cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10217871

A joint report by the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), Beyond the Battlefield: Russia’s Information War Against Ukraine’s European Future (opens pdf), shows that Russia’s attempts to undermine Ukraine’s EU path are systematic, coordinated, and persistent. They are not isolated ‘fake news’ stories. They are part of a wider Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) ecosystem designed to weaken Ukraine, divide European societies, and damage confidence in enlargement.

For Ukraine, EU membership means security, institutional resilience, democratic transformation, and the sovereign right of Ukrainians to choose their own future. For the EU, Ukraine’s accession is also a strategic investment in the stability of the continent. A democratic and successful Ukraine inside the European family would be a direct defeat for the Kremlin’s imperial project. Russia understands this. That is why it seeks to make Ukraine’s European future appear impossible, costly, or dangerous.

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The report documents how Russia’s information apparatus works across several layers. Official state voices set the main messages. State-controlled outlets, state-linked assets – including networks of anonymous Telegram channels and pseudo-local websites – and state-aligned commentators then repackage and amplify them. This structure helps hostile actors hide attribution, test narratives in smaller channels, move them across platforms, and present coordinated manipulation as if it were genuine public opinion.

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Russian FIMI actors seek to persuade Europeans that Ukraine is too expensive, too corrupt, too unstable, or too culturally different to join the Union. These messages are adapted to local vulnerabilities. In Germany, they exploit economic concerns. In France, they often rely on corruption and conspiracy narratives. In Poland, they use historical sensitivities and anti-refugee themes. Across Europe, Ukrainians – especially refugees – are repeatedly portrayed as a security threat. Such manipulation can damage public debate and fuel hostility against Ukrainians.

A dangerous feature of these operations is their ability to move across borders. A narrative tested in the Ukrainian information space can later be adapted for EU audiences. A statement from a European debate can be taken out of context and reintroduced into Ukraine to create the false impression that Europe has lost confidence in Kyiv. This circulation of manipulation is why Ukrainian and European institutions need a shared analytical picture.

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The report also points to a broader challenge: Russia is no longer relying only on individual falsehoods. It is building a manipulative information environment. Generative AI, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, cross-platform amplification, and information laundering allow hostile actors to produce content quickly, cheaply, and at scale. The aim is to flood the information space, exhaust audiences, and make distrust feel normal.

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Archived

cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/euro@feddit.online/p/1838883/belgium-bans-imports-from-occupied-palestinian-territories

France has granted political asylum to Alexei Moskalev and his daughter, Masha, according to inTransit, the human rights group that assisted the family.

The Moskalevs arrived in France on a humanitarian visa in March 2026.

Moskalev has raised Masha alone. Authorities in the [Russian] Tula region took notice of the family after Masha drew an antiwar drawing in an art class.

As the independent Russian human rights media project OVD-Info reports,

In April 2022, sixth-grader Masha Moskaleva drew an anti-war picture in her art class. The girl depicted the Russian and Ukrainian flags with the words “No to war” and “Glory to Ukraine”, and a woman with a child, at whom rockets were flying from the Russian side. After this, problems began: the [Russian] police got involved, and there were interviews with FSB officers.

In December 2022, the family’s home was searched. It turned out that a criminal case had been opened against the girl’s father, Alexei Moskalev, for repeated discrediting of the army because of posts on social media. Moskalev spent one year and ten months in a penal colony.

In 2023, he was sentenced to two years in a penal colony for “discrediting” the Russian army over comments he had posted on Odnoklassniki.

When Moskalev was placed under house arrest and later sent to the colony, Masha was transferred to a social rehabilitation center. Her mother, who had never raised her, later took her in.

Moskalev was released from the colony in 2024 and reclaimed his daughter. The two then left Russia.

Archived

This article offers a case study of the Russian-American pro-family organisation the World Congress of Families, explaining its emergence, strategies, and religious and political agenda from 1995 until 2019. The article adds to a growing body of research that sheds light on transnational networks of conservative and right-wing political and civil society actors. It zooms in on Russian pro-family activists as connected to such networks and thereby takes an innovative perspective on the Russian conservative turn as part of a global phenomenon. The article also makes the argument that a specific Russian Christian Right movement, comparable to and linked with the American Christian Right and conservative Christian groups in Europe, is taking shape in Russia.

Article was published in 2019.

The European Union has authorized Ukraine to spend part of a €6 billion ($6.9 billion) defense loan on Chinese-made drone components, the Financial Times reported, citing sources.

The European Court of Justice said people running free, donation-funded websites can qualify as “operators” under the EU’s Russia sanctions, even if they are not traditional broadcasters.

With its judgement, the EU Court of Justice ruled that the bloc’s RT (formerly Russia Today) is banned also from non-commercial operators, closing a potential loophole and increasing the effectiveness of EU sanctions.

Here is the judgement by the Court (pdf)

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Sharing videos from Russia’s state TV can land even a donation-funded blogger under EU sanctions, Europe’s top court ruled Thursday.

The European Court of Justice said a German court may treat three people accused of reposting videos from Russia Today Germany on the website Traugott Ickeroth as “operators” under the EU’s Russia sanctions rules, even though the website is freely accessible and not run by a traditional broadcaster.

German prosecutors accuse the trio — known only as R, N and K — of posting Russia Today Germany videos four times in 2023 through the website’s “Live-Ticker” blog. Under German law, violating the EU broadcasting ban can carry prison terms of three months to five years. Court records say R and N received more than 60,000 euros (roughly $68,400) in donations between April 2022 and August 2023.

The EU suspended broadcasts by Russia Today and Sputnik days after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, saying the Kremlin-controlled outlets were central to a disinformation campaign supporting the war. Since then, the bloc has expanded sanctions to thousands of Russian officials, oligarchs, banks, companies and other targets, making them one of its main tools for squeezing Moscow.

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The judges said the law does not limit the ban to commercial broadcasters. Instead, an “operator” simply means the person responsible for making prohibited content available to the public. “Applied to the field of communication and the broadcasting of media and digital content, that term refers to any natural or legal person directly or indirectly responsible for making available or transmitting that content to the public.”

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Jed Odermatt, a reader in international law at The City Law School, City St George’s, University of London, said: “By finding that profit motives are irrelevant to determining who is an ‘operator,’ the court confirms that these sanctions also apply to individuals running websites that disseminate prohibited content, closing what would otherwise have been an exploitable loophole.”

Luigi Lonardo, associate professor of European law at the Luxembourg Centre for European Law at the University of Luxembourg and adjunct faculty at Sciences Po’s Paris School of International Affairs, said the judgment shows why the court was willing to read the sanctions broadly. “This judgment is about the reach of EU censorship,” he said. “It is good news for the effectiveness of EU sanctions.”

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With the EU law question now settled, the case returns to the Saarbrücken Regional Court, where judges will decide whether the three defendants committed a crime under Germany’s sanctions law.

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Europe's first-ever dedicated non-alcoholic craft beer festival has kicked off in Warsaw, placing Poland on the frontier of the fast-growing alcohol-free beer market while also spotlighting the nation’s wider shift towards mindful drinking.

The 5,120 heat-related deaths in Germany in 2026 through June 28, published by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), is therefore an estimate. But that does not mean the figure is pulled out of thin air. "It is based on a statistical correlation," says Alexandra Schneider, a meteorologist, epidemiologist and deputy director of the Institute of Epidemiology at Helmholtz Munich.

The presentation was led by: Ben Stoikovich, GreenX Metals Ltd. Kazimierz Chojna, GreenX Metals Ltd.

Poland recorded 235 attempted illegal crossings from Belarus during the first half of 2026, down from more than 15,500 during the same period last year, the Interior Ministry said on Saturday.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.world/post/49585184

Translation:

5, 10 or 15 percent? Card terminals are increasingly asking for tips.

You may have had to do this lately too: choosing what percentage tip you want to give on the card terminal when paying in a restaurant or bar. Or clicking 'no tip' after all.

The number of hospitality businesses doing this is growing, and we are also tipping more often when we have to choose. This is evident from figures shared by payment companies with the NOS. When giving such a tip, we most often choose 5 percent from the options of 5, 10, 15 percent, or a self-chosen amount.

Hospitality businesses using payment and software company Tebi can decide for themselves whether to display the menu. It turns out that at coffee shops where you order at a counter, the percentage of tippers skyrockets when they ask for a tip. Almost no one adds a tip by card if no request is displayed, but with a request, that figure is over 20 percent.

In upscale restaurants, customers often leave a tip by card anyway, even if not asked. With a tipping menu, even more people do so, according to the figures. Percentage of transactions with a tip

At surf school and beach bar The Shore in Scheveningen, they have been working with percentage tips for quite some time. During the pandemic, the business switched to card payments only. "Tips dropped drastically then," says co-owner Thomas Franse.

In 2021, The Shore got a POS system that had that tipping option, and it was enabled. "That was definitely the moment the tips went up again."

Franse has mixed feelings about asking for tips. "It is not the best customer experience. In the beginning, we received quite a lot of negative reactions alongside the positive ones. However, it is an important source of income for the staff." He also notices customers getting used to it now, because more and more hospitality businesses are doing it. A tip menu on a card reader

Payment company Adyen compiled data on the proportion of hospitality business owners who are customers of their establishments who use a custom tipping menu. For restaurants, this rose from 19 percent in the first half of 2025 to 22 percent in the first half of 2026. For bars and cafes, it rose from 46 to 53 percent.

"This indicates that this is increasingly becoming a standard part of modern payment processes in the hospitality industry," says Julien Marlier, Benelux Manager. On card terminals where the tipping function is active, 61 percent choose 'no tip'. Consequently, 39 percent do leave a tip, averaging 4.31 euros.

Tebi also has figures on the percentage we select when giving a tip. Most often, people choose 5 percent. "About a quarter enter their own, usually small, amount," says general manager Florian Brunsting. "High 'American' tip amounts are hardly ever seen." In the US, a tip of at least 20 percent is expected in restaurants. How much tip should we give?

The Irish pub Mick O'Connells in Utrecht also has card readers with tip requests. "It is sometimes quite surprising who does and doesn't give a tip," says manager James O'Halloran. "Young students, from whom you wouldn't expect a tip, might give 5 or 10 percent. Wealthier bank employees sometimes give nothing at all."

The tip is usually 5 percent, he notes as well. "On average, we receive about 3,500 to 4,000 euros in tips monthly. That is distributed entirely among employees, based on the number of working hours." On average, it amounts to about 2 euros per hour. Less personal

Restaurant and bar patrons react differently to tip requests. "I didn't give a tip," says Sophie, who ordered at the counter at a salad bar in Utrecht and had to choose. "I find it less personal. It's just: here, do you want to give a tip or not?"

"I like it because then I can choose for myself what, if anything, to give," says a visitor to The Shore in Scheveningen. He gave a 5 percent tip. "People work hard for it. So it's nice to give a little something extra." More often in Amsterdam

Whether entrepreneurs opt for a tip menu varies by region. For instance, in Amsterdam, over 30 percent of Tebi customers have enabled the feature, whereas in Nijmegen, for example, it is only 10 percent.

During a survey in Den Bosch, several hospitality businesses said they did not want to get involved. "I'm not really a fan of it," says Marc Bouman of Brasserij Breton. "I'm not going to push tips unnecessarily; people give it if they want to."

"If you show that choice, people might feel forced," says Angie Joosten of Café CinQ. "For us, it works just fine to leave it entirely up to each individual."

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary’s president signed a constitutional amendment into law on Saturday that ends his term in office, bringing to a close a dispute between him and the country’s new government that was seeking to oust him as part of a purge of officials appointed during the reign of Viktor Orbán.

The planned abolition of support for new, small solar systems from 2027 in particular could cause investments worth billions to collapse and put tens of thousands of jobs at medium-sized businesses and in the skilled trades at risk nationwide, the German Solar Association (BSW) warned.

Europe’s China debate has long been shaped by the assumption that China’s power would continue to grow almost automatically and that this rise would lead to liberalization. When this did not happen, Europe thought it could get away with adapting and managing risks.

That’s no longer the case.

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Behind the display of [China's] strength lie mounting structural pressures: an ageing society, a shrinking workforce, a deep property crisis, weak consumption, high debt and slowing growth. China’s population is becoming more pessimistic, saving rather than spending.

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This vulnerability is not good news for Europe. If anything, China’s fragility is reinforcing political control at home and a more assertive posture abroad. Beijing seeks to reduce its own dependencies while deepening those of others.

This has consequences for Europe. China’s weak domestic demand is pushing excess capacity abroad. Massive state backing, including subsidies, allows Chinese firms to pursue aggressive pricing wars, which threatens the competitiveness of non-Chinese manufacturers globally. As Beijing expands its industrial dominance, it creates dependencies on Chinese technology and innovation. This is not just a trade issue but one of power. A Europe dependent on China in key sectors is more vulnerable to political pressure.

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And yet this is not only a story of risks. It is also a story about Europe’s room for maneuver. The EU is vulnerable, but so is Beijing.

China needs Europe more than is often assumed by European policymakers. Access to the European Single Market remains essential for Beijing, especially as the U.S. market becomes more restrictive. Europe is one of the few places where Chinese firms can still sell higher-value goods at attractive profit margins.

European research, technological excellence, and industrial know-how also remain valuable. This latter leverage is, however, limited and shrinking. Europe should not let it slip away unused.

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That is why Europe needs a different China policy.

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There is no hope for “change through trade”; economics and security cannot be separated. Instead of hope for systemic change, however, Europe should pursue a more interest-driven and leverage-based strategy.

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First, Europe should build on its strengths [and] protect and expand its technological advantages, especially in areas where China still depends on European capabilities.

Second, diversification should become the default. Reshoring and “Buy European” drives alone will not be sufficient [so the] the EU needs to diversify supply chains and export markets. For this, it needs to work more closely with partners across the Global South. Europe needs to create conditions that guarantee investors reliable demand in the European market even when they do not produce in China and therefore accept higher costs.

Third, the EU needs credible escalation tools. To be taken seriously, Brussels must be credible when it threatens to use the Anti-Coercion Instrument. If a qualified majority of member states is required to block, rather than approve, its activation, Europe’s deterrence grows.

Fourth, Europe should pursue a genuinely leverage-based diplomacy. Dialogue remains important and should be tied to concrete demands. Europe should use market access, investment, and technological cooperation as bargaining power. In return, Europe should seek concrete concessions from Beijing, including curbs on export surges that undermine European industry, lower exports of dual-use goods to Russia, and tougher localization conditions for Chinese investments in Europe.

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Europe’s leaders should rather rethink their assumptions and establish a new diplomacy with China: aiming for concrete progress in priority areas backed by a credible willingness to use unilateral means to defend Europe’s core interests.

Europe must be prepared to defend those interests, within a new and more pragmatic approach to China.

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Archived

cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/euro@feddit.online/p/1836822/ban-on-destruction-of-unsold-clothes-and-shoes-enters-into-application

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10199378

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Russia’s federal budget revenues are set to decline by hundreds of billions of rubles. At the same time, Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries are leading to refinery shutdowns that could force producers to reduce oil output. Russia's oil industry not only contributes to the federal budget but also receives subsidies and tax breaks from it, meaning the losses could grow even larger. If oil production declines while budget payouts continue, the budget deficit could multiply several times over. In that event, even the state's financial reserves would not be enough to cover the shortfall.

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Russia has 38 medium- and large-scale oil refineries with a combined processing capacity of about 330 million metric tons per year. In 2024, they processed approximately 267 million metric tons of crude, the lowest figure since 2012. The financial results of individual refineries are no longer made public — instead, since 2022, all significant figures have been consolidated at the level of their parent holding companies. As a result, the direct revenue losses caused by shutdowns at specific refineries can be estimated only indirectly, by examining the declining performance of the parent groups and exchange-traded indicators for Russia's domestic petroleum products market.

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The industry's direct losses in 2025 alone were estimated at more than 100 billion rubles ($1.3 billion), and when estimates of lost revenue are included, the figure exceeds 1 trillion rubles ($13 billion). For the federal budget, the key issue is that insufficient refining capacity forces companies to cut oil production, largely because of infrastructure bottlenecks that limit the transportation and export loading of crude oil.

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The Power of Siberia pipeline reached its designed capacity, allowing Gazprom to supply more natural gas to China ... – 38.8 billion cubic meters. The compensation, however, is far from equivalent. Prices for gas sold to China are linked to a basket of petroleum products and are subject to a substantial discount, while the lack of alternative export routes leaves Moscow with little bargaining power.

The lack of alternative export routes leaves Moscow with little bargaining power in selling oil to China.

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Lost refining capacity cannot be restored quickly using domestically produced equipment, and anti-drone defenses at refineries are not enough to solve the problem.

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[Russian] policymakers must now contend with an entirely new factor: government payments to subsidize fuel imports under a new mechanism. It is one of the measures the Russian government has introduced to address the country's worsening fuel crisis. When oil prices are high — a state that would ordinarily benefit the federal budget — the Russian government is obligated to pay hundreds of billions of rubles to domestic oil companies while also providing compensation to fuel importers.

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Archived

Once upon a time, inequality in Europe was largely horizontal. The rich western half drove BMWs and holidayed abroad, while the poorer east rewired its own appliances and queued for bread. But three decades of catch-up growth in erstwhile communist countries has put paid to jokes about Romanian cars whose top speed was “downhill”. These days inequality in Europe has a vertical dimension—one that goes up and down family trees. Youngsters unable to move out of their parents’ spare room due to sky-high house prices wonder if they will ever enjoy the lifestyle as adults which they knew as kids. Thirty-somethings in jobs pay hefty taxes to fund the pensions of oldies who retired in their prime. Costs related to ageing are guzzling a quarter of the European Union’s GDP, a figure unlikely to fall as the Old Continent grows older still. To be a young European is to feel oneself an unwitting participant in an intergenerational confidence trick.

If the European welfare state looks like a pyramid scheme, its pharaohs are the “baby-boomers”. The bumper generation born in the two decades after 1945, aged roughly between 60 and 80 (Hello Mum! Hi Dad!), would like to go down in history as the first in centuries not to have started a war pitting one bit of the continent against another. Sociologists will surely celebrate the 1960s, when boomers sought to replace chauvinism with rock ’n’ roll. But economists will judge them less kindly. Boomers granted themselves generous pensions, relying on demographic trends that have since lapsed. The costs turned Europe lethargic. Today’s grandparents inherited a continent rebuilding itself after war; they will pass on one in need of repair after the damage they helped wreak.

The most obvious goodies in the intergenerational heist are houses, which boomers bought for a song and which are now worth millions. Yes, they did so by borrowing money at eye-watering interest rates—but they then profited when property prices kept climbing after the mortgages had been repaid. Even adjusted for inflation, housing in Europe has gone up by a quarter in just a decade, with rents also increasing faster than incomes. The result, beyond making boomers feel like financial whizzes when they were merely lucky, is to lock the young out of home ownership. The share of Europeans who live in their parents’ homes well into middle age (not entirely voluntarily, one assumes, no matter the quality of mama’s cooking) has steadily increased over time. Among those born in the 1980s nearly a quarter still lived at home at 30, half again as many as those born two decades earlier. Home ownership used to be the path to financial independence. Now inheritance looks a better bet—if it ever arrives.

Europe is hardly the only place with old people in pricey homes. But its cradle-to-grave welfare state has pushed more of the cost of ageing onto the young. In most other rich places, including America, Japan and South Korea, over-65s derive most of their income from working a bit and drawing on private pensions they funded during their careers. Europeans quit their jobs early, live long and expect the state—ie, current taxpayers—to pick up the tab for their retirement plans. In America the trillions of dollars stashed away in private pensions provided the cash for venture-capital and private-equity funds, which in turn allowed American firms to grow into behemoths. In most European countries today’s pensions are paid by today’s workers, in the expectation that tomorrow’s as-yet-unborn workers will pick up the baton and fund their own parents as they age. (Some of it is financed by government deficits, which the yet-to-be-born will also have to repay one day.) That means less capital for European firms, one reason why there are so few big ones in areas like tech. Instead there is a huge unmet cost that weighs down the public purse.

None of this mattered when both the economy and the population were growing, as post-war babies remember from their youths. But Europe’s population is now peaking—not least thanks to boomers starting the trend of having fewer kids. In 1960 over five workers supported each pensioner in western Europe. Now there are just 2.5 workers supporting each pensioner. The upshot is that today’s young know they must at least in part make their own pension arrangements, as Americans do, on top of shelling out for payouts to their parents. The only other readily available option to improve the ratio of workers to pensioners is to import lots of migrants. But efforts to do so have helped poison European politics by boosting nasty parties on the populist right. No continent for young men

Nobody will begrudge boomers their elongated lifespans. (Again: an awkward hello to your columnist’s parents here.) But an older society is one that caters to the immediate present, not the future. The median age of voters in France’s most recent presidential elections was 52, not least because the old are more likely than the young to shuffle to the polls. That is within a decade of the effective retirement age. Unsurprisingly, politicians have made old people’s priorities their own. When budgets are tight, money can always be found to protect pensions and old-age homes; it is far easier to push through cuts to education and innovation instead. “The future of democracy is increasingly decided by voters who don’t have one,” laments Maxime Sbaihi, an economist at Club Landoy, a demography think-tank in France.

Things might have changed after covid-19, when the young endured years of social restrictions largely to protect the old. Alas, the favour has yet to be repaid (though these days there is a European Commissioner for “intergenerational fairness”). Raymond Aron, a French thinker, once warned that an ageing society is one that will “be stalked by the spirit of abdication”. That weary mood feels all too real for today’s Europeans, as they trudge past yet another nursery being converted into a nursing home.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/euro@feddit.online/p/1837114/trump-officials-want-to-use-human-rights-aid-to-advocate-for-white-south-africans-and-r