Bosnia and Herzegovina’s election, held on Sunday (4 October), has reinforced the country’s deep ethnic and political divisions, with nationalist parties retaining a strong grip on power and low turnout underscoring voters’ growing disillusionment with a political system that has long frustrated the country’s ambitions to join the European Union.
Public support for EU membership remains strong. According to a 2026 survey by Bosnia’s directorate for European integration, 74.4 percent of citizens said they would vote for EU membership in a referendum. Even in Republika Srpska, the ethnic Serb component, where support is lower, 54.1 percent said they would back joining the bloc.
And Bosnia became an EU candidate in 2022, but its path towards membership remains stalled.
The European Commission has identified 14 priorities that the country must address before it can move towards opening accession negotiations. So far, it has not opened a single accession-talks chapter and does not have a chief negotiator for EU membership.
Meanwhile, Bosnia’s complicated political system, built around three constituent ethnic groups, continues to hamper the adoption of reforms.
The Bosnian nationwide turnout was just 42 percent, reflecting political apathy, but the complexity of its system also means few people in the EU followed what went on.
Instead of a single president, Bosnia and Herzegovina has a tripartite presidency comprising one Bosniak (South Slavic ethnic group), one Croat, and one Serb.
Voters registered in the federation may vote for either the Bosniak or Croat member, but not both. Voters in Republika Srpska elect the Serb member.
From the provisional results, on Sunday, Denis Becirović won a second term as the Bosniak member of the presidency with 38.12 percent.
He is to be joined by Darijana Filipović (46.55 percent) of the Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina (HDZ BiH) as the Croat member, and Željka Cvijanović of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) as the Serb member (55.37 percent).
The Bosnian system excludes citizens who do not identify as Serb, Croat, or Bosnian from standing for the presidency.
And the post-war power sharing agreement includes 14 parliaments and governments in total for the country of some 3.1 million people, making reforms hard to push through.
But amid the complexities, the biggest winner from Sunday’s elections could be Serb nationalist politician Milorad Dodik, while the big loser could be the EU, according to Adi Ćerimagić, a senior analyst on the Western Balkans at the European Stability Initiative think tank.
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The White House is monitoring reports of a suspected plague case and related quarantine measures in Russia’s Irkutsk region and is assessing possible options, a Trump administration official said.
“The administration is aware, monitoring the outbreak, and assessing options,” the official told Axios.
A State Department spokesperson separately said the United States is aware of reports of a fatal case of suspected pneumonic plague in Irkutsk Oblast and is tracking developments with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies.
“Many details have not been confirmed. We encourage Russian authorities to share accurate information quickly and openly,” a spokesperson said.
The reports center on the death of 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, a laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East. Independent Russian outlet Lyudi Baikala reported that she broke a test tube containing the bacterium that causes pneumonic plague on Sept. 25. She was hospitalized in Shelekhov on Sept. 29 with severe pneumonia and died overnight between Oct. 1 and Oct. 2, according to local accounts.
Russian authorities have not confirmed that Shipilova had plague. Rospotrebnadzor, the federal public health agency, said she was diagnosed with “pneumonia of unknown etiology” and that expanded testing found no microorganisms linked to her work. The agency said a review found no laboratory accident involving pathogenic microorganisms at the institute and that the sanitary and epidemiological situation in Irkutsk, Shelekhov and the wider region remained stable.
Alexei Tsydenov, head of the neighboring republic of Buryatia, said earlier on Telegram that the woman “died, maybe of the plague,” while adding that there were no plague outbreaks in Buryatia.
After the death, authorities placed nearly 200 people who had contact with Shipilova under medical observation, with most hospitalized for monitoring, Russian media reported. Irkutsk Gov. Igor Kobzev said those under observation showed no signs of illness and that laboratory tests were negative.
“All identified contact persons have been placed under medical observation. As of today, the contacts show no signs of illness, and their laboratory test results are negative,” Kobzev wrote on Telegram, according to The Moscow Times.
Several hospitals in the region imposed temporary restrictions or quarantines, and the director of an aluminum plant in Shelekhov ordered employees to wear masks, local reports said.
Pneumonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, can spread person to person through respiratory droplets and is the most severe form of the disease. The CDC says plague is potentially life-threatening but can be treated effectively with antibiotics if diagnosed and treated promptly. Natural plague foci outbreaks still exist in parts of Siberia, Mongolia and Central Asia, and Russia maintains specialized anti-plague institutes to monitor them.
No additional U.S. travel restrictions have been announced. There are currently no direct commercial flights between the United States and Russia.
The post ‘Monitoring the outbreak’ – White House ‘assessing options’ after lab worker dies of plague in Russia appeared first on Remix News.
Russia will use nuclear weapons if Nato tries to blockade Kaliningrad. That was the blunt warning from the Kremlin last week. In truth, this is an empty threat against an invented danger. Russia’s nuclear bluff is worn out from overuse, and Nato has no such intention.
But the outburst does signal something useful: Russia’s sensitivity about Kaliningrad.
The northern half of the former German territory of East Prussia is the Kremlin’s last great trophy from the Soviet victory over Hitler in 1945.
Like many trophies, it is less impressive on close inspection. Kaliningrad is an artificial creation, from its name (after the war criminal Mikhail Kalinin) to its population (imported after ethnic cleansing) and its southern border (a crude straight line, of the kind European colonists inflicted on African countries).
Now Moscow’s grip on this exclave — an island of Russian territory sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania — is increasingly fragile. Not because anyone will sever the precarious air, sea, and land routes that keep it supplied, but because of Russia’s all-too-real, corrupt, authoritarian, and incompetent system of government.
The weakness of the Russian system, aggravated by the cost of the disastrous war in Ukraine, makes holding on to Kaliningrad unsustainable: economically, socially, demographically, and politically.
Outside commentary mostly misses this, depicting Kaliningrad as a fortress from which Russia can menace its neighbours.
It is more realistic to see it the other way round, as Russia’s greatest strategic vulnerability: an Achilles’ heel.
The think-tank the Baltic International Security Centre (BISC) is conducting a big research project called Kaliningrad 2050.
The name poses an implicit question: do you really believe that Kaliningrad will still be under Moscow’s rule by the middle of the century? It looks increasingly unlikely.
BISC will this week convene 20 experts for crisis simulations examining how Kremlin rule might unravel, and how neighbouring countries could, would, and should react.
The causes are imaginary, for now. But an environmental disaster, a breakdown in fuel supplies, or a public-health emergency, such as the one now unfolding in Siberia, are all entirely possible in Russia’s current ramshackle state. Decision-makers will have to react to the resulting refugee flows, pollution, and humanitarian needs.
We do not yet know the BISC study’s outcome: as with military ‘war games’, the aim of these exercises is to test how different scenarios play out. We hope the conclusions will be useful for those who deal with these dilemmas in real life.
Next up will be a book, Fragile Fortress, to be published later this year. Edited by the British Russia-watcher Christopher Peters, and written by local and foreign experts, it explores topics including memory politics, economic weaknesses, internal repression, and the state of public opinion. The main message: Kaliningrad survives only thanks to economic subsidy and political support from Moscow.
These efforts could hardly be more topical.
While the Kremlin blusters about a threat from Nato, social media scare stories depict supposed Russian invasion plans to be launched from Kaliningrad, with maps showing thick red arrows piercing the Suwałki Gap, a strategic stretch of land which links Poland and Lithuania.
But as the book’s military chapter shows, such an attack is impossible in current (or likely) conditions. Russia has almost no ground forces left in Kaliningrad: they have all gone to Ukraine. Nor does the Russian air force there have the kind of airfields and hangars needed for a real war.
Nato, especially since Sweden and Finland joined the alliance, is overwhelmingly dominant in land, sea, and air in the region: a point underlined by its recent surveillance exercises in the region.
In short, the nuclear bluster is irrelevant. Nobody is menacing Kaliningrad from the outside. And the real question is when and how, but not if, the Kremlin will lose it in the end.
Merz visited the Ukrainian capital on Sunday while Russian drone attacks continued against Kyiv.
According to the Ukrainian presidency’s account of the meeting, the package includes more than €1 billion for defence and additional financing for the energy sector ahead of winter. Separate reporting put the energy component at approximately €350 million.
The visit also produced an extensive group of bilateral agreements involving governments and companies.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine and Germany had concluded 15 agreements and documents, most concerning security co-operation, production, procurement, orders for German industry and joint projects in Ukraine. He put the total value of the agreements reached during the visit at more than €8.5 billion.
A narrower set of industrial agreements reported during the visit was valued at about €6.6 billion and included air-defence, radar and drone projects.
The visit went beyond another transfer of military aid.
Germany and Ukraine are increasingly constructing a defence relationship based on procurement, industrial production and the transfer of Ukrainian battlefield experience to European manufacturers.
At the Ukrainian-German Business Forum, Zelenskyy said the new security package would strengthen Ukraine’s armed forces immediately while industrial agreements were intended to build longer-term production capacity.
The direction corresponds with a wider shift in European support for Ukraine.
Military assistance is increasingly moving away from transfers of existing national stocks towards contracts financing new weapons production. In July, the EU released €3.47 billion for Ukrainian defence procurement, including financing intended for drones, missiles, air defence and combat aircraft requirements.
Kyiv has since asked European partners to accelerate further financing as the demands of the war outpace scheduled disbursements. EU Today reported in September that Ukraine was seeking early access to part of its 2027 EU funding to close a military budget gap.
The German agreements add a bilateral industrial track to that European system.
They also reflect changes on the battlefield.
Russia has continued to expand large-scale drone and missile attacks, increasing the importance of interceptor production, radar coverage and lower-cost methods of destroying unmanned aircraft. Ukraine’s air-defence problem is increasingly an industrial one: inexpensive attack drones cannot sustainably be countered only with scarce and costly surface-to-air missiles.
EU Today has previously examined how Ukraine’s air-defence battle has become an industrial equation, determined as much by production rates and cost ratios as by the technical performance of individual systems.
German-Ukrainian co-operation is increasingly being shaped by that requirement.
Merz has presented continuing support for Ukraine as a direct German and European security interest, rather than assistance based solely on solidarity with Kyiv.
The argument has acquired greater force as German authorities investigate Russian-linked sabotage and hybrid operations on German territory.
In September, investigators reportedly traced the attempted bombing of a Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle Airport to a suspected Russian military-intelligence organiser, with EU Today reporting details of the alleged GRU-linked logistics network.
For Berlin, support for Ukraine is now increasingly seen as part of Germany’s own security.
Merz’s visit also carries a domestic political dimension. His government is committing Germany to considerably higher defence expenditure at a time when the CDU has suffered severe electoral setbacks in eastern Germany and voters remain concerned over public finances and economic performance.
Yet Germany’s military and industrial engagement with Ukraine is continuing to expand.
The new package announced in Kyiv is important in itself, particularly as Ukraine prepares for another winter of Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure. The wider development, however, lies in the growing number of defence-production agreements accompanying it.
European governments have spent much of the war debating how to replenish their own weapons stocks while sustaining Ukraine.
The German approach increasingly points towards a different model: Ukrainian operational experience, Ukrainian procurement requirements and European industrial capacity being brought into the same defence-production system.
Russia might not have directly interfered in Latvia’s election, but the vote still showed how the Ukraine war was distorting European democracy.
Latvia’s VDD intelligence service did not detect any of Russia’s classic interference tactics in the run-up to Saturday’s (3 October) vote, such as a spike in disinformation, vote buying, or a manufactured security scare.
The centre-right prime minister Andris Kulbergs retained power with 35.8 percent of the vote, even if coalition-building might take a while.
And voters’ concerns included the cost of living and failing healthcare, in what also sounded normal.
But despite the ordinary appearances, Russia’s war in Ukraine still influenced the election in fundamental ways, in a strange new normal for Europe that most of us had hardly imagined just five years ago.
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