Russia continues its devastating air assaults; more than 40 people were reportedly killed after a school bombing this week.

During a closed-door meeting with allies Thursday, Ukraine’s ambassador to NATO Alyona Getmanchuk “emphasised the importance for Ukraine of NATO Allies fulfilling the commitment made at the Ankara Summit to provide €70 billion in military support this year,” according to a statement by the Ukrainian mission.

“It is essential to mobilise all partners to the fullest extent, accelerate new decisions, and translate previously announced commitments into concrete deliveries of equipment or transfers of funds,” it added.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has also asked allies to dig deep for more money. “With winter coming, and with Russia’s aggression unrelenting, allies need to do more, especially in support of air defense,” he said during a recent visit to Tallinn.

The missing cash underscores the growing difficulties faced by allied governments in continuing to finance Ukraine. The U.S., once the main giver, has stopped almost all new aid since Donald Trump returned to the White House.

That has left European countries as Ukraine’s key supporters. But many capitals face growing fiscal strains while countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Nordic nations — which have historically provided outsized contributions — have repeatedly called on others to give more.

There is “some fatigue” from the largest donors “[which] have repeatedly financed packages,” the third NATO diplomat said.

NATO’s Ukraine funding is typically channeled toward programs like the alliance’s non-lethal aid scheme, called the Comprehensive Assistance Package, as well as its Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List that has European allies buying critical U.S. weapons like Patriot interceptors for Kyiv. The shortfall includes a $1.9 billion gap in funding for unpaid PURL deliveries, two of the diplomats said.

Separately, allies remain skeptical that they will meet Rutte’s target of $15 billion for PURL this year. “I do not think that there’s a chance we will meet that,” said the same NATO diplomat cited above.

Ukraine’s NATO mission said 29 allies have now contributed to the scheme. Since its launch in 2025, it has raised around $9 billion in total contributions, the two diplomats added.

PARIS — Far-left presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party set out leaving NATO and nationalizing defense companies in its official platform released Friday.

“Immediately withdraw from NATO’s integrated command and then, in stages, from the organization itself. Reject the tribute demanded by the United States of 5% of GDP devoted to defense spending,” read France Unbowed’s 222-page program.

However, France under Mélenchon would still provide assistance to European Union countries under EU treaties, the document added, echoing what the far-left leader previously told POLITICO.

An increasing number of polls place Mélenchon in second place in next year’s high-stakes election to replace President Emmanuel Macron. The top two vote-getters go on to a second round, which could see Mélenchon facing off against far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who also pledges to take France out of NATO’s integrated command.

Unlike Le Pen’s far-right party, France Unbowed does not explicitly say it would stop providing assistance to Ukraine — but it does insist on the need for a diplomatic solution. Any peace agreement would need to lean on “collective security guarantees, between the belligerents and with the rest of Europe.”

France Unbowed wants more arms regulation, including of lethal autonomous weapons systems and nuclear weapons.

The far-left party is also pushing back against the “space arms race,” including by pledging to close NATO’s space center in Toulouse, but says France should have the means to guarantee its sovereignty. Unlike most other political parties, France Unbowed has strong interest in space policy, and argues in its presidential platform that France should acquire a space shuttle.

France Unbowed lawmakers have previously pushed for France to procure Dassault Aviation’s Vortex, a European reusable orbital spaceplane program spearheaded by the French aerospace manufacturer.

Overall, France should invest more in so-called critical enablers, meaning military equipment in areas such as communications, intelligence and logistics that are currently mostly provided by the U.S. via NATO. “They must be produced as a matter of priority,” the party wrote.

It also wants to nationalize some of the country’s main defense companies including ArianeGroup.

A more detailed platform specifically on defense will be released later, a France Unbowed lawmaker told POLITICO.

A joint U.S. government statement says the hacks are affecting the food, transportation, and healthcare industries after reports of global mass hacks.

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.

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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BERLIN — German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius on Wednesday pushed back against criticism that Berlin is putting its own arms industry ahead of European defense cooperation, arguing that other countries are doing exactly the same.

Speaking at the Berlin Security Conference, Pistorius was responding to Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, chair of the European Parliament’s defense committee, who accused Germany of remaining too focused on buying weapons from its own manufacturers instead of working with European partners.

“Everyone says, unanimously and every day, not just on Sundays, that we want more defense cooperation and more joint armament projects,” Pistorius said. “But when push comes to shove, every country says, just as unanimously, but each for itself: ‘My industry must not be left behind.’”

The dispute highlights a major problem for Europe’s defense ambitions. EU countries want to build stronger armed forces and buy more weapons together, but governments are also keen to protect jobs and factories at home.

The numbers show how difficult that cooperation remains. EU countries spent €115 billion on military equipment in 2025, but only 24% of that spending went toward joint purchases, according to the European Defence Agency.

Brussels wants that share to reach at least 40% by 2030. The EU has also launched the €150 billion SAFE loans-for-weapons program to encourage countries to buy arms together rather than separately.

But national interests continue to get in the way, with governments often reluctant to see major weapons contracts go to companies in other countries. Poland’s government said it wants 89% of the almost €44 billion it is getting in SAFE funds to be spent on domestic industries.

Pistorius defended that approach, saying governments also have a responsibility to protect their economies and industries.

“I would therefore reject the criticism in your question,” he told Strack-Zimmermann. “And if there is criticism to be made, it should not be directed at Germany, but at literally all Europeans with a defense industry.”