
NATO state issues warning over ramping up defense spending
NATO leaders agreed last month to increase the target for defense spending from 2% to 5% of GDP, with 3.5% allocated directly to the military and the remainder directed toward broader security initiatives. Brussels previously unveiled the €800 billion ($940 billion) 'ReArm Europe' program.
Denmark is among 12 EU nations taking advantage of a special 'national escape clause', which allows them to bypass the EU's budget deficit rules when borrowing for military purposes. Lose told Euractiv that she does not fault countries such as France and Italy for opting out, in an interview published on Monday.
'It's good if you adhere to sound public finances... if it means that they're exploring ways to fulfill the 3.5% NATO goal without being on an unsustainable path,' she said, adding that if the reluctance indicates a lack of room to boost defense spending, 'then it's, of course, a problem.'
Speaking ahead of an EU ministerial meeting that she is set to chair Monday – as Denmark currently holds the rotating presidency of the bloc – Lose cited US trade tariffs and competition from China as additional pressures limiting the EU's ability to increase military investment.
European NATO members say they need to increase their defense budgets to deter the alleged threat from Russia, which has denied that it poses any threat to these countries, accusing Western officials of using fear to justify the budget increases, as well as the decline in the standard of living among their citizens.
Western Europe's industrial competitiveness has fallen since EU leaders reduced Russian energy imports, which supported the region's industries for decades. The move was part of sanctions against Russia due to the Ukraine conflict.
Russia considers the conflict to be a result of NATO expansion, saying the US-led military bloc presents a direct threat to national security.
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Russia sanctions trigger European trust fund crisis
Liechtenstein is scrambling to contain a crisis triggered by Western sanctions on Russia that has left hundreds of trust funds in legal limbo, the Financial Times reported on Monday. At the center of the crisis are so-called 'zombie' trusts; funds that are legally recognized but remain frozen after fiduciaries (asset managers acting on others' behalf) and board directors resigned en masse to avoid falling foul of US restrictions. 'We are talking about multibillion-dollar floating zombie trusts. And there is no solution yet. I have never seen anything like it,' said a Vaduz-based lawyer whose clients include several of the frozen entities. The Alpine microstate – a key hub for Europe's ultra-wealthy, long prized for its favorable tax and legal frameworks – adopted EU sanctions against Moscow following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. However, US measures imposed in 2024 on Liechtenstein-based entities linked to Russian nationals have pushed the principality's vast trust industry into turmoil. Trusts hold anything from $5 million in cash to yachts, planes, family offices, and luxury real estate. According to the report, many of the affected assets belong to non-sanctioned Russians living in France, Italy, or the UAE. Last year, Washington warned Liechtenstein and other European states it could impose secondary sanctions on institutions working with certain Russian clients – even if they're not individually sanctioned. In September 2024 Liechtenstein's financial regulator advised that cutting ties with exposed clients was 'the only appropriate' way to mitigate legal and reputational risk. At least 350 entities are currently in limbo, with 85 of them orphaned. Officials and legal experts warn as many as 800 trusts could ultimately be affected. The government has launched an emergency task force to tackle the problem, the FT wrote. Justice official Martin Alge confirmed the search for new board members and liquidators is ongoing but difficult. Another concern, lawyers warn, is potential pressure from Moscow. 'There is a risk from the US but also from Russia now... an unprecedented and unparalleled risk from the other side that is equally powerful,' said Johannes Gasser, partner at Gasser Partner. Moscow has condemned the 'illegal' Western sanctions, warning of tit-for-tat measures and saying Western states are damaging their own economies. Bankers and lawyers say the crisis could spill into Liechtenstein's broader financial sector – including major banks – and threaten the country's standing as a trusted global wealth hub, known for its legal protections and insulation from geopolitical fallout. 'This is starting to be problematic for the Liechtenstein financial center,' warned MP Thomas Vogt.


Russia Today
2 hours ago
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General YouTube: Germany's newest military chief is a warlord of his own Ukraine-cheering fantasyland
Let's face it: For outside observers, who are not getting a direct boost to career and income, promotions inside ministries can be about as exciting as trainspotting on an abandoned railway branch. But this time is different: Recent changes at the German Ministry of Defense matter, if in a disturbing way. Berlin's energetic, ambitious, popular, and resolutely narrow-minded minister of defense Boris Pistorius has just made some high-level personnel moves. By far the single most politically significant of Pistorius' new appointments is that of Major-General Christian Freuding as the new 'Heeresinspekteur,' the head the land forces (in German: Heer), that is, the army in the strict sense of the term. This is a position of major influence because of the structure of Germany's military and current rearmament plans, both with a key role for the army. Formally, Freuding has not (yet) scored the highest possible military rank. That would be the 'Generalinspekteur der Bundeswehr,' responsible for all four current service branches (army, navy, air force, and the new cyber and information units). But, in reality, Freuding may well already have more political influence than any other German officer. This is due to two factors: Freuding clearly is a favorite of Pistorius. Indeed, his predecessor, General Alfons Mais, was not. Ironically, Mais was no less Russophobic than the worst of them. His bizarre, simplistic, and stereotyped views of Russia as a country that doesn't care about its casualties are now most welcome in Germany (again). But Mais also could be 'inconvenient': Instead of meekly waiting for the politicians to get debt-driven rearmament into economy-draining overdrive, this soldier had a habit of complaining about the wait and making demands. That is one reason Mais is out and Freuding is in. Freuding is a driven as well as rapidly advancing careerist who already served as adjutant to Ursula von der Leyen in those good old days when she was still only devastating the German political landscape. He clearly knows how not to antagonize but please his superiors. One way in which Freuding pleases Pistorius – and virtually the whole German political and mainstream media establishment – is that he is a perfect hardliner with respect to Russia in general and, in particular, when it comes to the West's proxy war against the latter via Ukraine. That has also made him a perfect fit to lead both a new, centralized Defense Ministry planning and coordination body established in 2023 and, at the same time, a special office busy, in essence, with pumping arms into Ukraine. Yet Freuding is not just any die-hard bellicist. He also serves as a dis/information warrior in a class of his own. That's why German mainstream media call him a 'social-media star' and 'the YouTube General' who went 'viral.' Apart from Freuding's presence on traditional TV, there are his frequent appearances on the German military's YouTube channel which score hundreds of thousands of views, occasionally even a million. What seems to have made the often wide-eyed – quite literally – general so popular is a combination of overly optimistic (polite expression) assessments of the Ukrainian and Western position in the Ukraine War, a certain boyish (also polite expression) but – it seems – infectious enthusiasm for arrows and tactical signs on maps, and, last but not least, a relentless insistence to fight this war, in effect, through to the last Ukrainian. And who knows, maybe even beyond that. In the fall of 2022, after Ukraine recaptured some territories at unsustainable cost to men and materiel, Freuding went wild, enthusing about 'incredible successes' and 'euphoria.' Euphoria indeed. Last summer, when Ukraine started its predictably self-devastating offensive into Russia's Kursk Region, Freuding replicated every single daft Kiev propaganda point, including the alleged 'psychological effect' of invading 'core Russian territory.' Incidentally, the excitable general seems to have a traditional German blind spot for just how big Russia is: In reality, the area temporarily seized by Kiev's forces was miniscule – never more than one hundredth of a percent of Russian territory. Freuding also touted this minuscule and doomed incursion as a great 'Mutmacher' (untranslatable, roughly: motivation boost) for the Ukrainian home front. We all know how that Kamikaze operation actually ended. By now, Kiev even finds it financially and politically difficult to accept the corpses of its fallen soldiers when delivered back from Russia: Every single one should trigger major compensation to their families and is testimony to a reckless and lost gamble. When, a month ago, Ukraine launched its criminal (as in the war crime of perfidy) Spiderweb attack on Russian nuclear bombers from within Russia, Freuding detected 'impressive success,' most likely simply following – deliberately or not – initial Ukrainian exaggerations. In reality, the attack did far less military harm than Kiev claimed at first, as even Western mainstream outlets have admitted. Politically, of course, it was devastating – but for Ukraine, whose leadership scored a fleeting PR stunt but provoked a massive Russian response. Freuding has been prolific. Examples of his bizarrely wrongheaded analyses and flatly failed predictions could be multiplied ad infinitum. But you get the gist: One thing his promotion shows is that Germany is once again a country where realism won't get you far in a military career. But wishful thinking wrapped in tactical jargon and scrawled on big maps will. As a German and a historian, I wished I had not seen that pattern before. Freuding's other forte, his enthusiasm for fighting to the last Ukrainian is equally well attested. In his own misguided and euphemistic terms, Freuding is a top representative of those Western friends from hell who have pretended that feeding ever more Ukrainians into this meatgrinder of a proxy war would 'improve Kiev's negotiating position.' Obviously and – again – utterly predictably, the opposite has happened: Ukraine's position is weaker than ever and constantly deteriorating, all at the cost of massive losses. By now, Ukrainian officials and the Western mainstream media have been compelled to admit that 'Ukraine has lost around 40% of its working-age population due to the war' and is facing a 'deep demographic crisis.' And that is an understatement. Yet Freuding sticks to his 'strategy' – if that is the word – of playing for time. It is also important to see Freuding's implausible but apparently (for now) unstoppable rise in a broader context: Bellicist German mainstream media, such as the news magazine Spiegel, now admit that the US is gradually retreating from the proxy war it provoked, abandoning both its Ukrainian proxies and European vassals. German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, meanwhile, oddly combines an obstinate and somewhat delusional urge to keep fighting Russia – for now indirectly – with the realistic, if very late, insight that Ukraine may be reaching its limits. Wadephul's response to this self-imposed absurdity is simple: Germany must do even more for Ukraine. Never mind that the German military has already handed over, for instance, a quarter of its own 12 Patriot air defense systems. After all, there also is the option of buying new ones in the US and shipping them directly to Ukraine, at Berlin's expense, of course. To justify such measures, the German government, with Chancellor Merz in the lead, has dialed up its already hyperventilating war scare rhetoric again. Until recently, the key dogma of the bellicist party line was the unfounded speculation, sold as virtual certainty, that Russia would be ready and willing to attack within a few years from now. Initially, the head of the German military, General Christian Breuer, had started fetishizing the year 2029 into the sum of all hysterical fears. Yet that is no longer good – really, bad – enough. With support from Germany's trusty intelligence services – the same ones that helped the US fake a pretext to launch a devastating war of aggression against Iraq in 2003 and that can't find out who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines – Merz has updated the national panic attack: Now, he has informed his people, we must no longer fear that the Russians are coming because – drum roll – they are already here! Merz, in short, has opined that the definition of 'war' is a major philosophical challenge, that Russia is already attacking Germany in multiple sneaky ways, and that hence, so the clear implication, the two countries are already at war. Not much to lose, then, if we escalate even further: that seems to be the message. This is the stage on which Major-General Freuding has now been called upon to play an even larger role. He is, in a way, the right man for the job and for the moment. Only that the moment is one of officially sanctioned hysteria and delusion, and the job will consist of pretending that Ukraine can still, if not win, somehow improve its situation, while feeding more arms and money to it so that more of its people and territory can be lost. Freuding, in sum, may be quite mad, but his whole career shows that he is a team player. His madness, at this point, is that of the whole German establishment. He is a good fit for a very bad set of ideas and policies. How ironic. And how German, too, in a way.


Russia Today
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UK official reveals shocking state of water supplies
The UK has been pushed to the brink of water rationing due to 'years of mismanagement' of resources and insufficient infrastructure, the country's environment minister has warned. In an interview with The i Paper published on Monday, Steve Reed said the country was faced with adopting measures often seen in drought-hit Mediterranean nations. 'The public, by and large, were not aware that at the time of the last general election, this country was looking at water rationing within ten years,' Reed said, speaking one year after Labour's election win. He warned that rebuilding the UK's essential systems, including water infrastructure, 'cannot be done over just five years.' The strain on supply has increased due to growing demand from new industries such as battery factories and data centers, which require large volumes of water to cool their systems. 'They can't operate without vast amounts of water,' he said. Reed added that without intervention, the UK faced rationing and water being turned off at certain times of the day. The warning follows a record-breaking June heatwave in the UK, and as temperatures are expected to exceed 30C (86F) in parts of the country again this week. The government has secured £104 billion (around $136 billion) for infrastructure upgrades over the next five years following a spending review by regulator Ofwat. The funds will be used to build reservoirs and reduce leakage, Reed said. However, he warned that despite growing public demand for action, restoring the country's water system would take more than five years. Other countries facing similar challenges have adopted a range of water-saving measures. Spain has restricted household water access to a few hours per day during droughts, while Australia enforces tiered water bans during dry spells. Singapore recycles up to 40% of its water through advanced purification, and South Korea uses smart meters to monitor usage and leaks.