europe

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The UK announced it was considering whether to join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) convention as part of its new trade strategy published last week, arguing it could help boost the UK’s flagging goods exports.However, the European Commission has made clear to the UK that it would not currently support such a move, according to four people familiar with discussions

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Describing the campaign to subjugate Ukraine as a “personal obsession” for Putin, [Ukraine’s former defence minister] Oleksii Reznikov said the conflict would continue in some form or another as long as he remained in the Kremlin.

Even if a ceasefire were declared and buffer zones established, Russia would continue to fight a hybrid war as it did in the years leading up to the full-scale invasion of 2022.

Members of Putin’s inner circle who may succeed him are unlikely to choose to continue the conflict, he said, because of the debilitating effect that sanctions have had on the country’s economy.

“[Putin] is afraid of Ukraine, because we are a threat to his regime,” Reznikov, who served as defence minister from the start of the invasion until September 2023, said in an interview with The Times. “If the Russian population sees that the democratic, liberal, European way is better than tyranny, then for the regime it becomes a question of survival."

[…]

Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who served as defence minister between 2019 and 2020, said that Ukraine should look to make itself into a “steel porcupine” capable of withstanding Russian aggression for years to come.

“Rather than assuming the war can be ended through a comprehensive battlefield victory or a negotiated compromise, Ukraine and its allies must plan to build a viable, sovereign and secure state under constant military pressure,” he wrote in an article for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank.

[…]

The rate of advancement [of Russia on the battlefield], remains glacially slow, with Russia having captured less than 1 per cent of Ukrainian land since the fall of Avdiivka in February 2024.

[…]

Asked what he believes Putin’s military objectives are, Reznikov invoked a scene from Yes, Prime Minister, the British television comedy of the 1980s, in which an adviser explains the Soviets’ use of “salami tactics”. The strategy involves a series of small gains, akin to thinly slicing a salami, that ultimately results in a significant advance.

Reznikov said this was an accurate description of Russian tactics to this day. “They started with Crimea — slices of salami. Then Luhansk — slices of salami. Then Donetsk — slices of salami. Today they occupy part of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. They will advance as long as you allow them to advance, taking as much land as they can.”

[…]

In June Russia surpassed the milestone of one million soldiers killed or wounded in action. But the state is enlisting an estimated 30,000 recruits a month, enticed by a generous salary and signing-on fee, so there is little prospect of any abatement to the rate of attrition.

“They have a huge manpower resources because the country has a population of 130 million,” said Reznikov. “So, for them it’s nothing to use these soldiers as cannon fodder. They place no value on human life.”

[…]

The EU will not rip up its tech rules in an attempt to reach a trade deal with Donald Trump, the bloc’s most senior official on digital policy has said.

Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission vice-president responsible for tech sovereignty, indicated the EU was not going to compromise on its digital rulebook to reach an agreement on trade with the US – a key demand of Trump administration officials.

“We are very committed to our rules when it comes to the digital world,” Virkkunen said in an interview with European newspapers, including the Guardian. “We want to make sure that our digital environment in the European Union … that it is fair and it’s safe and it’s also democratic.”

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Exclusive: Unofficial sites charging eight times the official price have already sprung up

If you are interested in this text, you might save not only the link, but the PDF as well - apparently there are ongoing efforts to de-publish it completely. (What again was the word we were using for this in USSR times?)

And if you are interested on many more details how “social media” and most smartphone software employs a neverending stream of “brain hacks” to capture our attention by addictive design, amplifying the campaigns of Cambridge Analytica and people behind it like Bannon or Mercer, this is a book you should look into:

“Free Your Mind from Smartphone and Social Media Stress”, by Imran Rashid and Søten Kenner, Johm Wiley & Sons, ISBN (print) 978-3-527-51002-3, (epub) 978-3-527-82886-9.

• title sounds like a self-help book but I think it is immensely political.