EU DEFENCE
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Antwerp’s Strategic Shield: Belgium to Install Air-Defence at Europe’s Trade Nexus
When the Prime Minister of Belgium stood before representatives of the Port of Antwerp last week and announced the deployment of an anti-aircraft defence system by 2027, it marked a significant shift in how Europe’s critical infrastructure is fortified against…
Belgium seizes suspected Russian shadow fleet tanker linked by US sanctions to Iranian shipping network
Belgian authorities have seized a tanker identified as part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet in what appears to be the country’s first operation of this kind at sea. The vessel, Ethera, was intercepted overnight off the Belgian coast and escorted…
Can Europe’s nuclear deterrent remain credible without US certainty?
Europe’s nuclear deterrence debate has sharpened as officials and analysts examine whether Britain and France can continue to provide a credible nuclear backstop in a less certain security environment. The immediate trigger has been a broader reassessment of deterrence in…
Secret Tunnels and Hybrid Pressure: How Belarus and Russia Are Testing Europe’s Eastern Border
Belarus’s use of migration pressure against the European Union is no longer confined to flights, forest crossings and organised pushes at the frontier. According to reporting by The Telegraph, citing Polish officials, border guards discovered four underground tunnels under the…
Four Years Since the Invasion: The War’s Strategic Lessons for Ukraine, Russia and Europe
Four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the central expectation that shaped much of the early commentary has not materialised: Moscow has not achieved its declared war aims. On the fourth anniversary, the…
Zelenskyy’s warning to Trump: peace without guarantees will fail Ukraine
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plea to Donald Trump — “stay on our side” — should be read as more than an appeal for sympathy. It is a warning about strategy. At the centre of the current diplomacy is a question that sounds…
Putin doubles down on militarisation while Geneva talks yield no breakthrough
Vladimir Putin used Russia’s Defender of the Fatherland Day on 23 February to call for further military expansion and to urge national unity around the war, in remarks that provided no indication of a shift towards ending hostilities, as US-mediated…
Trump Administration Warns EU Over ‘Buy European’ Defence Procurement Plans
Europe’s accelerating rearmament has opened a new line of tension with Washington: not over whether European states should spend more on defence, but over where that money should go. Reports this week indicate that the Trump administration warned the European…
France-Germany rift over FCAS fighter jet raises new doubts over Europe’s flagship air combat project
A public dispute between France and Germany over the next generation of European fighter aircraft has renewed uncertainty around the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), one of the continent’s most expensive and politically significant defence programmes. The disagreement centres on…
Major General Wolf-Jürgen Stahl’s Trump Broadside Exposes Europe’s Strategic Anxiety
It is not often that a serving German general publicly dissects the character of an American president. That taboo has now been shattered. Major General Wolf-Jürgen Stahl, head of Berlin’s Federal Academy for Security Policy, has delivered a diagnosis of…