Donald Trump, who in his election campaign promised to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, began his second term by starring in an extremely tense meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, where he did not hide his disdain for the Ukrainian leader. That set off alarms in Kyiv and, although the two leaders apparently eased the tension, it has become clear in recent days that Trump continues to belittle the Ukrainian president, whom he points to as the culprit for not being able to reach a peace agreement while celebrating the alleged willingness of Vladimir Putin. And in all this context, aid from the United States to Ukraine has remained blocked for almost two years, since Trump returned to the White House.

The confrontation between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy is becoming more evident with each passing day. The US president continues to pressure his Ukrainian counterpart to stop attacking Russian refineries, while he negotiates the lifting of sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons and cuts military aid to Kyiv. Ukraine resumed its bombings this Thursday against these types of Russian facilities, after three days of suspension following Trump's announcement of an alleged immediate energy truce, which Moscow neither accepted nor complied with. "Enough is enough," said Zelenskyy in an interview with the Financial Times in which he announced that the blockade on attacks against Russian energy infrastructure was over. Hours later, Trump reacted by stating that "it is a disgrace".

Denmark and Greenland celebrated, three weeks ago, an agreement with the United States that they considered put an end to months of provocations and tensions between the two NATO partners. But Donald Trump has shown that he has no intention of abandoning his challenges to the Arctic island. This Wednesday, in a message on his social network, he claimed that the US is preparing large-scale hydrocarbon exploration. "A massive oil, gas and mineral exploration is being prepared to begin in our beautiful new Greenland!", wrote the American leader, using a clearly provocative possessive pronoun.

After a few months in which it seemed that the relationship between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy had gotten on track, the statements, announcements, and events of the last few days suggest quite the opposite. On Friday, the President of the United States announced an agreement with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, with which Moscow is expected to deliver about two million tons of diesel to the US over the next two months, which represents a significant lifeline for the Kremlin's war economy. That same day, Trump hinted that Ukraine should change its president and threatened to stop sharing information with Kyiv in retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries.

Germany's Supreme Court ordered this Wednesday the pre-trial detention of the former head of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), August Hanning, who was arrested yesterday accused of spying for a foreign country. According to the Prosecutor General's investigation, he is suspected of espionage, disclosure of state secrets, and attempted treason against the homeland. Hanning, eighty years old, faces a prison sentence of between six months and ten years if he ends up being convicted.

Anti-drone shields, surveillance flights with warplanes, new battalions on NATO's eastern flank, increased arms production... Europe is immersed in an undeniable remilitarization race, but protection does not end in the military sphere. Faced with the increasing threat of hybrid attacks by Russia, the most exposed countries have also redoubled their efforts in civil defense.

Eitvydas Bajarūnas is a renowned Lithuanian diplomat and expert in foreign policy and international security. He has been ambassador to Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Russia, where he held the highest position in Lithuania's diplomatic mission in Moscow until three months after Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We speak with him in a context of growing threat due to Russia's hybrid war against Europe.

The center of Kyiv filled with dense black smoke this Monday afternoon. The Russian army bombed the center of the Ukrainian capital in broad daylight, leaving at least one woman dead and 21 injured, including three children. The city's mayor, Vitali Klitschko, reported that Russian drones attacked non-residential buildings in three districts of the city at four in the afternoon. One of the bombed buildings is the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the country's main public scientific research institution, located in one of the most central areas of the city, very close to important monuments, such as the National Opera and the German embassy.

The American political scientist Susan Stokes explores in the book The Regressors. Leaders Who Erode Their Own Democracies (Galaxia Gutenberg) the causes behind the democratic backsliding that the world is experiencing in the 21st century. She points to economic inequalities as one of the key factors and describes the process followed by leaders of different countries and ideologies to dismantle the democratic system from within. We talk about it in a conversation in Barcelona, where she participated in a debate at the CCCB.

Several fighter jets from Finland and Sweden intercepted a group of Russian warplanes flying over the Baltic Sea this Thursday, according to the Finnish Air Force. This incident adds to the numerous Russian aircraft and drones that have recently violated or approached the airspace of NATO countries. In this case, the Russian squadron, consisting of a Tu-134 transport plane and several MiG-31 and Su-30 fighter jets, was flying in international airspace over the Gulf of Finland.

Denmark has joined this Thursday the increasingly frequent and more serious warnings about a potential Russian military attack against NATO territory. Just a week ago, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was the first to warn that Moscow is planning missile attacks against border countries, and the next day it was French President Emmanuel Macron who assured that the Russian threat to Europeans has intensified and announced a protection plan. Today, the Danish intelligence services have joined in, stating that Russia will likely intensify its hybrid war in the coming months and adding that a military attack against a NATO country cannot be ruled out.

The Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, has raised his tone against Russia on the day the country commemorates the 87th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. "As we know, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and today we must read these rhymes of history with the due seriousness," said the Polish leader, who in recent months has been one of the clearest in denouncing the increase in provocations and attacks by Vladimir Putin's regime in the framework of thehybrid war against Europe. "I would prefer to speak only of the heroic deeds recorded in history books, but Russia's escalation of aggression does not allow me to," he said in a video on social media.

The Swedish legislative elections this Sunday leave no clear winner, but there is no doubt about who the losers are. On one hand, the far-right party Sweden Democrats (SD, by its Swedish acronym), which has retreated for the first time since it entered Parliament in 2010 and has lost the title of second-largest force. And the other major casualty is the Social Democratic Party. Although it remains the largest formation in the country, the result obtained is the worst in the last century, since Sweden implemented universal suffrage.

The far-right party Sweden Democrats (SD, by its acronym in Swedish) could be closer than ever to governing. For the first time, all the formations of the country's right-wing bloc are open to the party being part of a possible coalition of government if they obtain enough support in this Sunday's parliamentary elections. The cordon sanitaire that Sweden had also defended has been definitively broken, and the SD is now considered a perfectly legitimate party to be part of the conservative bloc, which aspires to remain in power for four more years.

The elections in Saxony-Anhalt, a small state in eastern Germany, have managed to exceptionally shake up politics across the entire country. A detailed analysis of the result allows for an X-ray of the profile of voters for Alternative for Germany (AfD), which took 43.8% of the total votes, double that of the 2021 elections. We review the keys to a historic election day that could mark the path for the upcoming elections in Germany.

The overwhelming victory of Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Saxony-Anhalt represents a lesson for the Berlin government and, more directly, for the CDU, the traditional German conservative party, which leads the governing coalition at the federal level. "We are deeply shocked; we did not expect this," admitted the Chancellor and CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, in a press conference after meeting with the party's leadership. The Christian Democrats, who had been governing this small state for 25 years, have renounced attempting to form a government after losing 20% of the support they received in the previous regional elections. "We no longer have a mandate to form a government; the AfD has it," said the Minister-President of Saxony-Anhalt and the Christian Democrats' candidate, Sven Schulze.

The far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has swept the elections in the eastern federal state of Saxony-Anhalt, where it has remained at the gates of an absolute majority. The AfD has obtained 43.8% of the votes, more than double that of 2021 (20.8%) and only three seats away from being able to govern alone.

"Europeans are facing a harsh truth: that this is the new normal." This sentence from the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, brings to mind that "new normal" of restrictions on individual freedom in favor of public health to which we had to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic. The statement, however, is not from six years ago, but from this week. Now, the new normal to which we must get used to is that of systematic attacks by Russia. "We are in a new era of European security," insisted the leader of the EU executive. The message arrived after German authorities directly blamed Moscow for an attack with an explosives-laden drone at Leipzig airport at the beginning of August, one of the most serious sabotage attempts recorded so far on European territory, at a key NATO logistics center.

The first photo I have on my phone's roll from the trip to Georgia is of a khachapuri. The second, of a khinkali. Two names that will quickly integrate into your vocabulary if you visit this corner of the Caucasus; there can't be many restaurants whose menus don't offer the two great emblems of this small country's gastronomy. Georgian cuisine, which used to be considered the best in the Soviet Union, is one of the country's heritages and a key element of its identity. Always with the permission of wine, the true reason for Georgians' pride, who claim to be its inventors. Georgia is a gastronomic and wine jewel; a treasure (still quite preserved and untamed) for lovers of nature and mountaineering; a must for fans of Soviet architecture and urbex. The "beautiful homeland of Stalin", as American journalist Robert D. Kaplan called it in The Revenge of Geography, enjoys (or suffers) a key strategic position, where Europe and Asia meet; "where Russia ends and the Middle East begins", as Kaplan summarizes in the book, which is a good resource for imagining what this turbulent area of the world was like during the post-Soviet chaos. Georgia has a colossal natural border to the north: the majestic peaks of the Greater Caucasus, with Russia on the other side. To the west, the Black Sea; to the south, Turkey and Armenia, and to the east, Azerbaijan.

The Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, has returned from vacation with a surprising move: a joint statement with her Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, in which both position themselves as the bulwark not only of security in Europe against the "undeniable" dangers of illegal immigration, but also of the traditional Christian values of the Old Continent. Someone unfamiliar with Scandinavian politics might deduce that Denmark's leader is part of an far-right or, at the very least, conservative party. "We are proud of Europe's Christian cultural heritage and we want to protect it. We hope that those who come to our countries and decide to make Europe their home will respect our values and not try to impose a way of life on us that we do not want." A message that could have perfectly come from the mouth of Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Santiago Abascal, or, indeed, Giorgia Meloni. But it turns out that Mette Frederiksen is a social democrat; one of the few progressive leaders governing in Europe, at least on paper.