Years ago I was flipping through the ads of a ‘Black Friday’ sale from a large US retailer, while visiting a relative in North Carolina. Amid the pens and pencils was a child’s school bag with a large neon printed unicorn surrounded by lollipops and or hearts.
It was bullet proof.
I can’t recall what caliber of bullet it promised to stop. But the same paper had a semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle for sale at only $549.99 [€490], which normally retails at almost $1,000. I snapped a photo of it.
Guns for sale in North Carolina, including a Bushmaster which had been used to kill small children at an elementary school prior to the sale (Pic: Nikolaj Nielsen)
A few years earlier, a Bushmaster had been used to gun down 20 small children at Sandy Hook Elementary. Most of them were only six-years old.
A Benenlli 12-gauge tactical shotgun was also on sale. Last week, five-year-old Rhoam Summer and two others, aged 8 and 11 were shot dead at a school in Oregon by a 16-year old with a shotgun.
I mention this as someone who grew up in the United States and went to school there but can’t identify with a normalisation of violence splashed out as one-off specials and deals ahead of Christmas, a holiday that is cynically meant to celebrate peace and kindness.
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The EU’s top diplomat has backed the idea of a Black Sea naval mission to protect grain ships from Russian drones – but this would require much more than Brussels’ existing Red Sea operation, while air policing might be more effective.
“The EU should send a mission to the Black Sea,” said EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas in the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday (20 October).
“To protect merchant shipping, not to escalate, not to scare anyone, but to make sure that we will supply safely fuel, merchandise at normal prices, anything we need. This is how it should be,” she said.
Some “six attacks in 10 days by suspected Russian drones marks a dangerous and unacceptable escalation in the Black Sea,” Kallas added, with “rescuers still searching for seven sailors missing after the drone attack on two tankers near Romania’s Black Sea coast”.
The Russian attacks were costing Ukraine €60m a day in lost exports of grain and fertiliser, Kallas also said.
And Russia had changed its tactics to start targeting people instead of cargo, said Sidharth Kaushal, from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defence think-tank in London.
“Before, they targeted ports, not civilians, or vessels at sea. They realised that threat to life is a much more effective deterrent to commercial shipping than threat to cargo,” he told EUobserver.
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The European Parliament has called for more spending to build affordable houses — using funds for regional development that currently make up a third of the EU budget.
Cohesion funds should be used to protect the ‘right to stay’ in rural areas or in small cities, a principle that the parliament wants to write into the new budget legislation.
Peripheral regions often face depopulation due to few job opportunities, according to a parliamentary non-binding report passed with 601 votes in favour, 20 against, and 36 abstentions on Tuesday (20 October).
MEPs are also calling for strong cohesion funds that would allow cities to better prepare for climate emergencies and provide a budget for additional investments in housing.
Cohesion funds, which account for a total of €48.03bn in the existing 2021-2027 EU budget, usually finance infrastructure projects, like bridges, roads, or railways in countries with a lower-than-average per capita gross national income.
The commission proposed significant cuts to reduce regional funds in the next multi-annual budget, set to cover 2028-34, but a group of 16 member states, often benefitting from the funding, opposed the reduction.
Regional development plays a key role in European integration since it is the “only instrument which can unite all of us,” and should not be reduced in the next EU budget, said Left Lithuanian MEP Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis during a plenary debate on Monday (19 October).
Cohesion funds “could be the response to the radicalisation of Europe,” Fredis Beleris, a German centre-right MEP said.
For that to happen, cohesion funds must be accessible for small and medium-sized cities, who often struggle with formalities linked to EU funds, said Denis Nesci, Italian conservative MEP spearheading the file.
Small municipalities should be able to access cohesion funds “on an equal footing as bigger cities,” he said, echoing the dominant centre-right commission’s position and its aim to simplify regulations.
A diverse array of MEPs on Tuesday (20 October) expressed their enthusiasm for the UK ‘correcting the mistake’ of Brexit by rejoining the European Union 10 years after its people narrowly voted to leave.
“Trump, Xi and Putin might form a troika of iliberalism standing in defiance of the achievements of liberal democracy”, warned Barry Andrews, an Irish MEP for Renew, saying that the EU should not treat the United Kingdom “like any other third country”.
His party ally Sandro Gozi, an Italian MEP, added: “Every option must be on the table, from a special partnership to full EU membership.”
The debate on EU-UK relations in the Strasbourg parliament came a month ahead of a highly-anticipated EU-UK summit in Brussels on 20 November.
Although the UK rejoining the bloc is still a distant prospect, it is back on the agenda because of new prime minister Andy Burnham.
Brexit had “done more harm than good”, Burnham told delegates at the Labour party conference in late September, adding that “we will not give Britain the clear path we need into the rest of the century until we decide on a long-term relationship with what is still our largest market.”
Britain could “go all the way” back into the EU, added Burnham.
European parliament president Robert Metsola has given an open invitation for Burnham to address MEPs, her office told EUobserver, in another sign of goodwill.
The UK Treasury, meanwhile, is expected to publish a study in the coming days detailing the scale of the hit to the UK economy from leaving the bloc.
Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer, who resigned in July primarily because of dismal opinion poll ratings, had promised a ‘reset’ of EU-UK relations when his government took power in July 2024. But apart from rhetoric, little has changed, though the UK now has access to the Erasmus+ student exchange programme.
Brexit is a “mistake that can be corrected by all of us” and admitting it is “a sign of strength”, said German Green MEP Terry Reintke.
New deals agreed should be “the floor and not the ceiling” of bilateral relations, said David McAllister, a German MEP for the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP).
On the right, Polish MEP for the European Conservatives and Reformists Jadwiga Wiśniewska also welcomed new talks with the UK, calling for them to be based on “concrete elements” like agriculture deals, defence and Erasmus+.
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The EU “will not drill and will not buy” Arctic oil and gas, EU officials said on Tuesday (20 October), as the European Commission presented its new Arctic strategy.
“Our position on Arctic oil, gas and coal has not changed,” a senior EU official told reporters. “It’s fairly simple. We will not drill in the Arctic, and we will not buy hydrocarbons from the Arctic.”
The strategy follows months of heavy lobbying by Norway’s prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre and his cabinet.
Oslo used the energy supply disruption caused by the Iran war to push the EU to drop its 2021 support for a moratorium on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic, insisting that it was crucial for future energy security.
But EU officials made clear on Tuesday they did not buy that argument. “We do not need Arctic resources to keep our energy supply secure,” the official said.
What happened to the moratorium?
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For the first time, Ukrainians rescued a wounded soldier by air.
He spent 500 days at the front, during which he had to amputate his own legs.
How the operation unfolded and what Ukrainians had to do to distract Russian drones.
Rubio repeats Putin’s claims about occupied territory in the Donetsk region.
Videos of the day: the first capture of a Russian tank this year; a swarm of Ukrainian drones.
The information in this text is a summary of events on Monday (19 October). The situation may have changed since then.
Hardly a week passes without some new development being reported on the frontline of Russia’s war in Ukraine. This time, Ukrainians demonstrated something truly unique. For the first time, they succeeded in evacuating a wounded soldier using a heavy rotary-wing aerial drone.
The story was published by the 30th Separate Mechanised Brigade and reported by a journalist from the Oboronka website, who spoke to both the operators and the wounded soldier. The evacuation took place near Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region, on the left, or eastern, bank of the Oskil river.
Infantryman Kostiantyn ‘Magura’ Vlasenko of the 2nd Mechanised Battalion of the 30th Separate Mechanised Brigade was tasked, together with a comrade, with heading into the grey zone in early June 2025.
Initially, they hid in one place, but when their position was flooded, they had to leave the building and take shelter elsewhere. Returning was impossible because of the dangerous situation. His comrade later died.
In February this year, Magura was also wounded by a Russian drone. Munitions dropped from the drone injured both his legs. According to Oboronka, he had to amputate his own lower limbs in order to survive.
The website did not give details of how he managed to do this. Similar cases have, however, occurred in the past.
In 2018, for instance, during an exercise in Slovakia, an American soldier was trapped beneath a tank. He amputated his own leg to save a fellow soldier, for which he was named Soldier of the Year in 2021.
In Magura’s case, this meant he was left immobile, and it was clear that he would not return from the front by himself.
Ukrainian units considered how to help him. The situation was extremely difficult in this respect.
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Europe is supposed to be financing its defence together. It barely is.
Of the €800bn announced under ReArm Europe in March 2025, €650bn is not common money. It is an estimate of the extra room governments get under the national escape clause to spend up to 1.5 percent of GDP more on defence for four years.
Each country still pays for that spending itself.
The room is also temporary: EU Commission simulations suggest that maintaining higher defence spending after 2028 could require additional annual fiscal adjustment of 0.25 to 0.4 percentage points of GDP from 2029.
The other €150bn is SAFE, and it is loans, not grants.
The EU borrows and lends the money on, and each country repays its share. Grants are small: €1.5bn from the European Defence Industry Programme for 2025-2027, plus the European Defence Fund for joint research.
Not every country has used these tools, as Table 1 shows. The Netherlands and Sweden have used neither. Like Germany, which has taken only the clause, they can borrow at least as cheaply as the EU, so SAFE gets them nothing.
France has taken SAFE but not the clause, to protect the credibility of its budget plans.
Table 1. Who uses SAFE and the national escape clause
Source: Council of the EU, European Commission. Data as of 17 October 2026. * Hungary: allocated €16.2bn, now requesting €5.4bn; still pending. ** Italy: the Commission backed its request on 8 October 2026; the Council has yet to decide.
Where SAFE does matter is on the eastern flank. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia can borrow the equivalent of five to eight percent of their GDP, and Poland almost five percent.
Graph 1. SAFE loans as a share of GDP, by country (%)
Source: Council of the EU, European Commission, Eurostat. SAFE loans only, as a share of 2025 GDP. Amounts approved by the Council, except Italy and Hungary (* revised requests of €8bn and €5.4bn, September 2026). Data as of 17 October 2026.
But defence is almost a monopsony: the state is nearly the only buyer. Without a clear flow of public orders, private investment will be hard to come by.
So Europe barely borrows together. And it buys alone.
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MEPs have put themselves on a collision course with EU governments by rejecting plans for a 17-percent cut in foreign spending – instead demanding additional spending worth €25bn.
Earlier this month, the Irish government, which holds the six-month rotating EU council presidency, proposed that €38bn of cuts be made from the ‘Global Europe’ heading, which covers foreign aid, as part of an overall package of €141bn of cuts to the seven-year EU budget, known as the multi-annual financial framework (MFF).
But in a vote on Monday evening (19 October), the European Parliament’s development committee instead backed a dedicated minimum budget of €25bn for humanitarian aid, as well as dedicated budget lines for a Gaza reconstruction fund and for candidate countries. Put together, that would mean a €25bn increase on the EU Commission’s original budget of €200bn for the Global Europe heading.
The position agreed by MEPs, by a 61-to-34 vote margin, will eventually form the basis of negotiations between MEPs and ministers when EU governments agree their position on the budget.
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Before the Czech election results were announced, a WhatsApp group used to alert journalists of prime minister Andrej Babiš’s public appearances went quiet. Reporters asking if and when the ANO leader would make a statement, were met with the same answer from party officials: ‘we don’t know’.
Anticipating poor run-off results for the Senate (upper house), the party had not planned any major press events. Instead, Babiš arrived at his local polling venue – a sports hall – on Saturday (17 October) afternoon, to concede defeat.
In the 2024 Senate elections, ANO had gained eight seats, but this year lost the one seat it was defending.
The opposition party of Mayors and Independents (STAN) performed best, winning ten of the 14 seats it contested.
Having climbed in the polls in recent months, the party now believes it could lead the opposition into the next general election against the ANO-led government.
Pro-Babiš candidates defeated
Babiš and his supporters could hardly have asked for a better starting position this year: ANO was defending just one mandate, and its senate group had 15 seats before the vote.
Babiš said his party had an exceptional chance to break the opposition parties’ long-standing majority to take control of the upper house.
But that goal was quickly out of reach. ANO would have needed to win in all 27 districts, but fielded candidates in only 24 of them.
When only 13 ANO candidates advanced to the second round, the prime minister’s appearances in the days before the vote suggested he no longer believed ANO could win. “The second round will see the same old story – everyone will join forces against us,” Babiš said.
ANO also fielded low-profile or inexperienced candidates, while STAN party leader Vít Rakušan personally travelled to support candidates throughout the campaign.
Analysts have attributed ANO’s poor performance to its poor choice of candidates. They point, among others, to Sandra Tsoukernik, the wife of a controversial businessman in the gambling industry who ran in the Tachov and Cheb district against incumbent senator Miroslav Plevný, a professor of economics.
Tsoukernik diligently toured her district, but unlike Plevný she did not speak about her programme at meetings with voters — or anywhere else.
Although Tsoukernik managed to fill town squares by hiring the pianist Michal David, this was widely viewed as a publicity stunt.
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In Paris, students have protested over shortages of teachers, overcrowded classrooms and deteriorating school buildings.
In Spain, the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal — who died on 7 October — became a rallying point for housing protests.
In Tirana, students joined wider demonstrations over education costs and corruption allegations.
These are not parts of a single movement, and the protests do not have one common cause. But they bring into focus a shared challenge: whether young people can see a credible route from education to decent work, and from financial dependence to a life of their own.
France: school conditions shape the starting line
Since September, French students have demonstrated over teacher shortages, overcrowded classes and deteriorating school buildings. Their demands concern more than the day-to-day running of schools. They also raise a question about equal opportunity: can public education give every student the tools to move forward, regardless of where they live or what their family can afford?
The wider figures help explain why that question matters.
In 2025, 25.5 percent of people aged 15–29 in France were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, compared with 24.2 percent across the EU, according to Eurostat.
In August 2026, unemployment among under-25s stood at 20.6 percent, against 8.2 percent for the population as a whole. The corresponding EU rates were 15.4 percent and 6.1 percent.
These figures do not show that school shortages cause youth unemployment. They do show how difficult the step from education into work remains for many young people and why well-resourced schools matter most in areas with the fewest opportunities.
Housing can make that transition harder still. In Paris, one-in-two private tenants under 30 spends more than 51 percent of their income on rent. A Eurostat indicator also shows that 70 percent of 20–24-year-olds and 25 percent of 25–29-year-olds either live with their parents or are financially connected to their household.
France scored 66 out of 100 and ranked 27th of 182 countries in Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index. The index measures perceptions of public-sector corruption, not the number of proven incidents. It does not explain the school protests, but it underlines why transparency and accountability matter when public services and resources are at stake.
Spain: when housing delays independence
Abascal’s eviction from the Madrid flat where she had lived for decades prompted demonstrations in several Spanish cities and renewed calls for stronger tenant protections. Her case was not a youth protest, but it put a human face on a housing crisis that also shapes whether younger people can leave home and build an independent life.
In 2025, 67.1 percent of Spaniards aged 18–34 lived with at least one parent, according to Spain’s National Statistics Institute.
Among those living with a parent, 28.3 percent said they could not afford to rent. The average age at which young people left home was 30.2, compared with 26.3 across the EU, according to Eurostat.
Housing pressure does not operate in isolation. In 2025, 27.6 percent of Spaniards aged 15–29 were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, above the EU rate of 24.2%.
In August 2026, unemployment among under-25s was 22.7 percent, more than twice the overall rate of 10 percent. When joblessness is so much higher among the young and rent is beyond the reach of many, delayed independence cannot be reduced to personal preference.
Spain scored 55/100 in the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, ranking 49th of 182 countries. That score does not establish a link between corruption and housing protests. But when people are asking for effective action on housing, transparency over how decisions are made — and accountability for whether they work — are part of the debate.
Albania: growth is not enough if young people see no path forward
In October, students in Tirana protested over education costs and corruption allegations, joining a broader anti-government movement. Their participation brought education and young people’s prospects into a wider debate about living costs, employment and trust in public institutions.
Albania’s official figures show that 19 percent of the population was at risk of relative poverty in 2025, while 31.2 percent experienced severe material and social deprivation, according to INSTAT. The two measures describe different aspects of hardship: one compares household income with the national poverty threshold; the other captures enforced inability to afford basic goods and activities.
Young people also face a difficult entry into the labour market. The World Bank’s ILO-modelled estimates put overall unemployment at 10.9 percent in 2025, rising to 25.6 percent among 15–24-year-olds. The estimated average age of leaving the parental household seemed to be 30.9, compared with 26.3 in the EU, according to Eurostat’s dataset. Together, however, these indicators describe the hurdles between education, employment and independence.
Albania scored 39/100 and ranked 91st of 182 countries in the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index. The measure is not a count of actual cases, but corruption allegations are part of the protests themselves. That makes transparency, accountability and public trust more than abstract principles: they shape whether people believe institutions respond fairly to their concerns.
Behind the statistics
Behind the statistics are millions of young people struggling to turn their ambitions into reality. The obstacles reinforce one another: under-resourced schools can narrow choices, unemployment can delay financial independence, and high housing costs can prolong dependence on family.
Across the EU, house prices rose by 55.4 percent and rents by 26.7 percent between 2010 and 2024, often outpacing income growth, according to Eurofound.
That is why the response cannot be confined to one policy area. It means properly staffed and maintained schools, routes from education into decent work, more affordable and social housing, targeted help with rent, and stronger protections for tenants.
Young people should also have a meaningful say in policies that shape their education, employment and housing.
A strong welfare state and effective social protection can help ensure that a young person’s prospects are not determined solely by family income or place of birth. If a low-income family cannot support a young person’s move towards independence, financial dependence can pass from one generation to the next. Tackling that cycle is part of building social justice and societies in which young people can plan a future with greater confidence.
The future will show whether today’s protests lead to lasting policies. The test will be whether young people can study, find decent work and afford a home without their prospects being set by the circumstances into which they were born.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been shortlisted for the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, an annual human-rights award from the European Parliament.
The announcement on Monday (19 October) comes after US president Donald Trump put his weight behind Israeli efforts to discredit the international judicial body by extending sanctions against it.
The ICC issued an arrest warrant in 2024 for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes, as well as other senior Israeli officials and Hamas. The US then responded by targeting its judges by impeding their day-to-day activities such as banking.
New sanctions against the court were announced by the US administration this month after the Nobel Peace Prize went to Navi Pillay, a former ICC judge who wrote a UN report concluding Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The ICC court labelled the move as an “assault on the rule of law” and called on countries to step up to protect it.
Sakharov Prize finalists named
Members of the EU parliament’s foreign affairs committee shortlisted the ICC and its members for the Sakharov Prize.
Named after the Soviet nuclear scientist dissident Andrei Sakharov, the award has been previously awarded to the likes of Iranian protest icon Mahsa Amini and to the Ukrainian people enduring Russia’s attacks.
“We stand by the ICC and its officials, and we are committed to safeguarding its work,” said Yannis Maniatis, Greek MEP for the Socialists & Democrats group which nominated the ICC for the award. “If the aggressors become the victims, and if we stand by helplessly as international justice erodes, we risk allowing those who believe themselves above the law to prevail.”
Tundu Lissu, a Tanzanian opposition figure in court for inciting the public to disrupt an election and facing the possibility of death row, is also a Sakharov Prize finalist. “There is no doubt about the political nature of his detention,” said David McAllister, MEP for the European People’s Party who co-nominated Lissu.
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EU ministers have discussed how to make labour standards compatible with modern technological conditions and workplace culture, such as telework and AI-led staff oversight, without losing competitiveness.
The law in question, called the Quality Jobs Act, covers a wide range of work protection measures, such as common standards for being able to ‘go home’ and disconnect from remote work, and limits to AI role in recruitment or its scrutiny of workers’ performance.
Technological innovation should “benefit both workers and businesses,” said Portuguese labour minister Maria do Rosário Palma Ramalho, addressing the ministers’ council on Monday (19 October) in Luxembourg.
Human oversight is essential, especially where AI systems decide on recruitment or workers’ assessment, she said.
Next to innovation, labour rules needed to ensure “fair and transparent practices, respect for human workers’ rights … and effective social dialog,” said Roxana Mînzatu, the EU commissioner for employment.
“This revolutionary technology has to be regulated” so that it “delivers for all,” Isabelle Schömann, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) deputy general secretary had also said during a conference organised by the centre-left S&D group in the European Parliament on 14 October, commenting on the need for the Quality Jobs Act to curb AI.
The draft Quality Jobs Act that the European Commission plans to present in December aims to update the long out of date 1989 and 1990 health and safety workplace rules.
It would also protect subcontractors and create standards for working in heatwaves, becoming more frequent with climate change.
EU legislators need to ensure minimum standards so that “neither jobs nor businesses are jeopardised” with extreme weather, Yolanda Díaz Pérez, the Spanish labour minister, said ahead of Monday’s debate.
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Spain’s Left has now missed its last chance to unite ahead of the country’s snap election on 29 November — a historic failure, not so much because the numbers don’t add up, but because it fails to offer an alternative.
The elections are seen as pivotal, with a real chance that the far-right Vox will enter the government for the first time since Spain’s return to democracy in 1978, in a coalition with the centre-right People’s Party (PP), which itself is expected to fall short of an absolute majority.
With that possibility on the horizon, the Spanish parties to the left of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), led by PM Pedro Sánchez, tried to agree on a nationwide joint list for the 29 November snap election.
But they failed because of a “war of egos”, as one political leader described it, and old grudges dating back to 2023. This has left many disillusioned and the left even more divided.
“These past few days have been very difficult … some people will be disappointed today, and for that I am sorry,” Ada Colau, former Barcelona mayor and leader of the Broad Front, said last week, as her alliance failed to reach an agreement on a joint electoral platform ahead of the election.
Spain’s electoral system disadvantages smaller parties, especially in less populated provinces. That means their votes are less likely to translate into seats.
In Spain, a country where a two-party system was the norm until 2015, it is puzzling that the “new” left, born precisely to break that duopoly, has ended up too divided to even compete with the mainstream.
So what’s the picture? On one side, the right is more aligned than ever: the PP and Vox are running separately, but the conservative party openly says it is willing to strike a deal with the far-right if needed. Liberalism is almost non-existent, even though Democracia 21 will run for the first time, but only in Madrid and Barcelona. And the left is divided.
War of egos
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As protests ripple through big cities across the continent, a quieter, more forgotten population at Europe’s edge sits through weeks of strikes and blockades, while largely ignored.
Italy’s southern regions of Puglia, Calabria, Sicily, Molise and Basilicata are facing empty supermarket shelves and plummeting fuel supplies since transport and agriculture workers have been protesting against climbing costs of living.
Entire sectors have been put on pause due to the excessive costs it now takes to run them, from delivering food goods to producing them, for unbalanced competition with foreign suppliers and sustained neglect from Rome.
While protestors in large cities like Milan and Bologna joined a European choir of protests fighting unaffordable housing last weekend, truck drivers from Bari to Palermo have joined in blocking roads to important ports and highways connecting isolated southern regions, and denouncing the outrageous costs of fertilisers, seeds, and fuel for tractors and transport for over two weeks.
“For us, and for the community, it’s become impossible to face the costs of fuel,” Luigi Di Benedetto, manager of an agriculture company in Caltagirone, Sicily, told EUobserver.
“Italy import products that do not meet legal specifications,” he said, echoing the worries of his colleagues and fellow protestors, since the market was flooded with cheaper foreign imports, which have left them unable to pay the bills.
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These are not yet Star Wars, but we may be approaching the first destruction of an enemy satellite in space.
Fighting is taking place directly in Dobropillia.
On the first day of restrictions on Starlink functionality, Ukrainian army attacks on Russian logistics dropped sharply, before beginning to return to their previous level — chart.
Russia continues to pound Kyiv with ballistic missiles, while power outages occurred across Ukraine.
St Petersburg experienced one of the largest air raids of the entire war over the weekend, but the damage was limited.
Maps of the day — Dobropillia
Videos of the day — a Russian glide bomb fails to explode and bounces off an apartment block in Sumy; a bomber drone destroys a Smerch multiple rocket launcher; the road between Pavlohrad and occupied Pokrovsk
These are not yet Star Wars, but we may be approaching the first destruction of an enemy satellite in space. Marco Langbroek is a Dutch scientist whose original field was Palaeolithic archaeology. He now works at the prestigious Dutch Delft University of Technology, at its Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, where he observes and tracks objects orbiting the Earth.
Among other things, he specialises in observing classified spy satellites. After the downing of flight MH17, he was among the experts involved in the investigation. He was the first to publicly point out that the Russian missile which shot down the civilian aircraft may have been detected by US early-warning satellites.
The same scientist was the first this time to notice the unusual behaviour of the Russian military satellite KOSMOS 2612, which began carrying out manoeuvres in the immediate vicinity of the European satellite ICEYE-X36.
At first glance, this report appears to have nothing to do with the war in Ukraine, but that is not the case. ICEYE-X36 is originally a Finnish satellite, launched into space in March 2024 from the Vandenberg space base in the United States, which is also used for the space programme — both military and civilian.
ICEYE-X36 uses radar observation and has cooperated with the Ukrainian government since 2022. Radar can monitor the Earth’s surface even through cloud cover, and Langbroek speculates that it is probably working for the Ukrainian military.
He began reporting on the situation on Saturday (17 October), calling it highly concerning.
“If Ukraine is indeed using ICEYE-X36, this means that a satellite of one country — Russia — is closely approaching a satellite of another state — Ukraine — with which it is at war,” Langbroek wrote. He wondered whether “we are perhaps witnessing the first real anti-satellite attack directly in orbit in the course of its preparation”.
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It is hard for European allies to know which is worse, hearing their sacrifice in the US-led war in Afghanistan mocked by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, seeing his State Department counterpart Marco Rubio dissembling about the interruption to Starlink service in Ukraine, or watching the commander-in-chief of the free world blithely end sanctions on Russia.
One option is to sit tight and hope that next month’s mid-terms will bring deliverance.
Mid-term blues?
It is possible, perhaps, that a huge political defeat for Donald Trump will change American foreign policy, though those who sincerely hanker for the eras of Joe Biden and Barack Obama may need to adjust their rose-tinted filters.
More likely is that constitutional tussles will make the US even more distracted and unpredictable. Who really believes that a midnight phone call alerting the president to a surprise Russian incursion into Nato territory will gain a firmer response if the Democrats control Congress?
It is also tempting simply to wallow in outrage.
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Berlin and Paris spent months negotiating over the future of Europe’s auto industry.
Germany wanted to keep selling new combustion-engine cars beyond 2035. In return, France wanted strict “Made in Europe” rules: public money spent on electric vehicle (EV) purchase incentives, subsidies and government contracts should benefit cars genuinely made in Europe, not simply assembled here.
One concession in exchange for the other. French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Friedrich Merz have now sealed the deal.
Both can claim victory at home, and both say they want the same thing: to strengthen Europe’s auto industry against Chinese competition.
But the trade-off undermines that very goal. It rightly pushes for more European production, but pays for it with less ambition for electric vehicles.
For Europe’s automakers to compete, two things need to happen: More of the value generated by car manufacturing must stay in Europe, and the transition to electric vehicles must remain on track. Trading one for the other weakens both.
Value creation is already moving elsewhere
On one point, France is right: a growing EV market alone won’t protect European jobs. Many of the most important components in electric cars already come from China, especially batteries.
Meanwhile, Chinese automakers are building factories in Hungary and Spain, securing direct access to the European market.
The risk is clear: cars assembled in Europe from imported components qualify as European products, benefit from purchase incentives and win public contracts.
Final assembly stays in Europe, but much of the economic value is created elsewhere. European auto suppliers have already cut more than 100,000 jobs in two years, and the European Commission warns that up to 600,000 more could disappear over the next five to 10 years.
That’s where the proposed Industrial Accelerator Act comes in. It would link public spending on subsidies, purchase incentives and government procurement to production in Europe.
This isn’t just about shutting out foreign competition. It steers demand to where it strengthens Europe’s industrial base.
To work, the rules must target the components that will shape the industry’s future: battery cells, software, electric drivetrains and power electronics.
“Made in Europe” can’t simply mean attaching the wheels here.
That doesn’t mean every nut and bolt must come from the EU. The auto industry relies on global supply chains and trusted trading partners.
But a law riddled with exemptions would be little better than no law at all: It would create more red tape without bringing a single new factory to Europe.
Factories need customers
Even the best industrial policy will fail without buyers. A battery factory can only make money if it produces enough batteries. Yet Europe’s battery plants are running well below capacity because they don’t have enough orders. Every battery that goes unproduced drives up the cost of those that are made. Factories, machinery and workers still have to be paid for.
Since 2022, roughly a quarter of announced battery projects in the EU have been canceled or put on hold.
This is why Germany’s push to delay the phaseout of combustion-engine cars is so damaging. Every combustion-engine car sold instead of an EV means one fewer battery that could be made in Europe. The very factories meant to make “Made in Europe” a reality would lose potential customers.
The best way to boost demand for European batteries is to build more small, affordable EVs in Europe. That’s where the biggest sales volumes are. Yet German automakers in particular have been slow to embrace this market, despite significant demand potential in Germany itself. Delaying the combustion-engine phaseout would only give them another reason to hold back.
Slow down, lose out
For European automakers, the stakes go far beyond their home market. Sell fewer EVs at home, and manufacturers will launch fewer new models, produce fewer cars and face higher costs. That will make it harder to compete abroad, too. Giving combustion engines more time won’t close the gap with China. It could make it wider.
Political uncertainty only makes matters worse. Automakers plan new models, factories and supplier contracts years in advance. Every fresh debate over exemptions gives investors and consumers another reason to hesitate.
Companies investing billions in EVs and batteries – and consumers considering buying an electric car – need to know that policymakers won’t change direction tomorrow.
The Franco-German bargain ignores economic reality. The future of the car is electric, and China figured that out long ago.
Beijing is doing everything it can to build an unbeatable lead in EVs, including through unfair practices such as massive government subsidies.
And Europe? It’s haggling over more time for yesterday’s technology. At stake is nothing less than the auto industry – the backbone of Europe’s industrial economy and a major source of jobs.
This deal is not yet law. A better deal would be simple: Europe should pursue electric vehicles with the same determination as China while making sure the jobs, factories and economic benefits stay in Europe.
European Council president António Costa gets to work this week rewriting the EU’s seven-year budget, after the bloc’s leaders binned the long-term plan proposed by the Irish council presidency last week.
The budget will be debated by MEPs at the plenary in Strasbourg on Wednesday (21 October), when European Parliament will also vote to allocate €47bn for Erasmus+ instead of the €40bn planned on Thursday (22 October).
A separate vote on Wednesday (21 October) will decide parliament’s position on the EU’s short-term 2027 budget, when MEPs will decide whether or not to ask for €2.7bn more than what council proposed in summer, with extra monies proposed for expanding Erasmus+, agriculture and responding to climate disaster.
Further, MEPs will also decide on disbursing €489m to Mediterranean member states ravaged by storms and flooding, and €1.1m to retrain hundreds of workers laid off in Finland’s paper industry cuts – both on Wednesday (21 October).
This comes after last week in Brussels, where national leaders at their summit binned a long-term budget proposed by the Irish Council presidency. While most wanted to keep budget headroom, a minority of big spending countries wanted to save cash. So while European Council president Antonio Costa gets to work rewriting the 2028-2034 funding plan, MEPs will also make their views on the matter clear.
A debate will also ensue on Tuesday (20 October) on how to respond to escalating Russian provocations off Bulgarian and Romanian coasts where drones have repeatedly violated EU airspace, followed by a vote on Thursday (22 October). MEPs will also ask the commission to explain why it decided to unlock sanctions on luxury Russian furs shortly after it imposed them.
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I went to bed on Saturday (17 October) glued to my X feed on the French riots and it was impossible not to react emotionally to images of familiar landmarks in Paris in flames.
It was a mistake to have followed things on the far-right propaganda tube of racist US oligarch Elon Musk, which both glorified and reviled its AI-curated clips of violent clashes between mostly white policemen and young black or Arab men.
But in any case, I felt pity for police facing Molotov cocktails and cobble stones and angry about their use of stun grenades that left young people maimed.
I was shocked to see public buildings and luxury shops in Lyon, Marseille, and Paris set on fire and looted in what looked like pure criminality, rather than liberté, égalité, fraternité.
But the anarchist adrenaline in me also said: “Fuck Louis Vuitton! A shop that sells luggage for the price of most families’ monthly incomes is a perfect symbol of the social inequality at the heart of this eruption of public anger”.
I woke up on Sunday thankful to learn from professional media, such as the BBC, that even if Paris looked like a war zone, no one had been killed, and even though police had made over 1,800 arrests, aggressive thugs were a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people who had peacefully protested for better living conditions and education.
But the political harm of Saturday’s X-streamed violence, which also broke out in Italy and Belgium, was still enormous and it will help the EU and French people’s enemies – the far-right in Europe, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and US president Donald Trump.
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At international level, the EU also played a decisive role in the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which was agreed in December 2022 at COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The framework established a global roadmap to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.
Next week (19-30 October), Yerevan will host COP17 of the Convention, where the first global review of progress since the adoption of the Framework will take place. It will be an important opportunity to determine whether the commitments made are being translated into concrete action and results on the ground.
As co-chair of the European Parliament delegation attending the conference, I will defend a united European position that is consistent with our historic leadership and responds to the urgency of the challenge.
The European Commission, which formally negotiates on behalf of the Union on the basis of the position agreed with the member states, must promote decisions that accelerate implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework during the remaining years to 2030.
Honest appraisal? A mixed picture
This global review must be accompanied by an honest assessment of our own performance. Europe should arrive in Yerevan acknowledging both the progress it has made and the work that remains.
The commission’s latest report on the implementation of the framework presents a mixed picture.
Of the 45 targets established for the EU, only two have been achieved and 16 are on track, while progress remains too slow on another 25 and two cannot yet be assessed.
There are positive signs in the EU. Protected areas have expanded, organic farming has increased and a greater proportion of fish stocks is being managed sustainably.
However, the overall situation of many habitats and species remains worrying, while farmland birds and grassland butterflies, among others, continue to decline.
The main problem is not a lack of legislation, as Europe already has many of the instruments it needs. The challenge is to implement them properly and turn them into visible improvements on the ground, which requires public authorities with sufficient capacity, reliable data, clear plans and stable funding.
The Nature Restoration Regulation is a good example.
Restoring wetlands, rivers, forests, soils and marine ecosystems will not only help biodiversity recover, but will also retain water, reduce flood damage, protect soils and make our territories more resilient to droughts, heatwaves and wildfires.
Missed deadlines
However, the regulation will only deliver results if member states meet their obligations.
The deadline for submitting draft national restoration plans was 1 September, yet only nine countries have done so.
This delay not only slows implementation, but also makes it harder to calculate the cost of restoring nature and the resources that will be required.
The commission was expected to present an assessment of restoration funding needs and gaps in August 2025, but we are still waiting for a complete analysis.
The commission argues that it needs the national plans to calculate these costs. Yet negotiations on the 2028-2034 financial framework are moving forward while many plans remain outstanding and we still lack a full estimate of the resources needed to implement one of our most important environmental laws.
This situation reflects one of the main challenges facing COP17.
Adopting targets is no longer enough. We must also agree on how they will be implemented, how progress will be measured and how action will be financed.
Five EU priorities in Yerevan
In this context, I believe that the European position should focus on five priorities. We must mobilise more resources for biodiversity, consolidate the Cali Fund, make progress in eliminating harmful subsidies, assess progress through concrete results and strengthen the role of nature in climate adaptation.
Finance will be one of the central issues in Yerevan, as the Global Biodiversity Framework calls for the mobilisation of at least $200bn [€178bn] a year from all sources by 2030. Public investment must remain the foundation of this effort, but private capital will also be needed.
With this aim, the commission presented its roadmap for nature credits in July 2025 and is now developing the methodologies, certification systems, oversight arrangements and pilot projects needed for their deployment.
These instruments could help finance conservation and restoration, but they will only be useful if they are governed by rigorous rules and deliver real, verifiable and additional benefits for biodiversity. They must never replace public funding or be used to justify damage to nature in one place in exchange for financing action elsewhere.
COP17 must also consolidate the Cali Fund, which was created so that companies benefiting from the use of digital information on genetic resources contribute to biodiversity conservation. The agreement reached at COP16 was an important step, but we now need real contributions and a fair distribution of resources, including for Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Another priority must be to eliminate incentives and subsidies that harm biodiversity. It makes no sense to call for new resources to protect nature while public budgets continue to support activities that destroy it.
The European Union should therefore examine its own policies honestly, particularly in areas such as agriculture, fisheries, energy and infrastructure, and establish a timetable for progressively phasing out and ultimately eliminating this harmful support.
The global review must also measure concrete results. Success cannot be assessed simply by counting strategies or setting targets. We need to know whether ecosystems are recovering, whether species are in better condition, whether protected areas are being managed effectively and whether funding is actually reaching action on the ground.
We must also strengthen the connection between biodiversity and climate adaptation. The droughts, floods, heatwaves and wildfires affecting Europe show that protecting and restoring nature is not a secondary concern. Healthy ecosystems are among our best defences against the effects of climate change and represent a direct investment in our security, agriculture and economy.
All these priorities lead us inevitably to the European budget, because political commitments are only credible when they are backed by sufficient resources.
The budget?
There is currently a clear contradiction between the leadership that the European Union wishes to maintain on biodiversity and the place given to it in the proposal for the 2028-2034 financial framework.
Although the commission proposes that 35 percent of the next budget should contribute jointly to climate and environmental objectives, it removes the specific 10 percent target for biodiversity included in the current budget and no longer presents LIFE as a standalone programme.
By placing biodiversity within much broader objectives and funds, its financing becomes less visible and risks being pushed aside by priorities such as security, defence and competitiveness.
Parliament must defend sufficient and clearly identifiable resources for biodiversity and for the activities currently financed through LIFE.
Simplification can make funding easier to access, but it must not reduce environmental ambition, transparency or democratic oversight.
This budget debate also affects our international credibility. Europe cannot ask other countries to increase their ambition and financial contributions while weakening budgetary support for biodiversity within the Union itself. Our leadership in Yerevan will depend not only on what we defend in the negotiations, but also on what we are able to implement and finance at home.
Europe has strong laws, valuable experience and the capacity to lead. We do not need to start again. We need to deliver what we have already agreed, provide the necessary resources and use COP17 to accelerate global action.
The global review cannot be limited to describing how far we remain from the 2030 targets. It must help us agree on how to close that gap during the four years that remain. I will travel to Yerevan with the European Parliament delegation determined to support that objective.
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