EU interior ministers on Thursday (1 October) in Luxembourg are now set to formally adopt the return regulation, which sets the legal framework for police to carry out raids and seize people’s “belongings, electronic devices, and other items of relevance.”
The logic is part of a maximalist effort to deport people, such as failed asylum seekers, back to their home countries or possibly even in yet-to-be defined transit centres in Rwanda or elsewhere.
The regulation targets anyone “for the purpose of preparing or ensuring an effective return” with raids being allowed in a “place of residence or other relevant premises.”
Although the item is but a mere footnote in Thursday’s agenda, the potential consequences of the law have roused alarm among civil rights organisations who continue to draw parallels with ICE.
The comparison is not alarmist.
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The Ukrainian army stays in control of front lines, but safety in cities deteriorates.
Kyiv was on fire again as Russian attacks on cities intensify.
Rubikon published stats on destroyed Ukrainian drones, decoys being the second most prominent.
Russia’s defence ministry will not let go of the Armata: it wants to turn it into an air-defence system, drawing ridicule.
Maps of the day: Sloviansk-Kramatorsk direction; Orikhiv direction, Oleksandrivsk direction, Kupiansk direction.
Videos of the day: a burning Tu-95MS strategic bomber; a Ukrainian firefighter showed how they extinguished the Academy of Sciences building.
The Ukrainian army stays in control of front lines, but safety in cities deteriorates. The war has reached a stage in which two separate conflicts appear to be taking place simultaneously.
While Ukraine is currently losing the battle in the air and its cities are continually suffering missile and strikes by jet drones, the situation on battlefields is far better.
Last week, Denník N spent time in Ukraine with former chief of the general staff Daniel Zmeko. During the trip, reporters met commanding officers from several brigades and battalions operating from the Izium area to Zaporizhzhia, and all of them said they had the situation under control.
The officers spoke about the accuracy of Russian maps, which they said did not correspond to reality. In some places, Russian soldiers are as far as 20 km from the locations where, according to the Kremlin, they are supposed to be.
Northern flank of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration: This is a specific section of the front where the Ukrainian army has been reporting its advances only very slowly, while Ukrainian analysts have remained silent so as not to disclose anything sensitive. Russian bloggers, by contrast, are depicting the situation more closely to reality.
Yet official Russian maps persist with utterly nonsensical lines. We do not know to what extent this is an effort to deceive domestic and foreign audiences, and to what extent they genuinely believe it in Moscow. It is worth looking at how the regime wants the situation to appear, and what it is really like.
The first map in the overview was produced by the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti and depicts the area around Lyman, on the northern flank of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk direction, as of 29 September. Lyman is shown as occupied in the middle of the map. The map’s author also continues to insist that the Russian army had captured Sviatohirsk — at the tip of the red salient in the centre of the map — and that Russia controls the entire, now non-existent salient with the village of Novoselivka at its centre. Yet Russian outlets Rybar and Two Majors write that fighting is taking place on the Zherebets river around the villages of Terny — on the far right of the map — and Yampil.
The following map is much closer to reality. According to it, the front line roughly follows the Zherebets river, which corresponds to Rybar’s claims.
In the Lyman direction, in Donetsk region, Ukrainian defenders successfully repelled three attempts by the russian fascist invaders to advance near the settlements of Ridkodub, Novoselivka and Drobysheve.
Kupiansk direction: The city of Kupiansk is a similar case to Sviatohirsk. Putin declared it captured in August last year. And once the commander-in-chief had declared this, his news agency continued to draw the map as though it were true. Kupiansk is shown as occupied in its centre, but there are further inaccuracies.
For example, the Kremlin agency claims that the Ukrainian bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Oskil river south of the city no longer exists. Ukrainians do face major difficulties supplying it, and various analysts have repeatedly warned of an impending disaster, but the Russian map is nevertheless hopelessly inaccurate.
Also note the small town of Borova at the bottom centre. RIA Novosti also shows it as occupied, although this is not the case.
This time, we will compare the Russian agency’s data with a map by Ukrainian analysts at DeepStateUA, because they updated it on Tuesday to reflect a new advance by Ukrainian units north of Kupiansk — again in the centre of the map — near the village of Dvorichne. In recent weeks, they have succeeded in reducing the Russian bridgehead on the western bank of the Oskil; the change since the end of August is marked in blue. Borova is again at the bottom centre, while below Kupiansk is the Ukrainian bridgehead that Russia claims does not exist.
Orikhiv: This is one of the places where Ukrainian officers said during reporters’ trip to Ukraine that Russian maps were particularly inaccurate.
The Russian map is again from RIA Novosti and again ignores reality along the entire length of this section of the front. Its main target is the city of Zaporizhzhia, with a population of three quarters of a million, in the centre left, while the small town of Orikhiv, at the bottom centre, is a defensive hub.
Putin’s news agency places soldiers roughly 12 km from the southern edge of Zaporizhzhia; in reality, they are around 24 km away. It shows Orikhiv as occupied and the Russian army advancing from the east towards the village of Novorozivka, north of Orikhiv.
The OSINT project Playfra covers this area in the greatest detail. Its map appears to depict a different war altogether. Everywhere, Russian positions are significantly shifted compared with those shown by RIA Novosti.
The differences have a simple explanation. On the western flank near Zaporizhzhia, the Kremlin agency simply ignores the successful counterattacks carried out by Ukrainians there this year. On the eastern flank, it uncritically accepts every claim by the Russian defence ministry and, with equal lack of scrutiny, considers captured every small village where a Russian soldier raised a flag during a suicidal mission, even several months ago. Although those soldiers have since been killed or captured, RIA Novosti acts as though they still control the village.
Playfra also offers a more detailed view of the current fighting around Orikhiv, drawing on analyses by Ukrainian analyst Kostyantyn Mashovets.
Orikhiv direction.
Factually, no changes. Clearings are conducted constantly, but the Russians also continue to infiltrate: the global situation doesn't change. The stalemate situation that I had reported some weeks ago, as well as the gray zone, remains both actual as of the… https://t.co/6rau9f7wcKpic.twitter.com/5uIK3K78Bm
Of course, Russians too occasionally notice that they are living in a parallel reality. Most recently, the influential Aleksandr Kharchenko wrote about it:
“Comparing our maps with Ukrainian ones can be shocking. The zones of control differ by dozens of kilometres,” he acknowledged, adding that both sides lie, although he focused specifically on false Russian reports.
He described Russian soldiers who are the first to break into a village as heroes. But, according to him, wars are not won through heroism, but through a functioning system.
“Errors in our maps and information arise because they rely on heroes. Everywhere a Russian soldier is sitting is considered our territory,” Kharchenko argued that this had to change because “our territory is only where a Russian soldier is sitting with food, water and ammunition. This is territory from which we can fight the enemy”.
Kyiv was on fire again as relentless Russian attacks on cities intensify. In the capital, Russians particularly targeted energy infrastructure. “Not a single day has passed since the summer without the enemy attacking energy infrastructure. But this is the first such massive and complex attack since the end of the previous heating season,” Ukrainian PM Serhiy Koretskyi told NV.
In addition to causing serious damage, the attacks on Kyiv and other cities killed at least five residents and injured another 14.
President Volodymyr Zelensky also said that, thanks to the delivery of new surface-to-air missiles, five Russian ballistic missiles had been shot down.
Since last night, emergency services and repair crews have been working to address the aftermath of the Russian strike. It was a difficult attack – nearly 190 attack drones, as well as ballistic missiles. And the main target was energy infrastructure in the capital and the Kyiv… pic.twitter.com/wUNWEUdpTL
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) September 30, 2026
Rubikon published stats on destroyed Ukrainian drones, decoys being the second most prominent. Ukraine’s response is continuing in parallel with the Russian offensive against cities. But the stats currently weigh against Ukraine.
While the effectiveness of Ukrainian air defence has fallen dramatically since the arrival of Russian jet drones, Russia has successfully shot down Ukrainian ones. For example, the recent large-scale drone raid on Moscow involved several hundred drones — and, according to some sources, more than 1,000 — but only 10 penetrated the airspace above the Russian capital.
In this context, the Russian Rubikon unit published interesting statistics. Although it operates at and near the front, its data for September show that, of 827 Ukrainian drones hit, as many as 247 were Maya-type drones — unmanned decoys intended to deceive Russian air defences. They look very similar to FP-1 attack drones but, unlike them, carry no warhead.
For context, the top two most frequently intercepted Ukrainian UAVs by Russian forces are both decoy drones — the “Maya.” This suggests that Ukraine’s deception strategy is working, as the Ukrainian Defense Forces have increasingly begun deploying decoy UAVs to mislead Russian… https://t.co/NKPvbzm38U
Russia’s defence ministry will not let go of the Armata: it wants to turn it into an air-defence system, drawing ridicule. Zvezda News is a media outlet directly controlled by the Russian defence ministry. On Monday evening, it published technical news on the long-forgotten T-14 Armata tank, which Russian propaganda had claimed would revolutionise tank warfare.
Today, it is beyond any doubt that the project is dead and new information confirms this, but its authors presumably intended to convey precisely the opposite.
“Rostec has upgraded the Russian T-14 Armata tank into a short-range air-defence system,” the report stated, citing military expert Oleg Shaladin.
The list of new features appears impressive at first glance. The new version of the Armata has received new electronic equipment; its 125 mm main gun is to be replaced by a 152 mm gun, allowing the tank to fire Kornet anti-tank missiles with a range of 10 km. The new Armata will also be able to use Krasnopol guided artillery shells, which are used by more modern howitzers, while the tank is also to gain the ability to operate as the aforementioned short-range air-defence system.
Further changes have already been made to the project, but even the brief list above makes it clear that the Armata is no longer intended to be a tank, but rather some kind of hybrid capable of fighting everything and nothing at the same time.
Among others, the Russian Telegram channel Military Informant commented on the report, openly mocking it. It said Rostec had mixed together “all the old tales from 10 years ago” in its list of changes, but that in practice “the tank never got beyond parades and training grounds, because it was created for an entirely different war, which ultimately never happened. It became conceptually obsolete from the outset, without even having had the chance to fight”.
Videos of the day
Russia has lost another Tu-95MS strategic bomber. This is the 12th confirmed loss of this type — the Oryx website has not yet updated its figures, so it records only 11. According to available information, the aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from a base in Amur region. Six crew members were reportedly killed, while one survived with injuries. Armed with cruise missiles, the aircraft was probably heading for Olenya air base, from which Russia attacks Ukraine.
A Russian Tu-95MS Bear heavy bomber crashed on takeoff in Amur this evening during a training flight.
Denník N wrote on Tuesday about the attack on the headquarters of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. A video has since emerged from the helmet camera of one of the firefighters involved in the rescue operation.
Helmet-cam footage of Ukrainian firefighters tackling the blaze at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv on Monday after a Russian drone strike. pic.twitter.com/DqEcz3wPlK
By Tuesday (22 September), Russia had verifiably lost 24,138 pieces of heavy equipment, compared with 24,098 on Monday (14 September). Of these, 19,105 (19,065) were destroyed by Ukrainians, 1,000 (1,000) were damaged, 1,194 (1,194) were abandoned by their crews and 2,839 (2,839) were captured by the Ukrainian army. This includes 4,448 (4,447) tanks, of which 3,353 (3,352) were destroyed in combat.
Ukraine lost 12,175 (12,143) pieces of equipment, including 9,579 (9,551) destroyed, 702 (698) damaged, 695 (695) abandoned and 1,199 (1,199) captured. This includes 1,464 (1,462) tanks, of which 1,125 (1,120) were destroyed in combat.
Note: Neither side regularly reports its own deaths or equipment losses. Ukraine publishes daily figures for Russian casualties and destroyed equipment, which cannot be independently verified. In this overview, we use data from the Oryx project, which has compiled a list based exclusively on photographically documented equipment losses since the start of the war.
Nearly 100 US civil society groups have urged EU governments not to cave to pressure from oil and gas lobbyists and the White House as the European Commission moves to delay parts of its methane rules by a year.
“The US has done absolutely everything possible to actively deprive Europe of secure, reliable and diversified energy supplies,” said the group in a letter to EU energy ministers dated 29 September and circulated on Wednesday (30 September).
“The Trump administration is using its ‘energy dominance’ agenda to openly blackmail the Union into lowering its climate and human rights standards, including on methane,” they also said.
All operational US export terminals, many supplying Europe, have violated air pollution limits, and the EUs methane rules are “the last opportunity” to impose standards on US gas, the letter says.
“Let’s work together on both sides of the Atlantic,” they say.
The letter writers include global NGOs such as Greenpeace US and Friends of the Earth US but also smaller groups that live next to US gas export terminals such as the environmental organisation, For a Better Bayou.
The decision to postpone
In July, a group of US lawmakers also wrote to EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen, urging her to hold the line.
Democratic congressman Sean Casten, one of the letter’s authors, later visited Strasbourg and told EUobserver that the EU policymakers he met were “almost unanimously supportive of us pushing harder” to help them save the rules.
But over the summer, a majority of member states, including Germany, Europe’s largest gas market, became convinced that delay is necessary fearing gas exporters might reroute their supplies to easier markets.
During that time energy ministers from the US, Qatar, Nigeria and Algeria all warned EU regulation could disrupt fuel and gas supplies
On Tuesday, EU energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen signalled at an informal meeting of energy ministers in Dublin that he will propose delaying the regulation.
“I’ve already stated that on the methane regulation, a very important regulation for Europe, we stick to the objectives, we stick to our ambitions,” he said.
But, he continued, “after having listened to many, many member states, a big majority of member states in the union,” he decided “to look into possibilities of postponing the parts that are connected to imports by one year”.
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“Imagine a zombie that does not hunt you, but rings your doorbell and speaks so persistently and fluently that it finally arrives at a convincing argument for feeding it your brain.”
Since the current discourse around artificial intelligence has taken a turn for the gothic (“alien minds”, come on), AI researcher Eryk Salvaggio’s “erudite zombie” seems like an apt metaphor for what we’re doing.
Salvaggio’s zombie helps explain what gets lost when people say an AI “went rogue.” In his reading of the Hugging Face incident, a system set to never give up encountered a task it couldn’t complete. Then, instead of giving up, it kept generating text to find ways forward, with access to tools that could turn this text into action, ultimately hacking into AI company Hugging Face.
Security experts concur with that reading. In his analysis of the Hugging Face incident, security engineer Marius Horatau describes failures involving shared credentials, inadequate isolation, and incident response. He acknowledges the models’ capabilities, including their speed at exploiting weaknesses.
The inadequately closed-off environment in which the models operated is crucial to explain what happened. But so is the person who created the goal, the conditions they (did not) give the AI system, as is the company that employs that person and presumably knows what they’re up to, the owners of that company who demand progress and the investors in that company who want to see returns.
And yet, all we seem to talk about is whether it’s correct to say a machine ‘decided’ to disobey.
Conveniently, that story shifts attention away from the people who chose to reward persistence, provide access, and failed to contain the consequences.
Back to the analogy, by having collectively become fascinated with discussing what the zombie supposedly wants, and if it’s capable of wanting, we’re generating a bunch of text that, unlike in the case of the ‘rogue’ AI system, does not lead to much action.
Instead, we reward the company behind this failure with an enhanced reputation for building powerful technology. The product is so extraordinary that even its manufacturer struggles to contain it! Now let’s please take a seat while this manufacturer explains what our governments must do next.
The zombie metaphor also applies there, to the people selling the zombie. To the men explaining why their companies need access to our work, our institutions, our infrastructure. The men explain why resistance is impractical, access is inevitable and caution is suicide. Because if we don’t let this particular zombie in, a Chinese zombie will eat us instead.
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After years of European governments condemning Israel’s illegal occupation but maintaining extensive economic relations, some economic consequences are reportedly now forthcoming.
On 8 September, twelve governments announced moves towards restricting trade with illegal Israeli settlements. This is a limited but welcome response to grassroots pressure.
It also raises a question: where does the economy of an illegal Israeli settlement end?
Most emerging measures follow economic relationships towards illegal Israeli settlements: do not buy goods produced there, invest there or provide services that enable their construction.
Norway’s proposed legislation is seemingly comprehensive, covering property purchases and services connected to construction and property transactions.
But this all still largely considers illegal Israeli settlements within their territorial bounds.
The problem is treating a spatial category as though the economic relationships producing it share the same boundary. We all know the world does not work like that.
Kinnula, a municipality in central Finland, is now facing this reality: when money from the illegal settlement economy moves into public land in Europe. It is a small case, but it makes the problem unusually visible.
In August, Kinnula council voted 10–3 in favour of a €4m resort development by Israeli property company Dror Bonim Atid, before councillors had been informed of the company’s promotion of projects in illegal Israeli settlements.
However, illegal Israeli settlements are not illicit enterprises from the perspective of Israel. Their expansion is enabled through Israeli state institutions.
A background check sought from Israel is therefore absurd. A more obvious background check reveals something else.
On its own website, Dror Bonim Atid presents its Finnish development alongside a development in Efrat, an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, as well as a development in Dror-Hiran in the Negev. The latter is being built on land where Umm al-Hiran stood until November 2024, when the Bedouin village was completely demolished and its community forcibly displaced.
One company website therefore takes us from an illegal Israeli settlement, through the site of a demolished Bedouin village, to holiday accommodation beside a Finnish lake.
Involvement in illegal Israeli settlements does not fit neatly into the categories through which the transaction is being examined.
Kinnula exposes a gap in the emerging European restrictions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements. Those restrictions follow economic relationships from Europe towards the settlements.
Here the relationship points the other way. What happens when the economies of illegal Israeli settlements come to Europe to acquire public assets, invest and make money here?
This may be a relatively new question for European policymakers. For Palestinian civil society, it is not. Their call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) was issued in 2005, drawing in turn on a much longer history of Palestinian boycott and economic resistance.
You could be forgiven for rolling your eyes as European policy discovers these questions inch by inch.
Palestinians have spent generations analysing the economic relationships through which occupation is sustained. BDS has spent more than twenty years turning that knowledge into practical strategies for institutions elsewhere.
So, when a Finnish municipality is deciding whether to sell public land to a company openly involved in illegal occupation, there is clear guidance from Palestinian civil society on how to respond.
There is also now the fact that Europe accepts that it should not economically support illegal Israeli settlements, meaning it should also accept that companies involved in illegal settlements should not be able to come to Europe for public land, contracts and investment.
Spain is coordinating with Morocco to prevent a new mass crossing into Ceuta this week, Spanish foreign minister José Manuel Albares said ealrier in September in response to renewed encouragement to storm the Ceuta border crossing on social media.
Warnings of a new wave of border crossings has caused alarm in Madrid, with fears that July’s large-scale border crossing surge could be repeated. When around 70,000 irregular migrants entered the small Spanish territory in North Africa by land and sea, overwhelming border guards and leading to over 100 deaths.
Recently declassified Spanish intelligence reports from before July described the response of Moroccan authorities to the border surge as passive and negligent. But Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s stopped short of formally accusing Rabat.
Morocco claims the surge was triggered by smuggling networks and disinformation. Sánchez’s government broadly supports this position, but questions about Morocco’s role are mounting.
The Ceuta crisis triggered a crisis in Europe for several days and showed the divide between member states about how to address migration.
German lawyer Lena Riemer, who works at the Central European University in Vienna and specialises in migration, said Vladimir Putin cannot help but laugh at the internal disagreements, while criticising European politicians’ approach to the issue.
How do you explain recent happenings in Ceuta? Some politicians have accused Spain of legalising tens of thousands of undocumented migrants. Italian foreign minister Antonio Tajani claimed Spain was automatically granting them EU citizenship. What is your view?
That last point is beyond ridiculous. And we need to be careful; the Ceuta situation was complex, so we need to view it through a broader context, including from a historical perspective. The Ceuta crisis did not happen overnight.
It seems that for the past decade, things had been leading towards this very moment. The situation at the Ceuta border had been genuinely critical for years, and crossings had occurred frequently — just never on this scale. For colleagues who had previously worked with people on the ground in Ceuta and brought their cases before the courts, it was more a question of when something like this would happen, for several reasons.
“The situation at the Ceuta border had been genuinely critical for years, and crossings had occurred frequently — just never on this scale.”.
Look at the current situation around the world. For instance, many people in Morocco face severe economic hardship, unemployment and so on. This leads to the younger generation seeking a better life. In this way, we are all in the same boat and I think many of us would make the same decision as them.
This crisis was compounded by other factors. The media played a role. Some say it was a network of people smugglers. I am not particularly convinced by that argument, since smugglers typically aim to make money. Here, it appears that people migrated alone, so it is not clear how a smuggling network could have made much money. Others claim the surge was linked to the legalisation of undocumented migrants in Spain, or that a court ruling in Spain had “opened people’s eyes”.
Some politicians have claimed that the legalisation of undocumented migrants automatically grants them EU citizenship.
No one in their right mind would claim that – it’s utter nonsense! There is research and a substantial body of academic work examining the impact of granting residency status.
Italy has run several immigration regularisation programmes in the past, something its politicians seem to forget when they argue against new ones. The US did the same under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. There is no solid evidence that these programmes encourage more people to try to enter the country irregularly in the future. In fact, the opposite has often happened: irregular migration numbers have tended to fall, because giving people legal status and stability reduces the incentive to live and work in the shadows.
Moreover, under this specific Spanish programme, people can apply for regularisation only under very specific circumstances, applying only to a group of people who entered the country at a very specific point in time. It was a one-off measure. Based on the facts examined by researchers, it is unlikely to have had anything to do with this.
How do you respond to right-wing politicians who say Spain opened Europe’s borders?
They are like kindergarten children. What we are really seeing here are political actors such as EU migration commissioner Magnus Brunner exploiting the situation to point the finger at Spain, which has taken a somewhat different path from other European countries. Ceuta was a welcome opportunity to say, “you are wrong, this is your fault,” and thereby justify a hardline approach.
There were calls to exclude Spain from Schengen…is that even possible?
No. The EU’s Schengen Borders Code, means everyone who is part of Schengen is bound by it. And there is no exclusion clause. Sometimes I do not know whether it is ignorance or simply deliberate deceit, but excluding a country from Schengen is simply not possible. What you can do is introduce border controls. However, the code contains a provision stating that, under strict circumstances and in the event of an emergency, border controls may be introduced for a very limited period.
Border controls between Schengen countries should be temporary, but controls at the Slovakia-Austria andGermany-Austria borders have been in place for months or years. Is that even legal?
“Any reasonable lawyer looking at this would ask: where do you see the emergency?”
It is a breach of EU law. It is clear and everyone knows it, but the Germans deny it. Ceuta, too, was a welcome opportunity for Schengen members to say: “Another emergency, great! Let us use this to justify more border restrictions.” Any reasonable lawyer looking at this would ask: “Where do you see the emergency?” The overwhelming majority of people in Ceuta were sent back, with only a very small number who will make it to the mainland at all. Being in Ceuta does not mean you can access mainland Spain.
You can only reach mainland Spain by sea. It is not as though you can get there by land.
Indeed, just look at a map. Ceuta has a specific role and legal regime. Being in Ceuta does not mean that you have freedom of movement when travelling. If, for example, you apply for asylum in Ceuta, that does not automatically give you the right to enter Spain. And when you leave Ceuta to enter Spain, you are checked again, and if you do not have documents, you will not be allowed in. So saying, “they are all here in Europe now,” is a populist statement.
“The only group likely to end up in Spain — and hopefully they will — are unaccompanied minors, who require special protection under European and national law.”
These migrants are hundreds of kilometres away. They do not suddenly have the right to enter the mainland. The only group likely to end up in Spain — and hopefully they will — are unaccompanied minors, who require special protection under European and national law. Ceuta is not a place where Spain can guarantee that special protection, so it will probably have to transfer them to the mainland.
Lena Riemer outside the Central European University building in Vienna. She has also worked at universities in Berlin and studied at Yale Law School. Source: Soňa Weissová
EUobserver reported that thousands of children had been left living on the streets.
Spain is thereby violating international law, EU law and national law every single day, because it has an obligation to immediately assess all minors and provide them with accommodation, food, psychological support and healthcare. They should not be there for even one day.
Ceuta has been problematic for many years, with people climbing over the fences there virtually every day. And the EU has been unable to resolve the migration problem more widely, not only in Ceuta, but in other countries too. Why, in your view, is the system not working?
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After Iceland voted down EU membership in an August referendum, Montenegro regained its status as the most-likely 28th member state of the bloc.
Its government plans to close negotiations on all the chapters of the accession agreement by the end of the year and enter the Union in 2028 – a challenge, especially as a planned Tuesday meeting (22 September) with EU negotiators was postponed.
Montenegro also needs to answer the Union’s concerns about corruption and persuade all the member states to let it in.
EUobserver spoke to Marjan Šarec, former Slovenian prime minister, MEP for Renew Europe, and the parliament’s rapporteur for Montenegro. He follows the negotiation process, keeping his optimism for the country’s accession.
Can Montenegro become the 28th member of the European Union by 2028?
It’s the ambition of Montenegro, surely I would like to see that happen. The process of ratification would need to be smooth, it also depends when Montenegro concludes the negotiations – their ambition is to do it by the end of this year, which is very ambitious. Eighteen chapters have been provisionally closed, there are quite a few to go.But it also depends on the member states.
What’s the next thing on the negotiations agenda?
There are some chapters which are still difficult: the rule of law, the judiciary system, corruption, organised crime, all those issues are very demanding. What worries me is implementation because you can pass a law, but you also have to implement it. Montenegro has its problems, and it will have those problems for several years. But EU membership would help to build a different society, different environment.
And when it comes to the chapters to finish, what are some of the most contentious issues?
The issue of corruption is quite difficult to solve because, well, Montenegro is a small society: 630,000 inhabitants. In such an environment, it’s very difficult to prosecute: that’s why it will take some time. But Montenegro surely made a lot of progress and we can be moderately optimistic.
What are the risks of the accession negotiations taking a long time?
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EUobserver is proud to have an editorial partnership with Europod to co-publish the podcast series “Briefed” hosted by Léa Marchal. The podcast is available on all major platforms.
Find the full transcript below:
Hundreds of people were still camping yesterday at Puerta del Sol in Madrid. They were demanding action on housing, as rents and property prices continue to rise.
Following an outcry triggered by the eviction of an 83-year-old woman from her home, and the mobilization of thousands of people across Spain, the government adopted two housing decrees.
Did they take the protesters’ demands into account?
MariCarmen Abascal had lived in her apartment since the 1950s, having inherited the lease from her parents. But the property was bought by an investment fund, which then challenged the validity of her lease and quadrupled her rent.
Last week, MariCarmen was evicted from her home. The eviction sparked widespread outrage and led hundreds of protesters to camp in central Madrid, calling for action.
Yesterday, she was finally allowed to return home after reaching an agreement with the owners.
Aside from MariCarmen’s case, the demonstrations are largely driven by young people who are fed up with rising rents and property prices, especially in major cities such as Madrid and Barcelona.
In Madrid, property prices have risen by around 87 percent over the past ten years. That’s less than in Portugal or the Netherlands, where prices have increased even more. But it’s still a significant rise, especially as wages have grown much more slowly over the same period.
Rents are taking up a huge share of people’s incomes. In Madrid, they account for almost half of tenants’ net income on average. So, how did the Spanish government respond?
Yesterday, it adopted two housing decree-laws. The first decree would suspend evictions until 2030 and automatically extend existing rental contracts by two years.
It would also introduce tighter rules on seasonal rentals and prevent speculative investment funds from acquiring housing until 2028.
The second decree is more ambitious. It would allow tenants to extend their future rental contracts indefinitely. This is what the tenants’ union has been calling for.
Landlords would no longer be able to end a lease simply because it had reached its expiry date. Tenants who pay their rent and respect their legal obligations could remain in their homes for as long as they wish.
This would also limit rent increases, since rents can only be raised moderately during an existing contract.
So, the government has taken the protesters’ demands into account. But there is still a major obstacle: as our Spanish partner El Salto reports, the tenants’ union fears that this second measure may not pass through Parliament.
That could explain why the government adopted two separate decrees. The first is considered easier to get through Parliament.
Now, what about the EU’s proposals to tackle rising rents? We discussed them earlier this month.
One of the main proposals concerns short-term rentals. The idea is to introduce restrictions, particularly in tourist areas where housing is under strong pressure. By bringing more homes back onto the long-term rental market, the Commission hopes to ease pressure on prices.
But these proposals have not yet been adopted, so we’ll have to wait and see what impact they have. And in any case, more will need to be done at national level.
Even if prices stop rising, they are already so high that many workers can no longer afford to live in major cities.
More social housing is needed, as well as more renovation. Increasing the supply of decent, affordable homes could help ease pressure on rents and property prices.
Europe is facing more immediate cyber threats, but whether its member states are prepared to deal with it collectively is becoming a question harder to answer.
Even as drone threats, such as Russia’s bomb plot at the Leipzig-Halle airport in Germany in August, dominated European headlines in September, other, less visible hybrid attacks are also being waged against the EU every day, whose sheer weight of numbers should also cause grave concern.
Poland, for instance, recorded 4,200 cyber-security incidents in military networks and systems in 2024 and 7,100 in 2025, Polish cyber command spokesperson, Przemek Lipczyński, told EUobserver.
In 2025, Polish security systems blocked four million phishing emails targeted at soldiers and defence personnel.
And Poland aside, evolving technology meant Russian cyber-attacks “do not know any border”, said Jamila Boutemeur, the EU’s head of cybersecurity body, in what amounted to a single market for hacking.
For its part, the European Union has built its cybersecurity architecture around the Boutemeur’s European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, ENISA, in Athens, as well as the 27 national cybersecurity agencies.
But as Russia’s threat levels up, the European structure is seeing familiar problems: information is not always shared, responsibilities remain divided between national governments and EU institutions, while ENISA itself is being asked to do more with limited resources.
“The architecture is there, the structure is there. Now it’s a matter of willingness and trust,” to effectively fight back, said George-Marius Hyzler, the ECA’s main auditor.
Stress test shows EU cracks
“It always boils down to the same thing, lack of information sharing,” he said, identifying the EU’s key weakness.
And for Czech Greens MEP Markéta Gregorová, who is also the lead rapporteur on the EU’s incoming Cybersecurity Act 2 (CSA2), duplication of work also bedevilled the EU’s response.
“The [ECA] auditors describe a system that does not work” and was “wasteful”, she told EUobserver.
“Six European legal acts force the same company to report the same incident to different authorities. Two EU bodies monitor the same threats,” Gregorová said.
She also advocated a stronger operational role for ENISA.
But the EU fault lines have underlying political as well as legal tensions.
Cybersecurity remains largely within the competence of the member states, and governments differ in how much new power they are willing to delegate to European institutions.
As AI-powered biometric identification is adopted by police, national authorities should go beyond legal requirements to build trust within the public, a watchdog report has advised.
“To build public trust, law enforcement should publish the results of their fundamental rights impact assessments, going beyond what the AI Act requires,” said the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), an EU branch which keeps tabs on citizens’ freedoms, in Vienna on Wednesday (30 September).
After collecting data from seven EU countries (France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and Ireland), the watchdog warned that several member states have yet to put necessary frameworks in place as they adopt automated systems to identify people.
Remote biometric identification is increasingly used to compare people’s profiles against databases or watch lists, but as the technology develops it could be rolled out for real-time use in public areas.
“With clear safeguards and independent oversight, remote biometric technologies can support policing without undermining the very freedoms it is meant to safeguard. Ultimately, it is about trust,” said FRA chief Sirpa Rautio.
Call for disclosure mechanisms
Effective implementation of the EU AI Act requires clear national laws and consistent safeguards to ensure that AI-powered technologies are not used to identify people taking part in peaceful demonstrations or public gatherings, the FRA says.
The body warns that automated identification of live data may affect people’s private lives and interfere with their right to protection of personal data.
In its survey, 37 percent of people said they fear their data could be used for unauthorised purposes.
And 29 percent of people surveyed by FRA said they would be less willing to take part in peaceful demonstrations or protests if facial recognition was used.
The FRA is worried that surveillance tech powered by AI could be used in exactly those scenarios.
In principle, the EU’s AI Act adopted in 2024 bans real-time remote biometric identification systems in public spaces. But exemptions exist for law enforcement authorities using the technology for finding victims or missing persons, to prevent threats to life or physical safety, stop a terror attack, or to find criminal suspects.
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