Today's stories share one thread: contested control — over narratives, over waterways, over who gets to assign blame.

Disinformation after Ceuta

  • Researchers at counter-disinformation group 411 and Alliance4Europe traced Kremlin-linked accounts and outlets around Rybar, Pravda and RT pushing far-right framing of the Ceuta crossing to hundreds of thousands of people within hours; Ukraine's foreign minister says the real target is Europe's cohesion, not Ceuta (more).
  • The European Commission pressed Meta and TikTok to tighten monitoring after false rumours that Ceuta's border had opened helped trigger a surge of roughly 72,000 crossings on 30–31 July, with at least 80 deaths reported; a follow-up meeting is due Monday (more).

Russia's war on Ukraine

  • Russian missiles struck the Kyiv region overnight, killing three people including a child, hours after President Zelensky arrived in Belgrade for a landmark visit to Serbia (more).

Contested waters and sovereignty

  • China ordered traffic controls in the Taiwan Strait as Typhoon Dolphin approached; Taiwan's government called the move "utterly ridiculous," raising questions over whether Beijing is setting a precedent for directing traffic through the strait beyond storm safety (more).
  • The UN Security Council condemned Houthi missile strikes on Saudi Arabia, unauthorized flights over Yemeni airspace and attacks on commercial shipping — a joint statement that required at least tacit agreement among veto-wielding members who have not always aligned on the Iran-aligned group (more).

Analysis

  • "The Fog Is the Weapon" argues that across Italy's parallel Russian, Chinese and Iranian information operations, the structural difficulty of attributing cyberattacks, and hybrid tactics as prelude rather than endpoint, it is the ambiguity itself — not any single attack — that blocks a collective European response (more).