Europe

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/62186633

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/62185811

Russia’s profits from exporting oil, gas and fertilizer amount to more than €10 billion ($11.54 billion) a month, the chamber said. "Russia is the big winner of the new war in the Middle East," Matthias Schepp, the chamber’s chairman, told dpa.

However, the major tech corporations are not considering an immediate halt to their surveillance measures. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snapchat's parent company, Snap, announced on Saturday in a joint statement that they will “continue to take voluntary measures” to identify such material on their platforms.

I think it is paywalled. If you do not use bypass paywall, see it below:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told Vladimir Putin during a phone call in October that he was willing to go to great lengths to assist the Russian president, including to help settle the war in Ukraine by hosting a summit in Budapest.

“Yesterday our friendship rose to such a high level that I can help in any way,” Orban said, according to a Hungarian government transcript of the call reviewed by Bloomberg. “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

To underline the point, Orban recalled a children’s story he said was popular in Hungary. The Aesop fable involves a mouse freeing a lion caught in a net after it had earlier spared the rodent’s life. The remark drew a laugh from Putin, the transcript shows. Spokespeople for Orban and Putin didn’t immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.

The relationship between Orban’s government and the Kremlin is coming under increasing scrutiny as Hungarians prepare to vote in an election this weekend, with opinion polls indicating that Putin’s closest ally in the European Union could be ousted after 16 years. Hungary opposes aid to Ukraine, while Orban’s campaign is portraying President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as an enemy of the state.

The brief call between Orban and Putin, which took place around noon on Oct. 17 and whose content is being reported for the first time, provides further evidence to suggest that helping Russia is a policy that comes from the very top of government.

The two men spent much of the discussion sharing their appreciation for each other, and also for Donald Trump. Both had spoken to the US president the previous day about the potential summit in Budapest, which ultimately didn’t happen.

Trump has endorsed Orban and US Vice President JD Vance will visit Budapest Tuesday as the election campaign enters the final stretch.

In the call, Orban described the friendship with Putin as having strengthened since it first began in the Russian leader’s home city of St. Petersburg in 2009.

“The more friends we make, the more possibilities we have to resist our adversaries,” said Orban, according to the transcript, which was corroborated by a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing confidential talks. The Hungarian premier lamented that he and Putin hadn’t been able to meet regularly in person as they had before the Covid pandemic.

Putin was then effusive over Hungary’s “independent and flexible” stance on his war against Ukraine. “It is incomprehensible to us that such a balanced, middle-ground position only generates counter arguments,” said the Russian president, according to the transcript. An anti-Ukraine campaign poster in Budapest.Photographer: Akos Stiller/Bloomberg

Some European leaders hit out at Hungary last week after a consortium of investigative news outlets, including The Insider and VSquare, published a leaked recording of a call between Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, involving removing a Russian billionaire’s sister from the EU’s sanctions list. Szijjarto dismissed the story as the work of foreign intelligence services tapping his calls and said that it’s no secret that he opposes the EU’s sanctions policy.

That report followed one in the Washington Post, citing a European security official, that Szijjarto would regularly brief Lavrov on private discussions in Brussels between EU foreign ministers.

Revelations of just how closely Hungary keeps Russia informed and works to advance its interests comes at a critical time.

Opposition leader Peter Magyar, a former insider in Hungary’s ruling elite, has vowed to steer Hungary back toward the European mainstream and away from Moscow should he prevail in Sunday’s election. Orban, meanwhile, has made anti-Ukraine messages the central theme of his campaign.

His government is obstructing a critical €90 billion ($104 billion) loan to Kyiv and last month authorities seized currency that was being transferred from Austria to Ukraine overland via Hungary. The country also continues to import Russian energy while the EU phases it out.

Orban and Putin spoke by phone as recently as March 3, where the Russian leader hailed “Hungary’s principled stance” on Ukraine, according to a Kremlin transcript. They also exchanged views on progress in agreements reached when Orban visited Putin in Moscow on Nov. 28. Orban noted then that it was their 14th meeting.

The main purpose of the October call, according to the transcript reviewed by Bloomberg, was to discuss the possibility of Hungary hosting a US-Russia meeting that had been floated at the time.

“Orban expressed willingness to lay the groundwork for holding a possible Russia–United States summit in Budapest,” according to an official readout released by the Kremlin after the call, which was in Hungarian and Russian, and lasted less than 15 minutes with translation.

According to the transcript of the call reviewed by Bloomberg, Putin walked Orban through the steps that could lead to the event, starting with a potential meeting between Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio before deciding the “appropriate level of representation.”

The president suggested involving Szijjarto in the discussions, according to the transcript. The Rubio-Lavrov meeting didn’t happen in the end.

Hungary was one of the few, “perhaps the only,” European country that was an acceptable venue for the meeting under discussion, Putin said, adding that he agreed with Trump’s assessment that it was an appropriate location because Orban was a friend to both presidents.

The summit in Budapest didn’t take place as the US and Russia failed to agree on Moscow’s maximalist demands over Ukraine. It would have followed a meeting between Trump and Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, in August.

Both Orban and Putin were full of praise for Trump. The Hungarian premier, who has been feted by the US administration and the MAGA movement, said he admired the American president’s “tornado”-style business approach.

“As they say, he moves forward like a tank,” Putin said. “It works for him, and you can only feel joy about it.” He praised Trump’s ability to deal with various crises at the same time, including in the Middle East. The US president had recently concluded a peace agreement in Gaza. More recently, Moscow has criticized the US for attacking Iran.

The call began with Orban wishing Putin a happy birthday after he’d turned 73 earlier in October. It ended with the two leaders inquiring about their respective health.

“I exercise, I also ski. I know you play football,” the Russian president said, according to the transcript. “I try,” Orban replied, to the laughter of both men. The Hungarian premier then thanked Putin and said good-bye in Russian.

Violent crime committed by active-duty Russian servicemen has surged since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Poland-based news outlet Vot Tak reported, with murders, sexual assaults and robberies rising far faster than the military’s expansion.

Russian garrison military courts received 729 murder cases involving servicemen between 2022 and 2025, compared with just 67 in the four years before the war, according to data compiled by Vot Tak.

The more-than-tenfold increase comes as the size of Russia’s Armed Forces grew by roughly one and a half times over the same period.

...

The number of murders committed by servicemen outside combat zones has risen steadily each year of the war, according to the court data.

In 2025, the number of murder cases handled by garrison military courts was one and a half times higher than in 2024 and 16 times higher than in 2022, the first year of the invasion.

Overall, 729 such cases were filed between 2022 and 2025, compared to just 67 cases from 2018 to 2021.

Similarly, courts received 278 cases of grievous bodily harm resulting in death during the war years, compared with fewer than 40 in the preceding four-year period.

The sharp rise cannot be explained solely by the military’s expansion, Vot Tak said. Presidential decrees increased the size of the military by about 50% compared with pre-war levels, far below the rate of growth in violent crime.

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Alcohol consumption appears to play a significant role in many of the killings.

In nearly three-quarters of published verdicts reviewed by Vot Tak, the perpetrator was intoxicated at the time of the crime. Soldiers committed murders while on leave, during downtime and even while on duty.

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While some killings involve disputes among servicemen, most take place outside military settings.

Only about 17% of the cases reviewed involved victims who were fellow soldiers. The majority of victims were civilians, oftentimes friends, acquaintances or strangers.

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In one case, a mobilized soldier stabbed a woman 42 times in a wooded area after an argument during a drinking session. He later attempted to persuade a witness to help bury the body.

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Archived

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/28133646

The war goes on, and so does the global energy crisis. In fact, I believe that prices of oil futures remain too low given how much spot prices will need to rise to resolve the shortages that will hit once oil supplies that were shipped before the Strait of Hormuz was closed are exhausted.

But a better future is coming, despite Donald Trump’s assault on renewable energy as he tries to drag us back into the fossil fuel past. Regardless of Trump’s chest-thumping, America is not the world. We account for only 15 percent of global energy consumption, compared with China’s 28 percent. And the rest of the world is moving rapidly to renewables, thanks to a technological revolution in solar power, wind power, and, less visibly, batteries.

So let me take an optimism break and talk about why batteries may save the world.

The decline in battery prices has been incredible. It’s like nothing anyone has ever seen before. Big, strong men with tears in their eyes come up to me and say, “Sir, have you seen the progress in batteries?”

Why does this matter?

[ ... ]

Furthermore, we’ve seen rapid progress in all components of the green energy transformation, even though their underlying technologies have little in common. Solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are very different, yet all have seen revolutionary improvements. This strongly suggests that the whole renewable energy complex is experiencing a virtuous circle: ever-growing use leads to falling costs and falling costs lead to ever-growing use.

[ ... ]

So although we are now in the midst of a severe energy crisis that could easily go on for many months, this too shall pass. A better, cheaper, cleaner energy future is on the way, and not even Trump can stop it.

The Bucha massacre of 400 Ukrainian civilians in April 2025 “has ​come to symbolise the cruelty of Russia’s war”, said EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas on Tuesday (31 March) after visiting a memorial on the eve of the fourth anniversary, together with ministers from 12 EU countries.

Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski said: “Anybody who claims that [Russian President] Vladimir Putin is not a war criminal should come and see for themselves”.

German foreign minister Johann Wadepuhl said: “We are working together with our partners to enable the legal prosecution of Russian atrocities”.

Italy’s Antonio Tajani also said: “The goal must be a just peace, also to prevent new massacres of innocent civilians”.

Ukrainian foreign minister Andrii Sybiha contradicted last year’s 28-point US peace proposal, which called for amnesty for Russian war crimes, saying: “There will be no amnesty for Russian criminals, including the highest political and military leadership of the Russian federation”.

...

Jose Luis Abalos is a disgraced ex-Socialist heavyweight, a former transport minister who helped propel Sanchez to power in 2018. The case is one of several corruption affairs rattling the fragile coalition.

Abalos and his former adviser Koldo Garcia are suspected of having pocketed kickbacks for handing out public contracts worth millions of euros for sanitary equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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The Supreme Court in Madrid will judge them for alleged bribery, embezzlement, influence peddling, membership of a criminal organisation and misuse of confidential information. The men deny the charges.

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This is the first major corruption trial affecting the government since Sanchez came to power in 2018 after ousting a conservative Popular Party (PP) government in a no-confidence vote over its own graft scandal.

The Socialists have sought to distance themselves from the case.

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But [conservative Popular Party] PP spokesman Juan Bravo said Abalos was Sanchez's "friend and quite possibly his cover-up man" even though the prime minister has said he knew nothing about his former minister's personal life.

Prosecutors want Abalos to serve 24 years in jail. They portray him as the mastermind of a scheme of illicit enrichment. They have called for a 19-year term for Garcia, who they say was a key intermediary.

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Resident population held steady at around 59 million

Net immigration at 296,000 last year Without migrants, population would have shrunk by 297,000

Fertility rate down to 1.14 children ​per woman

The new EES system will be fully implemented from 10 April onwards and could help significantly modernise EU control systems – but not without a few initial hiccups along the way.