Ukraine has received undisclosed assistance from Poland as it struggles to defend against increasingly intense Russian drone and missile attacks, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hinted during a meeting with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Brussels on 15 October, Radio Svoboda reported.

Ukraine’s air defense needs are greater than at any point since 2022, as intensified Russian drone and missile attacks strain existing systems and expose shortages of interceptor missiles. With US support increasingly uncertain amid tensions between Kyiv and Washington, European military aid is becoming more critical to Ukraine’s ability to defend its cities and infrastructure.

Zelenskyy thanked Warsaw for its support, suggesting that some assistance had to remain confidential. He also specifically mentioned 20 mm ammunition, which Ukraine needs to defend its cities against Russian attacks.

“Sometimes this has to stay between the two of us,” Zelenskyy said, thanking Tusk for the aid.

European support increasingly important amid US rift

Ukraine is facing mounting pressure on its air defenses as Russia increases the scale of its aerial attacks. Ukrainian forces are also struggling with shortages of interceptor missiles, particularly Patriot missiles needed to counter Russian ballistic strikes, leaving the country vulnerable to further attacks.

The need for additional support comes amid growing uncertainty over US assistance under President Donald Trump. Washington has taken steps that have strained ties with Kyiv, including easing some restrictions on Russian fuel and pressing for an energy ceasefire that Ukraine says Russia has continued to violate. 

Recent disruptions to US-linked intelligence and satellite support have also raised concerns about Ukraine's ability to detect and counter Russian attacks.

As uncertainty over Washington's role grows, European military assistance is becoming increasingly important for Ukraine's defense.

Defense cooperation continues despite political tensions

Tusk reaffirmed Poland's commitment to supporting Ukraine, saying Kyiv could count on Poland and the European Union. He also opposed easing EU sanctions against Russia, arguing that Europe should not take steps that help Moscow finance its war.

The meeting also came amid strained relations between Kyiv and Warsaw over historical disputes. However, Poland's government has maintained that these disagreements should not undermine military support for Ukraine, whose ability to resist Russian aggression is closely tied to Poland's own security.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed held a telephone conversation on Wednesday with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss bilateral, regional, and multilateral issues, against the backdrop of the ongoing conflict in the northern region of Tigray.

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“Our discussion is a testament to both countries’ commitment to transforming the enduring relationship between Ethiopia and the United States into a more strategic and practical partnership,” Abiy Ahmed stated in a message posted on his X account.

The Ethiopian leader added: “I welcome the assurance of continued U.S. support for Ethiopia and our shared commitment to advancing bilateral cooperation and addressing regional and multilateral priorities.”

The contact took place as the Ethiopian army and its allied militia, the Tigray Peace Forces (TPF), clash with rebels from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) for control of the region.

Eritrean soldiers have reportedly been seen driving through northern Ethiopia. Eritrea denies that its troops have crossed the border town of Zelambessa.

Al Jazeera’s Malcolm Webb reports. pic.twitter.com/b0pnKkysHq

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 8, 2026

Addis Ababa has reported gains in Tigray following months of escalation and recurring drone strikes. The TPLF announced a “defensive war” on September 23, following the outbreak of heavy fighting.

The situation is further complicated by the formation of an alliance comprising seven rebel and opposition groups—including the TPLF—aimed at overthrowing the Ethiopian government.

These developments have reignited concerns regarding a potential new large-scale conflict, similar to the 2020–2022 war that left at least 600,000 people dead.

Hundreds of university and high school students clashed with Albanian police on Monday outside the Ministry of Education in Tirana during a protest over university conditions, tuition costs, and a lack of financial support.

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The demonstration began at 2:00 p.m. local time, when the young people blocked the street in front of the Ministry and threw paint, eggs, and firecrackers at the façade. Subsequently, some protesters tore up barriers and paving stones to hurl at the building, shattering its windows, according to local media reports.

Police detained 23 protesters, and at least six officers—as well as one journalist—were injured, the Ministry of the Interior reported, as cited by the Albanian public broadcaster RTSH. None of the injuries are life-threatening.

According to the official statement, police units intervened proportionately to neutralize those responsible for the incidents and restore order. Police responded with tear gas and a high-pressure water cannon before advancing on the crowd.

🚨🇦🇱 LIVE FROM TIRANA: Police assault a student who refuses to back down, confronting six officers before being arrested

✊ STAND WITH THE STUDENTS! STOP POLICE BRUTALITY!#Albania #Tirana #StudentProtest #ACAB pic.twitter.com/pHguk3N3ym

— Anonymous TV 🇺🇦 (@YourAnonTV) October 13, 2026

The students, primarily from the University of Tirana and the Polytechnic University, are demanding improvements to university facilities and student dormitories, as well as greater financial support for the student body. They are also calling for the resignation of the Minister of Education, Mirela Kumbaro.

During the protest, demonstrators chanted: Without youth, there is no Albania. According to the newspaper Gazeta Shqip, the mobilization was prompted by the poor condition of the country’s universities, the cost of education, and the lack of public financial aid.

The protest is part of the so-called “Flamingo Revolution,” an opposition movement against the government and the political system that began in May in response to a luxury tourism project in the protected Vjosa-Narta lagoon—a project linked to Jared Kushner, son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Since then, the movement has expanded its demands, calling for the formation of a technocratic government and the ousting of Edi Rama and veteran conservative leader Sali Berisha from power.

#Albania | The police violently cracked down on citizens protesting outside Parliament in Tirana, where they were demonstrating against Prime Minister Edi Rama and a tourism project linked to the family of U.S. President Donald Trump.

The clashes occurred during the final… pic.twitter.com/caorFLU1jP

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) July 23, 2026

Germany is preparing a new meeting of the Coalition of the Willing to coordinate further support for Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 12 October following a conversation with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Russia continues to strike Ukraine’s energy infrastructure despite US President Donald Trump’s claim that Moscow has agreed to an energy truce. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is initiating a meeting of European leaders to discuss assistance to Ukraine in this situation.

Kyiv and Berlin have also agreed to hold a meeting of national security advisers in the E3 format, with Ukraine participating, according to the statement. The format involves an informal grouping of three leading European countries: the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

Zelenskyy and Merz discuss energy truce and support for Ukraine

During the conversation, the two sides also discussed US President Donald Trump’s proposal for an energy truce and Russia’s subsequent actions. Russian forces continue to attack Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Zelenskyy noted.

“This is exactly how the Russians behave when pressure eases. It is very important that Europe continue to act on principle,” Zelenskyy stressed.

Germany is coordinating preparations for a meeting of the Coalition of the Willing, the Ukrainian president noted. The two sides also discussed support for Ukraine’s financial stability. Further steps are to be coordinated in greater detail during a meeting scheduled for this week, Zelenskyy said.

The Coalition of the Willing seeks additional support for Ukraine

The Coalition of the Willing was initiated by the United Kingdom and France, which held talks with representatives of 37 countries in March 2025 on supporting Ukraine in the event of a peace agreement. The initiative envisaged financial assistance and the deployment of troops, air forces or naval forces to protect Ukraine against renewed Russian aggression, Bloomberg reported.

The latest meeting of the Coalition of the Willing took place on 24 August and was the 16th meeting, according to a statement on the website of the President of Ukraine. Zelenskyy called on partners to strengthen Ukraine’s air defense and provide at least 300 missiles for Patriot systems for the winter, the statement said.

The president also proposed bringing forward part of the European loan financing planned for 2027 so that Ukraine could receive the funds this year. He separately stressed the need to find a mechanism for using frozen Russian assets to defend Ukraine and to unblock the maritime corridor in the Black Sea.

“We value this format—the Coalition of the Willing. It brings together countries that are ready not only to talk about security but also to act. We need this—to act and build real security together,” Zelenskyy stressed.

A ceasefire in words, but fresh attacks on energy infrastructure in practice

Ukraine and Russia had allegedly agreed to an immediate energy ceasefire, US President Donald Trump said on Truth Social on 11 October. However, at the time of publication, neither Kyiv nor Moscow had confirmed such an agreement, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

Ukraine supports the ceasefire and is awaiting details from the US side, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on X the same day. Russia must also agree to halt the strikes, he stressed.

Ukrainian forces had received the relevant orders, and Kyiv was ready to refrain from striking Russian energy infrastructure provided Russia reciprocated, Zelenskyy said in his evening address on 11 October.

Russia continued attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure after the ceasefire was announced, including striking a gas production facility and a petrol station, Zelenskyy said on his official Telegram channel on 12 October. Moscow had shown no willingness to abide by the ceasefire, the president added.

Ilias Kasidiaris, a former MP of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, who was released from prison last week, announced on Monday, his support for a new far-right party called the Alliance of Greeks. As KTG reported last week HERE, Kassidiaris is eager to return to politics, however, legislation makes it impossible for convicts for crimimal […]

The post Ex neo-Nazi Golden Dawn official declares support for new far-right party appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

How two fields that never talk to each other arrived at the same answer.

The same protocol, two fields

ACLS (Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support) and ATLS (Advanced Trauma Life Support) are the gold standard frameworks for managing physiological crise: systems built to keep trained professionals functional when every instinct says to react without thinking. Special Educational Needs support sits, professionally speaking, at the opposite end of healthcare, in the sustained work of accompanying children through dysregulation and meltdown, through the disorientation of a nervous system that won't reliably self-regulate. Different setting, different literature, different culture of practice.

But according to Dr. Adaugo Ijeoma Nwauwa, a physician who has instructed ACLS and ATLS and also worked directly supporting children with diverse learning and behavioural needs, the two fields are running the same protocol without knowing it.

Cognitive regulation, not just medicine

The claim is more precise than it first sounds. ACLS and ATLS are not, at bottom, medical protocols. They are cognitive regulation systems for the clinician, not only the patient. Under extreme stress, cognition degrades in predictable ways: attention narrows, sequencing collapses, and emotional reactivity overrides trained procedure. Resuscitation medicine doesn't assume a clinician's competence will survive that pressure intact; it's built around the assumption it won't.

The response is to remove the need for real-time judgement wherever possible: convert decisions into automatic sequences, spread cognitive load across a team, and give each person one narrow role so no single mind holds the entire crisis.

“This isn’t an accident of medical history,” Nwauwa says. “It’s applied psychology, and it works.”

Dysregulation is dysregulation

The same architecture, she argues, is needed and largely absent in SEN support because it's the same underlying problem. A child in sensory overload meltdown is not being difficult; the prefrontal cortex, the seat of language, reasoning, and sequence, has gone functionally offline, leaving the limbic system to run threat detection and fight-flight-freeze on its own. A trauma patient in haemorrhagic shock is a different system in a different kind of overwhelm, but the logic doesn't change: the environment has to supply, from the outside, what the person's own system currently cannot generate.

In both cases, the worst thing a responder can do is the thing that feels most natural under stress: escalate. Raise the voice. Add complexity to the demand. Let their own anxiety enter the room as a signal the other person's nervous system will pick up before any words do.

What works instead is almost boringly consistent: reduce arousal, impose sequence, communicate through calm rather than instruction, and wait for the window in which re-engagement becomes possible.

Calm Is a trained skill, not a trait

This is where the argument does its most useful work, not in the parallel itself, which is intuitive once stated, but in what she does with the word "calm". Calm, in her account, is not a personality trait or an emotional state the responder happens to be in. It's a trained physiological and behavioural posture, produced deliberately, that signals safety to everyone in the room regardless of what the responder actually feels.

Emergency medicine trains this explicitly and treats it as a technical skill worth simulating and rehearsing. SEN support demands the identical output, a support worker staying regulated through a full meltdown, with a fraction of the training infrastructure and almost none of the professional recognition that it is a skill at all rather than a personality quirk.

“A support worker who stays regulated while a child is in full meltdown isn't 'being patient',"  she says. “They’re performing a skilled intervention.”

The distinction matters practically: naming it as a technical skill is what makes it teachable through simulation, scenario repetition, and deliberate practice under controlled stress, the same methods that already work in resuscitation training.

The shared failure mode

The two fields also share a failure mode, the same one emergency medicine spent decades designing its protocols around: skipping assessment in favour of immediate action. Faced with visible distress, the instinct is to do something. ACLS treats that instinct as dangerous enough to override by rule: assessment before intervention, every time, no exceptions for how urgent the moment feels, because acting on a wrong read during a cardiac arrest kills the patient.

The stakes in a classroom are different, but the mechanism is identical. A worker who responds to visible distress without first identifying its source — sensory overload, pain, an unmet need, a communication breakdown — will frequently intervene in ways that escalate the very thing they're trying to calm.

“The assessment step isn’t a delay,” she says. “It is the intervention.”

The missing cross-pollination

What she finds most frustrating is not that the parallel exists but that almost nobody has acted on it. The literature on acute crisis intervention and the literature on neurodiverse behavioural support don't cite each other, don't share conferences, and largely don't share a vocabulary, despite, in her assessment, running on the same underlying mechanism.

The traffic could move in both directions: emergency medicine has the deeper evidence base and decades of simulation science to offer SEN training, while SEN support has made real advances in co-regulation and trauma-informed practice with obvious, unexplored applications in the emergency room, where patients in crisis are often just as dysregulated, just as unreachable by instruction, as a child mid-meltdown.

Training programmes that treat physiological crisis response and behavioural dysregulation as categorically separate disciplines, she argues, are training people for a version of the nervous system that doesn’t exist. It doesn't draw that line. Neither, she'd argue, should the curriculum.