Tomasz Wlostowski

Likwidacja Komisji Europejskiej oznaczałaby silniejszą rywalizację państw członkowskich w Europie. Słabsi straciliby bufor nieraz wykorzystywany przez Polskę na przykład w sporach o Nord Stream 2. Nie tędy droga do reformy.

Final Destination: Poznań Edition 😱

I’m sending a sledgehammer message to shipping companies whose tankers are transporting illegal Russian diesel to our ports. Reverse course while there’s still time.

I agree. To return to the negotiating table as a participant rather than an appetiser, Europe must escalate: create a problem whose resolution requires its involvement. The obvious starting point is to confiscate Russia’s financial assets frozen in Europe and use them to support Ukraine’s defence of the inviolability of Europe’s borders. Europe would then hold a decisive stake in any financial settlement - and a seat that Washington and Moscow could no longer simply arrange between themselves.

Putin spent years building a war chest, knowing full well invading Ukraine would be costly. Making his war cheaper is no way to make him stop fighting

🇺🇦 🇺🇲 The confrontation inside Trump's Ukraine peace negotiations is now coming into focus. Le Monde reports that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spent nearly three hours pitching Ukraine's presidential chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, a postwar economic arrangement built around restoring Russian oil and gas flows to Europe through Ukrainian pipelines. The meeting took place on October 9 at the Shell Bay golf club in Florida. Witkoff presented the proposal as a regional prosperity plan: Ukraine would collect transit revenues, Europe would receive cheaper energy, and Russia would regain access to commercial routes disrupted by the war. Budanov saw something fundamentally different. According to a witness cited by Le Monde, he objected that the arrangement would recreate Ukraine's dependence on Moscow. “Our model is not Belarus, but Poland!” he reportedly replied. The meeting was interrupted, and Budanov called Zelensky. When talks resumed, news arrived that Trump had announced a separate agreement with Putin involving Russian diesel. Le Monde reports that an irritated Witkoff then demanded that the Ukrainians accept the arrangement and stop striking Russian oil refineries, arguing that the attacks endangered the wider world. A source familiar with the Ukrainian delegation described its members as exceptionally distressed by the encounter. The account adds a revealing dimension to the commercial negotiations we have been tracking. The proposed Lukoil asset sale, Novatek's involvement in an Alaska LNG venture, the broader US-Russia list of business opportunities reported by the Financial Times, and now the proposed restoration of Russian energy transit through Ukraine all point to the prominence of energy deals in Washington's diplomatic approach. These are separate proposals, with different participants and legal circumstances. But Le Monde's reporting exposes the strategic disagreement underlying them. For Witkoff, restoring commercial flows appears to be part of the mechanism for producing a peace settlement. For Budanov, according to the account, those same flows threaten to restore Moscow's economic leverage over Ukraine. The reported exchange also raises a question about sequencing: why was Kyiv being pressed to stop attacking Russian refineries while Russia continued striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure? Le Monde's reconstruction relies on accounts of a private meeting. The reported exchanges have not been independently confirmed by the participants. Source: Le Monde

Witkoff to Putin: “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian -- you are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.”

Another sign of the talks going nowhere: U.S. negotiators are talking past Russia, Europe and even Trump. There is no way for them to offer up European agreement on intensifying the gas trade absent peace in Ukraine. Russia has been trying to restart Nord Stream since Ukrainians blew it up; it won’t happen unless 1. The war stops 2. AfD wins absolute majority. Existing consortia failed to get the Trump admin, to issue sanction waiver. Even if shale gas champion Trump would do it, EU sanctions remain and Germany needs to agree and certify. Negotiators spend energy discussing abstractions while achieving nothing of the positions demanded by the Kremlin and the WH, let alone Kyiv or Europe.

And so the slaughter continues … Time for Zelensky to go

Russia has been accused of sending secret agents to defecate in the lavatories of Finnish MPs in a bizarre escalation of its hybrid warfare against the West 🔗 telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…

Macron's former Prime Minister, who is candidate at France's next presidential elections, proposes to "build the United States of Europe" 👇 I've been hearing this discourse ever since I was a child, that we cannot compete with the US and China without a strong Europe. Which, granted, makes a lot of sense on paper: if you're to compete against giants, you've got to be a giant yourself. Logical, right? Except, in practice, the exact opposite occurred. Just look at the evolution of relative share of global GDP (visualcapitalist.com/ranked-…): in 1992, the year of the Maastricht treaty (which officially created the EU), the countries making up the EU used to have 28.8% of global GDP which was actually more than the US (25.7%) and China (1.9%) combined! Fast forward to today and both the US and China's shares have grown - in the case of China it's grown considerably - but Europe's share has shrunk to around 17%, the same share as China, losing about 40% of its economic weight in a mere 3 decades. Which means that, very concretely, more Europe - and there has been, treaty after treaty, more and more Europe - has so far meant more and more economic irrelevance. The more we built Europe - this supposed economic giant on paper - the smaller we got economically. And it's not a China story, it's not that simple: if it were, the US's global share of GDP would have shrunk alongside Europe, but it just didn't. Which means it's really a Europe problem. And, unfortunately, it's not just the economy. More Europe has meant more irrelevance and weakness in just about all fields that matter. Take foreign affairs for instance. There used to be a time when Europe's voice mattered in the world - or at least that of the countries making up Europe. When, say, De Gaulle could, in the space of a single year, pull France out of NATO (adst.org/2014/06/france-has-…), ask American troops to leave French soil (humanite.fr/histoire/general…), and then fly to Phnom Penh to tell a packed stadium that the US had no business waging war in Vietnam (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phnom_…). Try to picture a single European leader doing even one of those three things today. Heck, in 2009 France got **back** in NATO, a sad illustration that the "strong Europe" we were promised as a counterweight to the US has in practice meant ever deeper subordination to it. It's even written in black and white in the Lisbon Treaty itself (eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.h…), which states that NATO "remains the foundation" of its members' collective defence. So much for the independent giant... Or take another critical dimension of power: technology. The countries of Europe used to sit at the technological frontier: Concorde, Ariane, the TGV, the World Wide Web invented at CERN, etc. A reminder that as late as 2007 a single European company, namely Nokia, sold 4 out of every 10 mobile phones on the planet. Today look at the ASPI Critical Technology Tracker (aspi.org.au/programs/critica…): out of the 74 critical technologies of the future, in how many is any European country in the lead? Answer: not a single one of them. And I'm not even speaking about energy, culture, and a dozen other fields where the story is identical. On energy alone: European companies now pay 2 to 3 times more for their electricity than their American and Chinese competitors, and just last year Brussels pledged to buy $750 billion worth of American energy as part of a trade "deal" for which it received, in exchange, 15% tariffs on its exports. Some giant... Long story short, there is the logic on paper and then there is the logic in practice: when you see that the patient has been getting steadily sicker for 3 decades, and that the doctor's only answer, year after year, is to increase the dose of the very same medicine, at some point you have to question the medicine. Or the doctor. De Gaulle, coming back to him because he was in my view one of the most prescient statesmen we ever produced, saw it coming clear as day: as early as 1962 he warned that a supranational Europe, having dissolved the only entities capable of having a will and a policy of their own - nations - would have no policy at all, and would end up following someone else's. He warned that "there would perhaps be a federator, but he would not be European" (fresques.ina.fr/de-gaulle/fi…). In the same 1962 press conference he also beautifully said that "Dante, Goethe, Chateaubriand belong to all of Europe to the very extent that they were respectively and eminently Italian, German and French. They would not have served Europe much had they been stateless men and had they thought, written in some integrated Esperanto or Volapük." That was his conviction: that Europe's genius is really the sum of its singular geniuses, and that you cannot add them up by melting them down. If you make some sort of soup out of French, Italian, Greek, and Spanish cuisine, all thrown in the same pot, you don't get all the flavors at once. Instead, you've destroyed four of the world's great culinary traditions to produce something no one wants to eat. I'm not anti-European, by the way, and neither was De Gaulle. I do believe - and so did he - that Europe should be a power in its own right. What De Gaulle called a "European Europe": independent of Washington, speaking with its own voice, master of its own destiny. He simply understood that only nations can carry such an ambition, because only nations have a will. Which is the great irony of this whole story: those who claim to want a strong Europe are busy dismantling the only thing that could ever make it one - the sovereignty of nations.

Latvia confirms it will impose national sanctions on Usmanov and Fridman. “Latvia will continue to use all legal instruments at its disposal to prevent the release of these persons’ funds and economic resources in Latvia.”

If reports are true that France supports sanctions lifting on Fridman & Usmanov as it wants Azerbaijan to release 2 French citizens, this implies: 1. Azerbaijan coordinates with Russia and serves its interests; 2. France has shown weakness and set a precedent. We urgently need clarity.