When Poland announced that an explosion damaged a railway track leading to Ukraine this week, Prime Minister Donald Tusk was quick to declare it was an unprecedented act of sabotage designed to cause catastrophe.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz canceled his agenda Friday in order to hold an urgent call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other European leaders about a US-Russian plan to end the war in Ukraine that would mean sweeping concessions to Vladimir Putin.

While the U.S. has taken part in previous iterations of the military exercise, this year's U.S. footprint was smaller as allied nations are pressed by the Trump administration to put more into European defense.

European gas prices have soared as tensions escalate between Russia and the West after Moscow ordered troops into two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine.

On the rest of Europe he soon imposed a grimmer fate: the Great Northern war, which embroiled bits of Scandinavia and the Baltics for two decades. Three centuries after Peter’s odyssey, and three years after his wannabe successor Vladimir Putin launched his own protracted war in Ukraine,

A Russian national, now in Azerbaijan, is suspected of coordinating a 2024 parcel plot targeting air cargo planes in Europe.

Poland has been especially outspoken about Russia’s actions and at the forefront of European rearmament. Its planned defence budget for 2026 is a record €46.9bn (around £41.3bn), equivalent to 4.8 per cent of the country’s GDP, the highest level in Nato.