Europe

Fawning for Trump’s favor, European leaders are ramping up military spending at the expense of public benefits.

European Union member states led by France and Germany are walking back on their commitment to protect human rights and the environment in global supply chains, Human Rights Watch said today. On June 23, 2025, member states agreed on a European Council position that, if it becomes law, would hollow out an EU directive on protecting rights in supply chains.

The directive, known as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), was designed to protect victims of human rights abuses as well as the environment while creating a level playing field for companies. It marked an important shift from voluntary standards to holding companies legally accountable for human rights and environmental abuses in their entire supply chain. It entered into force in July 2024 as part of the European Green Deal, the EU Commission’s flagship project to make the EU more sustainable and climate neutral by 2050.

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The student protests in Serbia have persisted for seven months, yielding widespread and diverse effects. All state universities are still blocked and primary and secondary school teachers ceased work from January to April 2025. Lawyers went on strike throughout the whole of February, while farmers and university professors have also voiced their support. Roads have been blocked and students have organized marches not only across many parts of the country but also to EU institutions in Brussels and Strasbourg. Notably, national minorities reported feeling equal to Serbian citizens for the first time.

However, the most significant outcome of the student protests has been the substantial delegitimization of Aleksandar Vučić’s populist Serbian Progressive Party (SPP) government. After half a year of struggles, it has become clear that the government’s legitimacy is not only questionable but non-existent.

Yet the SPP remains in power and appears to be growing more repressive. The government has illegally cut the salaries of university professors who support the students. Without evidence, it has accused and imprisoned six opposition activists, including students. At the largest peaceful protest held in Belgrade on 15 March, the government used a non-lethal weapon, the ‘sound cannon’, against them.

Oppression is known to increase proportionally with declining legitimacy, but the question of what it means to govern without legitimacy remains unaddressed. The problem that this question raises is the reality of power without legitimacy – the violence under which all institutions of democratic society and political communities as we know them are currently being dismantled.

Asmat Shanava, owner of the Pirosmani restaurant in Karlovy Vary, is an indispensable figure for both Russian organized crime and the Russian state. She works as an intermediary, securing payments, setting up companies, and coordinating meetings. She arrived in Karlovy Vary with her husband in the late 1990s. He died shortly afterwards. However, Asmat Shanava stayed and expanded her connections to include the mayor of Karlovy Vary. Russian citizen Alexandr Franchetti also contacted her for help. Franchetti was arrested in Prague in 2021 on suspicion of forming an armed group during the annexation of Crimea, he urgently sought someone to pay his lawyers for his defense.

Ukrainian scientists confirmed that after the Russian oil spill in the Kerch Strait, all Black Sea countries have found themselves in a risk zone. For some, these are oil spills, for others – birds in fuel oil or fish and water, polluted with toxins. But pollution affected all the coasts.

Several days later, oil clots and dead fish were found in almost all the Black Sea countries, but it turned out to be complicated to prove that these were the consequences of the spill of that very Russian oil. Yet, Ukrainian scientists developed a model to forecast the movement of oil in the sea and proved this fact. They also forecast that the swimming season will not pass without surprises – oil that went to the bottom in the cold season rises to the surface in summer.

The “James Bond-like” Russian Duma politician Leonid Slutsky and his Russian Peace Foundation helped arrange the Moscow visit of David Lindtner, a close ally to and advisor of Robert Fico, our investigation has found. Slutsky and his foundation have close ties to the GRU—and routinely pass information about their guests to the agency’s European espionage department.

The European Union should immediately suspend its trade agreement with Israel as long as Israel’s atrocity crimes persist, Human Rights Watch and over 110 organizations and trade unions said in a joint statement on June 19, 2025. This would be the first measure taken by the EU in the last two years to ensure some accountability for Israeli authorities’ egregious abuses of Palestinians.

EU foreign ministers are expected to discuss the EU-Israel Association Agreement on June 23, when they will receive an assessment of Israel’s compliance with article 2 of the agreement, which qualifies “respect for human rights and democratic principles” in “internal and international policy” as an “essential element” of the agreement. The review was initiated on May 20, when 17 out of 27 EU foreign ministers supported a proposal by the Dutch government. The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner and suspending the trade pillar of the agreement would reinstate tariffs on bilateral trade.

The government is trying to hide the problems Hungarian hospitals are facing. However, Direkt36 used artificial intelligence to process more than a thousand official documents, which paint a devastating picture of how healthcare professionals struggle on a daily basis.