If Podgorica negotiates a document that combines full membership with stronger accountability and safeguard mechanisms, "this could very well become the template for future enlargements" – not only for the Western Balkans, but potentially also for Ukraine and Moldova, explain BiEPAG members Jovana Marović and Odeta Barbullushi
Top officials used the G7 gathering in Paris to warn Scott Bessent of the economic consequences of the war in Iran.
Soldiers of the “Black Jack” brigade ritually furled and packed their unit’s colours in Fort Hood, Texas in early May, as the tank unit’s 4,000 troops prepared to deploy to Poland. Their mission was to help defendNATO against the Russian threat. “When an armoured brigade combat team deploys forward, it sends a clear and unmistakable signal,” said General Thomas Feltey, the division’s commander, at the ceremony. Less than two weeks later America sent the opposite signal: the deployment was scrapped. It was the second time this month that Donald Trump had announced cuts to America’s military presence in Europe. Earlier he said he would withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany and more from elsewhere, reflecting his anger at the lack of European support for his war in Iran.
Mr Trump has been casting doubt on his commitment toNATO and its Article 5 mutual-defence clause since the start of his second term. That has prompted a long-overdue increase in European defence spending. Yet in recent months he has gone further, announcing unexpected troop reductions and cancelling the deployment to Germany of a cruise-missile unit that was to plug an important gap in Europe’s defence. The rapid drawdown has upended Europeans’ assumption that they would have time to build up their own forces and replace vital American “enablers”, such as intelligence and surveillance assets. America’s huge expenditure of missiles in Iran is delaying shipments to European allies and Ukraine, as it restocks its own supplies.
Some inNATO, shocked by Mr Trump’s threat in January to seize Greenland from Denmark, worry not only that America might sit out a war with Russia, but that it could actively thwart other members’ responses. The possibility is seen as remote. But interviews with senior officers and defence officials from severalNATO countries reveal for the first time how seriously they take the risk. Some European armed forces are making secret plans to fight not just without America’s help, but without much ofNATO’s command-and-control infrastructure. “The Greenland crisis was a wake-up call,” says a Swedish defence official. “We realised we need a Plan B.”
None of the officials interviewed would speak on the record, because of concerns that doing so could accelerate America’s departure. Mark Rutte,NATO’s secretary-general, “has literally banned talking about it because he believes it can add fuel to the fire”, says one insider. When Matti Pesu of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA) co-authored a paper last year arguing for a Plan B, Finnish officials denied one would be considered. But the urgency of the threat has led several countries to start thinking about how, and under whose command, Europe would fight ifNATO were to “malfunction”, as one official put it. “What chain of command can you use if America is blockingNATO?” asks another defence official.
The question cuts to the core of the alliance’s success. Most military coalitions look like a primary-school music practice: each country turns up, bangs its drum roughly in time with the others, and leaves.NATO, by contrast, was set up as a symphony orchestra controlled by a single conductor, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), an American general who also commands America’s forces in Europe. To conduct this orchestra,SACEUR has secure communications links to a network of permanent subordinate headquarters (see map), staffed with thousands of personnel ready to respond the moment a war starts. “US leadership is the glue that holds the alliance together,” says Luis Simón, the director of the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Free University of Brussels. “Without them, we would see a fragmentation, probably, of the deterrence ecosystem.”
Thus a Plan B requires more than acquiring weapons; it means creating a structure under which Europeans would fight. The core, at least in northern Europe, would probably be a coalition of Baltic and Nordic countries, plus Poland. These countries mostly share common values, and all fear Russia. Several ofNATO’s bigger European members, such as Britain, France and Germany, have “tripwire” forces in the Baltics, and are thus very likely to be drawn into any conflict. Perhaps one-third ofNATO members would “fight on day one” irrespective of whether Article 5 is triggered, says Edward Arnold ofRUSI, a think-tank in London. “No-one would be waiting for the Portuguese to turn up at the North Atlantic Council [NATO’s highest decision-making body] to debate,” he says.
One often-mentioned alternative command structure is a British-led coalition of ten mostly Baltic and Nordic countries known as the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), with a standing headquarters near London. Established by Britain and six otherNATOmembers in 2014, theJEF was originally seen as a complement to the larger body that could provide high-readiness forces on short notice for circumstances that did not meet the Article 5 threshold. Its remit expanded when Sweden and Finland joined the coalition in 2017, several years before they applied for membership inNATO. It is now seen as a way to sidestep one ofNATO’s weaknesses: any member can block the triggering of Article 5, which requires a unanimous decision. TheJEF, as its then commander, British Major General Jim Morris, said in 2023, “can react to situations on a non-consensus basis”. It has already been activated several times, for exercises and naval patrols.
“TheJEF is the most established of the alternatives,” says Mr Arnold. Its headquarters already has capabilities in intelligence, planning and logistics, he notes. It has its own secure communications networks that, although limited, do not rely onNATO. Britain’s membership offers a degree of nuclear deterrence.
Yet theJEF’s focus remains primarily on the Nordic and Baltic regions. It lacks major powers such as France, Germany and Poland. Some allied officials are anxious about Britain’s defence preparedness: underfunding has left it with few ships, submarines and army units ready to deploy at short notice. “England is everyone’s favourite uncle,” says one official. “But it is suffering from Downton Abbey syndrome. It keeps up the pretence, but it doesn’t have the funds.”
Such problems might be mitigated if the group brought in Germany, which is enormously increasing its defence budget. For all its drawbacks, theJEF seems the best solution if European members are unable to take over the existingNATO framework. But Europe will find some form of joint defence framework to replace the Americans. A deterrent based on someone who may not show up is no deterrent at all. ■
The Ukrainian President believes there are prospects for the constructive reset of the relationship between the two countries.
The German government is keen to learn from Ukraine’s experience defending its electricity grid against attacks, after experiencing recent blackouts caused by sabotaged power lines in its capital.
For more than four years, Russia has battered Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with missiles and drones – at times, much of the country, including its capital Kyiv, was subject to hours of blackout.
Yet, somehow, Berlin found itself in the same boat in January when left-wing extremists with a single firebomb caused the city’s worst multi-day power cut since the Second World War.
Neither emergency services nor politicians were prepared for the disruption that triggered a massive manhunt.
“Energy is no longer a separate sector, it is the operational foundation of the state,” Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Tuesday at the opening of an energy security conference in Berlin.
Without the “system of systems”, the state is nothing, Shmyhal added.
Kyiv has, by and large, managed to keep going for more than four years, a feat that draws considerable admiration from abroad.
“Resilience is not limited to the institutional level,” said German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, speaking alongside the Ukrainian minister. “In Ukraine, ordinary citizens also help to foster it.”
To learn from Ukraine is to learn to win, Wadephul suggested, saying we should “listen very carefully.”
Kyiv’s recipe is simple: expand the European Union’s trifecta of functioning markets, efficiency, and integration.
“Resilience must become an engineering category,” Shmyhal said. In his besieged country, protecting the grid meant “special protective structures around key energy facilities” and air defence.
“Our second lesson is distributed resilience,” the energy minister explained. Moving away from big, centralised power plants to honeycomb-like decentralised structures “where each element is able to operate with a degree of autonomy”.
Susanne Nies, a think tank expert at the Berlin-based Helmholtz Zentrum, said Germany needed to learn from Ukraine how to operate an electricity network under attack, repair equipment quickly, and create “triple redundancy” strategic reserves of grid equipment.
Berlin must also develop security protocols to be followed before and after attacks, and look at how to diversify and decentralise energy production, she said.
“Time is of the essence; Ukraine acts with courage and quickly, learning through trial and error, something that, unfortunately, is not as widespread in Germany,” Nies told Euractiv.
Olena Pavlenko, who heads the Kyiv-based think tank Dixi Group, said knowledge exchange between Ukraine and Germany is already taking place at multiple levels,” from high-level political exchanges to grid operator talks and municipal-level exchanges.
Germany was focused on shielding vulnerable spots in the grid and building up strategic reserves at the European level, she noted. “Ukraine’s hands-on experience is increasingly shaping European thinking on energy security, transforming the country from a recipient of support into a provider of practical solutions,” Pavlenko told Euractiv.
For Georg Zachmann, an energy specialist at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, Ukraine needs to go further. Kyiv should “finally take stronger steps towards building a defensible energy system alongside the constant patch jobs,” he said.
This would mean getting the most out of “small, system-friendly facilities”, with better planning support from its allies. “Partners should not hesitate to demand reforms from Ukraine that enable such investments,” he added.
Conspicuously absent at the Berlin conference: talk of the issue that saw Shmyhal shoehorned into his role in January. His predecessor, German Galushchenko, is currently being investigated for alleged corruption.
Learning from one another is a “feel-good topic where nobody gets hurt”, as one member of the audience put it.
With the US having cut most of its support for Ukraine after US President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, and Europe stepping in to fill that gap, Germany has become Ukraine’s largest donor. Berlin has contributed some €1.3 billion just through its energy emergency support fund since the onset of the war in 2022.
Officials have long held concerns, usually voiced in private, that some of the money is being skimmed off in the chaos of war.
In late 2024, Berlin effectively got a seat on the board of Ukraine’s high-voltage grid operator Ukrenergo, in the person of former State Secretary Patrick Graichen, who did not attend the event hosted by the foreign ministry.
“The German government has an interest in a supervisory board for the Ukrainian grid operator Ukrenergo, formed in accordance with OECD standards and comprising several independent, international experts/members,” it said in early 2025.
EU leaders are set to discuss extending the bloc's timeframe for reapproving sanctions against Russia from six months to a year when they convene in Brussels next month.
Democrats acrossEurope, including Turkey, were heartened by voters’ rejection of Viktor Orban in Hungary’s recent elections. His long tenure as prime minister had become a case study in “illiberal democracy”. Elections were held, but the surrounding ecosystem was steadily bent: media were consolidated, courts constrained, civil society pressured and economic power fused with political loyalty.
Much of this resonates far beyond the Danube. Turkey, too, has seen increasingly illiberal leadership and a gradual narrowing of competitive democratic space. Its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, came to power in 2003 with popular support and strong democratic rhetoric. Yet over time he has turned ever more authoritarian: controlling the media, building loyalist business networks, muzzling civil society and weaponising the judiciary against the opposition, including my own Republican People’s Party (chp), the second-largest in parliament after Mr Erdogan’s party, Justice and Development (ak). In both Turkey and Hungary, by the late 2010s, politics had shifted from open contestation to managed competition, where electoral outcomes are not predetermined, but increasingly guided by the ruling party.
There are also striking similarities between the democratic opposition movements in both countries. In Hungary’s 2022 election and Turkey’s 2023 election, broad six-party opposition alliances tried to defeat authoritarian incumbents. In both cases, however, these alliances—more focused on strengthening ties between the constituent parties’ elites and other establishment figures than on nurturing grassroots support—struggled to create a genuine opposition movement. What later succeeded was a new political approach that went beyond formal party alliances: politics rooted in popular mobilisation, disciplined messaging and credible leadership.
After the setbacks of 2022 and 2023, opposition movements in both countries learned from their defeats and began to look beyond conventional alliance-building. In Turkey thechp, under my leadership, defeatedakin the 2024 municipal elections. Since then we have been preparing for the next general and presidential elections. In Hungary the opposition under Peter Magyar’s leadership won last month’s general election, securing a parliamentary majority large enough to change the constitution.
But there is also a crucial difference. Hungary is a member of the European Union, and it is now experiencing a peaceful transfer of power. Mr Orban ensured that the recent election was an unfair fight, for instance by rewriting electoral rules to suit his own interests and overseeing a disinformation campaign aimed at tarnishing the opposition. In Turkey Mr Erdogan has walked the same path, but dared to go much farther along it, using loyal elements within the judiciary to suppress the opposition.
Our presidential candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, defeated Mr Erdogan’s handpicked mayoral candidates in 2019 (twice), and again in 2024, and was preparing to compete against Mr Erdogan himself. For this electoral success he has been jailed, along with his associates, on baseless and politically motivated accusations of corruption, espionage and aiding terrorism. Mr Erdogan is now attacking my party’s mayors through fabricated lawsuits, aiming to paralyse our party and create an opposition he can control. Since 2024 around 25chpmayors have been arrested, placed in pre-trial detention and in effect removed from office through judicial and administrative measures.
Still, as in Hungary, resistance to Mr Erdogan’s regime—in the streets, coffeehouses and courtrooms—has sparked a new democratic awakening in Turkish society. My party has embraced bottom-up mobilisation, making the case that economic decline and democratic backsliding are deeply intertwined. We are uniting voters across parties, social groups, ideologies and ethnicities.
ak’s goal is not to eliminate the opposition but to tame it: allowing it to contest elections, and even govern big cities, while forcing it to operate within narrowing constraints. This is not simply a shift from democracy to authoritarianism, but from free competition to containment. Thechp’s task is therefore not only electoral, but also civic: to regenerate democratic confidence and restore citizens’ sense of agency.
Turkey’s case is further complicated by identity. It is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, yet constitutionally secular and socially pluralistic, with a long history of parliamentary democracy. In this sense, Turkey is a crucial test for the universality of democracy, the rule of law, checks and balances, and accountability. While Hungary speaks powerfully to the post-communist experience, Turkey—a country with almost nine times as many people, a regional power, a migration hub, an energy corridor and a key member ofnato(as well as being aneucandidate)—carries broader significance for democracy, from Europe to North America and beyond.
The Kurdish question makes Turkey even more distinctive. Today there is a new peace process between the government and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (pkk). Thechpsupports this process, not out of tactical or electoral calculations but for a broader democratic vision. Peace and democracy cannot be separated. This understanding is crucial for the Middle East, where questions of pluralism, representation, citizenship and co-existence remain central to any peaceful future.
The struggle for democracy in Turkey is even more difficult than in Hungary—not simply because Turkey is outside theeu’s institutional framework, but because it is larger, more complex and crisscrossed by geopolitical fault lines. The stakes are higher, and the conditions more challenging. Mr Magyar was able to run in, and win, elections in Hungary. But our presidential candidate has been behind bars for over a year.
In Turkey the democratic struggle is no longer confined to parliament or the ballot box. It is being waged on multiple fronts: in mass rallies, in everyday life on the streets, in courtrooms through legal arguments, and on social media through the wit, creativity and digital fluency of young people. Hungary’s opposition victory energised the global debate on democratic backsliding. A democratic breakthrough in Turkey would transform it. ■
Ozgur Ozel leads the main opposition in Turkey. He is the chair of the Republican People’s Party and a member of parliament for Manisa Province.
Access to future EU aid funding is likely to be tied to preferential treatment for European firms and withheld from backers of the likes of Russia and Iran, EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas has said.
Speaking on Europe Today on Euronews, the EU's top military general Seán Clancy says Ukraine remains the EU’s “number one priority” as war continues to reshape Europe’s defence strategy.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on a tour across Europe as India and the EU grow closer on trade and security. The trip comes at a time when Europe is rethinking supply chains and defense after the Ukraine war, rising tensions with China, and worries about economic dependence.
A year ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky articulated a strategy of “bringing the war back to Russia.” “The war was brought from Russia, and it is to Russia that the war must be pushed back. They must be the ones forced into peace. They are the ones who must be pressured to ensure security,” Zelensky said in March 2025.
Since then, and ever more intensely this year, Ukraine has been pursuing a “strategic neutralization” of assets in Russia. This means scaling back the hard-fought, casualty-intensive thrusts to claw back occupied territory that have cost Ukraine so much in terms of blood and treasure, and instead embracing long-range, asymmetric warfare to degrade Russia’s economy, rupture its military manufacturing, and deflate civilian morale. This spring, there’s every sign that this strategy is bearing fruit—and perhaps even shifting the battlefield calculus in the war’s fifth, grinding year.
Almost daily, Ukraine’s new weaponry capabilities, in particular its own long-range missiles and high-precision drones, are wreaking havoc where they hit energy infrastructure, arms and explosives factories, and military command and logistics centers. On the home front, Ukraine is playing defense, killing or wounding about 35,000 Russians a month, according to Ukrainian sources, bringing some estimates of the war’s total death toll to 352,000 Russian service members.
According to Ulf Brunnbauer, a historian at the University of Regensburg, Ukraine’s object is to show its Western supporters that “they have not only staying power but can really harm Russia, thus helping their case for continuous support. This puts Kyiv in a better position for eventual peace talks by increasing the incentives for Russia to settle for a compromise.”
The battered oil refineries smoldering across Russia underscore Ukraine’s success in choking Russia’s economic lifeline. In April and thus this month, the Ukrainian armed forces have hit 20 oil refineries and export terminals. The dramatic images of Ukrainian drone strikes on the Tuapse oil refinery on Russia’s Black Sea coast on April 28 displayed a Russia at war and reeling: For weeks, thick black smoke spewed out of the site and blanketed more than 300 kilometers of southern Russia, including three cities.
The strikes, some hitting as far as 1,750 km from Ukraine—that’s 2.5 times farther than the range possible four years ago—have rendered Russia unable to fully capitalize on the high petroleum prices caused by the Iran war.
According to Al Jazeera, Ukraine has deterred Russia from reaping the gigantic windfall profits that it was counting on from oil exports, some of which the United States made possible by lifting individual sanctions in the context of the Iran war and energy crisis. Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign against Russian port and energy infrastructure in “a calculated bid to prevent Russia from offloading oil onto tankers,” Al Jazeera reports. In other words: Ukraine found a way to check the effects of a U.S. policy that had originally looked devastating for Ukraine. In March, Russia’s seaborne oil shipments dropped by roughly 300,000 barrels per day, partly as a result of Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries. According to Bloomberg, average output at Russian oil refineries fell to 4.69 million barrels per day in April, a record low since December 2009.
And the strikes on military installations such as air defense systems, airfields, and armament plants appear to be thrwarting Russia’s ground war in Ukraine, too—Kyiv’s most immediate priority. Russia’s forward momentum on the battlefield in Ukraine has ground to a virtual halt. Its armed forces even suffered a net loss of territory in April, for the first time since August 2024, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based think tank. Russia’s anticipated spring offensive is thus far a washout.
Just this weekend, Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities reached deep into the Russian heartland, hammering its military tech industry in locations previously considered untouchable due to their closeness to the capital. Long-range attack drones struck Angstrem Microelectronics in Zelenograd, a main cog in Russia’s semiconductor industry. And drones also damaged MKB Raduga, the nerve center for Russia’s cruise missile program, in Dubna, just 80 miles north of Moscow.
“This strategy is all about the battlefield in Ukraine. It’s about stopping Russia from taking the Donbas and forcing it into negotiations that Ukraine can control,” said ISW analyst George Barros. “That should be the basis for a settlement.”
Until now, Barros argued, Russian President Vladimir Putin has operated “as if it doesn’t matter how high costs run as long as Russia keeps making gains and the West’s will dwindles. The idea was that Russia will simply outlast them and win in long run.” But Russia is obviously now wavering in a way that it hasn’t before, Barros said.
There are signs everywhere that Russia is panicking but perhaps none greater than Putin’s call for a cease-fire on May 9, Russia’s Victory Day national holiday, when it commemorates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, usually with plenty of pomp and bluster. Putin pleaded with Ukraine not to disrupt the celebrations, and the usually uber-martial parade burnished no military hardware at all this year—a stinging admission that Ukraine has the capability of striking a top-tier public event in the middle of Moscow in the middle of the day.
According to the Moscow Times, an independent Russian media outlet, the Kremlin is rethinking its war goals and the narrative that it tells Russians about the “special military operation,” as it calls the war, downplaying its significance. Russian officials are apparently preparing to frame a peace deal with Ukraine as a “victory.” The Kremlin wants to shift public messaging away from its previous goal of capturing all of Ukraine, and in particular Kyiv, and toward holding what Russia already has—occupied territories in eastern and southern Ukraine—firmly in its hand.
And there’s even evidence of discontent among Russian political strategists regarding the war’s high cost. High-ranking officials have begun to question aloud the war’s continuation, according to the Moscow Times. Reportedly, they believe that taking the entire Donbas requires a full-fledged wartime economy and countrywide mass mobilization. This, they warned, would dangerously exhaust Russia’s resources, break the economy, and accelerate already dire population decline.
These setbacks for Russia are increasingly reflected in public opinion, which has largely supported the war until now. Although Russian polling shows that 73 percent of Russians approve of Putin’s performance—a robust number, were this applied to Western politicos—it is the lowest figure recorded since February 2022, according to the Public Opinion Foundation.
Most Russia experts doubt that Ukraine pins any hope on Russians rising up to overthrow Putin. The authoritarian state’s controls are too muscular, and just to make sure that this occurs to no one, Putin has clamped down on social media, such as the widely used Telegram channels, which are a widely accessed media source for many Russians.
“Public opinion,” said Barros of ISW, “is important to the Kremlin today in a way it wasn’t during the Cold War. Our team has been astonished about the extent to which Putin has made militarily questionable decisions in order to maximize regime stability and minimize discontent at home.”
And the deep-strike capabilities aren’t the “only cards that Ukraine has now,” said Fedir Serdiuk, a Ukrainian Defense Ministry advisor, in reference to U.S. President Donald Trump’s contention that Ukraine “doesn’t have the cards” to win the war.
“Ukraine relies on state-of-the-art unmanned surface vehicles and sensors to navigate and control the Black Sea,” Serdiuk said. “Millions of first-person-view drones, surveillance platforms, and much improved intelligence tech has helped sustain defense on the ground.” Serdiuk also pointed to ever more effective special operations such as Operation Spiderweb, a covert drone attack deep inside Russia in June 2025 that took out a significant portion of Russia’s strategic aviation capabilities, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M bombers.
Brunnbauer, the historian, doubted that Ukraine believes that it can push the Russians back, at least in the short or medium term. “But what they are showing to the world, to themselves, and to the Russians who care to know” he said, “is that time is not necessarily on Russia’s side—and that they can survive without much American help.”
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau instructed senior State Department officials to facilitate and approve a visa for a fugitive former Polish cabinet minister, allowing him to flee to the United States from Hungary, three people familiar with the matter said.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has picked a French AI firm over the U.S. security giant Palantir, in a push to make Europe less reliant on American tech, according to German media reports.
President Vladimir Putin will arrive in Beijing on Tuesday for a two-day state visit, accompanied by an entourage of cabinet ministers and the chief executives of Russia’s largest state-owned and private corporations.
It was already known that Krakow, Warsaw, and Gdansk are included in the Prime Minister's schedule, but it was not known that he would arrive with such a large delegation.
According to multiple sources familiar with the details of the Hungarian Prime Minister's first official trip, Peter Magyar is currently planned to be accompanied by half a dozen of his ministers to Poland, which is completely unprecedented in the history of Polish and Hungarian relations.
On Friday and over the weekend, various sources were still talking about a number between four and eight regarding the ministers arriving with Magyar, but one day before the visit it looks like six will ultimately accompany him.
According to the plans, Minister of Foreign Affairs Anita Orban and Minister of Culture Zoltan Tarr will travel with the Prime Minister, and Minister of Economy and Energy Istvan Kapitany, Minister of Defense Romulusz Ruszin Szendi, Minister of Transport and Investment David Vitezy, and Minister of Agriculture Szabolcs Bona will join the negotiations in Poland. Chief National Security Advisor Peter Toth will also be there.
Peter Magyar will negotiate not only with Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his government, but a meeting is also planned with Polish President Karol Nawrocki, who was elected as the candidate of Law and Justice, and who met with Viktor Orban in Budapest in the days before the elections. The program also includes coordination with the presidents of the Polish Sejm and the Senate.
As Peter Magyar has already mentioned, he will visit Krakow, Warsaw, and Gdansk within Poland.
He will arrive in Krakow on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 19, from where he will continue by train to Warsaw in the evening to negotiate with the aforementioned Polish leaders the next day on May 20. According to current plans, he will also pop over to Gdansk on the same day, where he will meet with Lech Walesa, the former leader of the Solidarity movement and former Polish president.
Following this, Peter Magyar will continue from Warsaw to Vienna the next day on May 21 to negotiate with the Austrian government there.
Hungary's new government says it is open to engaging with Ukraine on its accession to the EU, according to several sources. Meanwhile, a technical dialogue with Kyiv has been announced on the thorny issue of Hungarian minorities. Brussels looks for a breakthrough.
If the US wanted to destroy its credibility in Europe deliberately, it could hardly have done it better.
The EU is set to sign its revamped trade agreement with Mexico next week, as Brussels moves to lock in the deal amid growing uncertainty over parallel trade talks with Washington.
The agreement will be formally signed at an EU-Mexico summit in Mexico City on 22 May, attended by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President António Costa and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Negotiations on the modernised pact concluded in January 2025, just days before US President Donald Trump returned to the White House and reignited tariff threats against major trading partners.
“The timing of this agreement is no coincidence,” one EU official told reporters ahead of the summit, describing the accord as a “geopolitical statement” in defence of open, rules-based trade.
Mexico is the EU’s second-largest trading partner in Latin America after Brazil, with which Brussels recently finalised the long-delayed Mercosur agreement. Brussels expects the revamped deal to further boost bilateral trade, which already exceeds €80 billion annually.
The updated EU-Mexico deal modernises a partnership dating back to 2000, adding new provisions on intellectual property, sustainable development and digital trade.
Still, Brussels remains wary after the political backlash triggered by Mercosur, particularly over agricultural concessions. This time, however, lawmakers insist the dynamics are different.
Borja Giménez Larraz, the European Parliament’s lead MEP on the EU-Mexico trade deal, argues Mexican agriculture is largely complementary to – rather than in direct competition with – European production.
“For Europeans, enormous opportunities are opening up in value-added products such as cheese, olive oil or chocolate,” he told Euractiv.
The EU already sells around €2.7 billion worth of food products to Mexico annually, while the agreement will gradually eliminate tariffs on key exports such as cheese, where duties currently reach 45%, albeit in some cases under quota arrangements.
A key component of the agreement is geographical indications. Mexico will protect 336 additional EU food and drink names, on top of the 232 spirits already recognised under existing arrangements.
The list includes Dutch gouda, Greek feta and Jamón de Teruel – a delicacy from Giménez Larraza’s home region, he noted. The protections are designed to shield European producers from foreign imitations and reinforce the value of premium EU food exports.
But the signing comes under the long shadow of Washington.
The US, Mexico and Canada are simultaneously renegotiating the USMCA trade deal, initially meant to conclude by 1 July, though US officials now acknowledge talks could stretch beyond that deadline.
At the same time, Washington has intensified pressure against the EU’s geographical indication regime in bilateral trade negotiations, seeking to undermine protections for flagship European products.
The US has pushed the issue with partners such as Argentina, despite the EU having already concluded the Mercosur agreement. Similar demands are expected to surface in the USMCA talks with Mexico and Canada.
Charles Deparis, president of oriGIn EU, representing GI food producers, said the EU-Mexico agreement offers “a very strong level of protection” for such products. But he said rapid ratification is key given the “increasing pressure” on EU trade partners to “undermine GI protections.”
“oriGIn EU calls on EU institutions and their trade partners to remain firm in defending the integrity of the GI system and to ensure that existing commitments are fully respected,” Deparis said.
The Commission is well aware of the stakes.
Speaking at an event at the Mexican embassy in Brussels last month, Commission top trade official Leopoldo Rubinacci declined to comment directly on repeated US challenges to EU geographical indications, but insisted that he remained confident Mexico and the EU would honour their commitments to the revamped deal.
Giménez Larraz expects the ratification process to move quickly.
“Our objective is for Parliament’s consent to be adopted in July, before the summer,” he said. “We are all aware of the need to close this as quickly as possible … to ensure it is settled on our terms and without interference,” the centre-right MEP said.
The EU is drawing up plans to force European companies to buy critical components from at least three different suppliers, in a bid to reduce the bloc’s reliance on China.
The new rules would affect businesses in a handful of key sectors such as chemicals and industrial machinery, which have complained about a surge in cheap Chinese imports, according to two EU officials familiar with the matter. The proposals come in response to Beijing’s export restrictions on key technologies.
The new law would set ceilings, expected to be about 30 to 40 per cent, for what can be bought from a single supplier. The rest of the components would need to be sourced from at least three different suppliers, not all from the same country.
EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič wants to tackle the bloc’s €1bn a day trade deficit and insulate companies from China’s “weaponisation of trade”, officials said. Some European car production lines ground to a halt last year after Beijing slapped controls on the export of rare earth magnets and other components.
Šefčovič plans a blitz of punitive tariffs on Chinese chemicals and machinery to stop a dramatic surge which has sent European manufacturers reeling, according to the officials.
“In many areas we are gradually becoming dependent on exports from China,” said a senior European Commission official. “Dependencies have a price and therefore we have to redouble our efforts [to diversify].”
The official said China’s huge investment in manufacturing, with high subsidies reported by the IMF, posed an urgent threat to the EU’s industrial base. The Chinese government has said the scale of its industrial policy was overstated. The EU was “pursuing protectionism under the guise of ‘fair competition’”, it said.
EU officials cautioned that plans were at an early stage but would be presented to a Commission meeting dedicated to China on May 29. If commissioners agree, a detailed proposal could then be endorsed by EU leaders at a summit in late June.
A second official pointed out that this would not just cover China, since some raw materials or chemical inputs come overwhelmingly from a couple of countries, such as helium from the US and Qatar and cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia.
Olof Gill, Commission trade spokesperson, confirmed there would be a debate on May 29 but declined to comment on internal discussions. He added that “such debates do not involve the adoption of formal proposals”.
The EU will attempt to use its network of free trade agreements with more than 70 countries to build investment and supply chains with producers.
Last year, the EU proposed increasing steel tariffs to 50 per cent and cutting low-tariff quotas in half to protect an industry that had shrunk to its smallest size on record.
However, the officials said it could hand out more steel quota to trusted partners and cut those for others disproportionately, thereby maximising the impact on China.
They said traditional anti-dumping and anti-subsidy instruments took too long — up to two years — because they required exhaustive investigations under World Trade Organization rules. Tariffs can only match the level of injury caused by the imports and Chinese companies can absorb them and still sell at a profit given their lower operating costs.
The Commission’s trade defence teams were also under pressure from the sheer number of complaints. The FT reported that those from the chemical sector were at record highs, with one industry leader saying the industry was “at breaking point”.
“We will not have the time, nor the human resources” to investigate them all, one of the officials said. “Today, in two years, you can lose the whole industry.”
Safeguards are activated by a sudden surge in imports and last five years to give industry a breathing space to improve competitiveness. The first official said the steel measures had prompted huge backlash from exporting countries.
“The political reaction it generates is proof that our partners also see that these safeguards would work.”