The EU's 21st sanctions package against Russia remains stuck days before a self-imposed deadline. Bulgaria's veto over Patriarch Kirill, French and Italian resistance to an entry ban on Russian soldiers, and a fight over cod quotas show how a single capital can reshape continent-wide policy — and why negotiators are trading substance for unanimity.
A Paris summit of Ukraine's allies promised more air-defence help on Monday, but the gathering exposed a widening gap between wartime rhetoric and delivered capability, with the EU's 21st sanctions package still unagreed and NATO's Ankara summit offering warnings rather than resolution.
EU foreign ministers meet in Brussels as a growing group of capitals push for trade restrictions on Israeli settlement goods. Germany has emerged as the key holdout, leaving the Commission short of the qualified majority it needs to act.
Volodymyr Zelensky's cabinet reshuffle was already reshaping Kyiv's wartime strategy. Then Lindsey Graham, the sanctions bill's chief architect in the Senate, died hours after his last visit to the Ukrainian capital.
South Africa says it has deported more than 53,000 undocumented migrants as anti-immigration protests spread — a shift that could ripple across Southern Africa's migration corridors.
Russian strikes on Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson and Ukrainian drone attacks into Russia and occupied Zaporizhzhia killed nine people overnight. The exchange came as the US senator who spent a year fighting to pass a Russia sanctions bill died hours after finally securing a White House deal to move it — leaving its next steps unclear just as Kyiv called the legislation essential leverage.
Lindsey Graham's death leaves his Russia sanctions bill without an author and opens a Senate seat fight shadowed by Iran's widening strikes on US bases across the Gulf.
At NATO's Ankara summit, Lee Jae-myung proposed a 'Defense Industry Partnership 2.0' and opened talks on a procurement pact that would give South Korea access to NATO's roughly $9.9 billion joint arms market. The bigger question is whether manufacturing capacity translates into institutional standing, or whether Seoul ends up as a well-armed outsider.
THE WEEK: NATO's Ankara summit repriced protection as a series of bilateral deals, the US–Iran truce failed in stages that ended with six American deaths in Kuwait, the IMF cut global growth to 3%, and the EU walked toward a self-set 15 July deadline on the Russian oil cap.
Barely a year after taking office, Ukraine’s prime minister is on her way out. Zelenskyy calls it an “updated political strategy”; the still-unnamed successor will reveal what that means — to Kyiv and to Brussels.
Six US soldiers died in a drone strike on Kuwait's Port Shuaiba as the United States bombed targets inside Iran and Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz again — a conflict now grounding Gulf aviation and rattling global markets.
Rep. Nancy Mace is openly interested in Lindsey Graham's vacant Senate seat, while Politico reports top House Republicans are privately working to keep their own members from being appointed. The fight over the Senate's loudest pro-Ukraine seat now runs straight through the House majority math.