Tag: European Union

Finland’s Military Prepares as Russia-Ukraine War Gets Closer to Home

The facade of the apartment building was blown off, the remains sagging to one side. Working together, the military police, the emergency services, the fire department and the explosives team cordoned off the scene, swept for other explosives, disarmed one, and searched for those still alive in the rubble with sniffer dogs, while removing the […]

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E.U. Foreign Ministers Hold Surprise Summit in Wartime Kyiv

Nearly all of the European Union’s highest diplomats met in Ukraine’s battered wartime capital on Monday, convening a surprise summit to reassert the bloc’s commitment to Ukraine against Russia’s invasion and to rebut concerns that some countries’ support might be waning. The foreign ministers came from 23 of the European Union’s 27 members, and were […]

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Ethnic Serbs in Northern Kosovo Feel ‘Trapped’ by Politics

After ethnic Serbian gunmen stormed the small village of Banjska in Kosovo last week and fought a deadly battle with Kosovar forces, Serbia deployed thousands of military forces along Kosovo’s border, and the White House denounced the move as “destabilizing.” The violence raised fears that this troubled Balkan region could be plunged into a wider […]

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Tight Finish in Slovak Vote Makes Government’s Shape Hard to Predict

Two exit polls released early Sunday after Slovakia’s parliamentary election showed a tight finish between a liberal party that wants to maintain robust support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and a Russia-friendly populist party, in a vote that many in Europe saw as a bellwether of support for the war. But neither of […]

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EU court rejects Valve appeal against €1.6 million fine for ‘geo-blocking’ Steam games, says policy existed to protect publisher royalties and ‘the margins earned by Valve’

The Court of Justice of the European Union has dismissed an attempt by Valve to convince it that the geo-blocking of Steam game activation keys did not infringe on EU law, reaffirming its finding from 2021 that “Valve and five PC videogames publishers unlawfully restricted cross-border sales of certain PC videogames that are compatible with […]

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Armenia Finds Itself Cast Adrift in a Tough Neighborhood

On the day Azerbaijan’s military sliced through the defenses of an ethnic Armenian redoubt last week, American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division had just finished a training mission in nearby Armenia, a longtime ally of Russia that has been trying to reduce its near-total dependence on Moscow for its security. The Americans unfurled a […]

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In Europe, the Far Right’s Time Has Come

Europe’s extreme-right tide has been a long time coming. Early breakthroughs punctuated the 1980s and ’90s, with a period of steady advances in the 2000s, not least in Austria, where the far right entered government. But in the wake of the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, an important shift has taken place. Rather […]

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Greece, Battered a Decade Ago, Is Booming

Paris Skouros pointed toward the sky outside his office in Athens on a recent weekday. In the past six months, four high-rises had sprung up, built by Greek and international builders to be sold for use as tourist rentals, foreign real estate investments and company offices. Farther afield, a fresh crop of new buildings dotted […]

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Bringing Ukraine Into NATO and the E.U. Is the Key to Peace

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. I’m Tom Friedman, and I’m the Foreign Affairs columnist for The New York Times. I just returned from Kyiv, […]

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Europe Made a Bold Pledge of Ammunition for Ukraine. Now Comes the Hard Part.

The pledge last March sounded as catchy as it was ambitious: European Union states would deliver a million rounds of 155-millimeter ammunition to Ukraine within a year. Now, at a critical moment in the war and with Ukraine running short of artillery shells to drive its counteroffensive, experts, weapons manufacturers and even some government officials […]

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A Dirty Deal With Putin Could Be a Power Shift for the World

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. I’m Tom Friedman, and I’m the Foreign Affairs columnist for The New York Times. I just returned from Kyiv, […]

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The EU says ‘prove it’ to companies that are dubiously claiming their products are environmentally friendly

Have you ever looked at a product that claims to be carbon neutral or environmentally friendly and wondered what the heck that means, specifically? It can be a dodgy marketing practice that induces consumers into buying something that may not be anything of the sort. It’s called greenwashing. The EU parliament has reached a provisional […]

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The Fight Between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Explained

Azerbaijan said on Tuesday that it had begun a military operation against an Armenian enclave inside its territory, raising fears of a sharp escalation in a conflict that has already resulted in two wars since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Decades of violence and geopolitical rivalry underpin the dispute between the two former Soviet […]

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A Trip to Ukraine Clarified the Stakes. And They’re Huge.

“Human morality must win this war,” Zelensky said. “Everyone in the world who values freedom, who values human life, who believes that people must win. And our success, the specific success of Ukraine, depends not only on us, on Ukrainians, but also on the extent to which the entire vast moral space of the world […]

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Swedish E.U. Official Johan Floderus Held in Iran in Brutal Conditions

Ten months with no communication with his family. Three hundred days in solitary confinement. A cell that’s fully lit around the clock. These are some of conditions faced by Johan Floderus, a European Union official from Sweden who was arrested in Iran in April last year and has been held hostage since, his family revealed […]

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