FIFA President Gianni Infantino expressed regret to the organization’s board on Thursday regarding his plan to sell stakes in the World Cup to private investors.

“I apologized for the mistakes that we made in relation to the communication and consultation process related to the … project, which then led to many consequences,” said Infantino after the meeting, adding that his proposal had dominated discussions.

“But what is important to remember is that it was a proposal — so in no way a done deal — just a proposal that actually intended to enable FIFA to invest more in our member associations, as opposed to replacing support from existing resources,” he added.

Thursday’s meeting in Zurich was the first time FIFA’s Council convened since the 2026 World Cup ended and details of Infantino’s controversial proposal came to light. The plan was hit with immediate backlash from football associations around the world, as well as high-profile figures like EU Sports Commissioner Glenn Micallef and U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

The sell-off plan also prompted calls for Infantino to resign as FIFA president, while U.S. President Donald Trump stepped in to defend him.

FIFA Council Vice President and Football Association Chair Debbie Hewitt expressed disappointment that documents about the plan had not been shared with the board, saying many questions remained unanswered after the meeting. “I’ve repeatedly asked for the papers to be shared … In spite of the request today, I haven’t received them,” she told the BBC.

During the three-and-a-half-hour meeting, Infantino was also pressed about the contentious decision to suspend the red-card ban given to U.S. player Folarin Balogun during this summer’s tournament. FIFA said in a statement its legal committee would undertake a review of the body’s disciplinary procedures, and “a presentation will also be made at the next FIFA Council meeting in December 2026.”

BRUSSELS — It was meant to be a debate on how to curb Europe’s soaring energy prices.

But the first session of talks at an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels Thursday quickly descended into a three-hour fight over whether the EU should put a carbon price on driving cars and heating buildings.

The delay got so bad, the roast veal and fig tartlet lunch awaiting European leaders was driven well into the afternoon.

Countries including Italy, Poland, Czechia and Hungary called for ETS2 — an already-legislated law that will put a carbon price on heating and transport from 2028 — to be delayed for two more years. Estonia suggested it could be scrapped altogether.

The push was rejected by a majority of the bloc, with several EU diplomats telling POLITICO it was, as one put it, an “unacceptable” offer. Another said the ETS2 launch date would never be changed. But the debate reflects a growing sense from right-leaning governments that the EU’s ambitious green agenda runs against their push to bring down energy costs. 

While the main topic of today’s discussion was ETS2, its predecessor, the Emissions Trading System — which puts a price on carbon emissions from factories and power plants — was arguably the real target.

Put together, these two emissions trading schemes will be the EU’s most powerful policy tool for bringing down planet-warming emissions.

A proposed reform of the original ETS is currently being debated in the European Parliament and in the Council of the EU. Italy and Poland have been leading a gang of 10 member-countries which have been railing against the ETS since American and Israeli bombs started falling on Iran in March. 

What they want is for the European Commission’s July review of the ETS to be further weakened, even though the proposal already softens carbon restrictions over the next decade to give industry more time to invest in cleaner production methods.

But by framing the ETS as a scourge on household bills, both Warsaw and Rome have found ready audiences at home and abroad. On Monday, hours before a meeting of EU environment ministers convened in Luxembourg, Poland led a meeting of member countries with concerns on the ETS. Their gang, which originally counted 10 countries in March, had now grown to 16.

While Italy and Poland did manage to get Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Greece to back their ask for a “reassessment of the ETS2” and to “further postpone its entry into force until at least 2030,” inside the room of European leaders the position mostly fell flat.

Five EU diplomats granted anonymity to discuss the ongoing negotiations said Nordic countries and the Netherlands were firmly against changes to ETS2 — a position backed by France and Germany.

But Paris and Berlin’s long-term reliability as ETS defenders is in doubt. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz both face threats from the far-right, where the ETS has become a dirty word.

Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland, which is no fan of the ETS, is politically ascendant, having won the largest share of votes in two regional elections in September. In France, with elections only months away in 2027, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally is leading in the polls. 

How Le Pen would deal with the ETS isn’t certain, but Jordan Bardella, the French far-right lawmaker and rising star of National Rally, offered a clue  in recent comments.

“ETS: three letters, an acronym that reeks of detached bureaucracy, with one question that keeps coming up: who’s going to pay?” he said to European Parliament in May.

Seven crew members are missing after a tanker caught fire close to Romanian territorial waters in the Black Sea Thursday morning, Romanian authorities said.

The San Marino-flagged chemical tanker sent a distress call at 7 a.m. local time about 13 nautical miles from Sulina, a port on Romania’s eastern coast, close to the Ukrainian border. Romanian border police, along with aviation units, arrived to assist the crew, the Romanian Naval Authority said.

Five people have been rescued so far, the naval authority told local media. Another tanker was affected by a fire late on Wednesday close to Sulina, with authorities confirming the crew were safe.

Romanian authorities have not given a reason for either incident. The fires broke out hours after the country’s defense ministry announced an air alert around Snake Island — a Ukrainian territory located about 40 kilometers from the spot where the San Marino tanker sent its distress signal. A drone was also spotted near Sulina overnight `”after which it disappeared from the radar,” the ministry wrote.

At least five commercial vessels have been hit by suspected drone strikes in the Black Sea over the past two weeks. The deadly attacks are affecting a key route that carries 95% of Ukraine’s grain exports.

On Oct. 6, drones struck two ships in Bulgaria’s Black Sea economic zone. One sank, and its 10 crew members went missing. On Tuesday two more ships were struck near Bulgaria, leaving 11 crew members missing.

Romanian President Nicusor Dan will meet Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte for talks on the sidelines of the European Council summit in Brussels at 1:30 p.m. today.

KYIV — Russia’s bid for reacceptance in world sports is gaining momentum ahead of the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. And nowhere has that been more visible than in President Vladimir Putin’s favorite event: judo. 

The martial art is a notable arena for Moscow’s return to international sport. Putin has long-standing ties to judo, and the sport’s governing body has become a leading force in decisions about Russian athletes’ participation.

Austrian-Romanian executive Marius Vizer is the entrepreneur who has helped transform his sport into a global commercial product since he began leading the International Judo Federation in 2007. But to his detractors, he’s a sports official who built a powerful network connecting Putin, Russia’s elites and global business interests, while maintaining the image of a neutral administrator.

“It’s clear that, considering how Vizer promoted the Russians and kept saying they were ‘good for us,’ [he has] definitely interests and connections in Russia. Russia’s ideas are everywhere,” the Ukrainian Judo Federation’s head coach Vitalii Dubrova said in an interview.

The International Judo Federation did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment on Vizer’s ties to Russia. The IJF also did not make Vizer available to reply to requests for comment.

While the IJF offered solidarity funding for Ukrainian judo in 2022 and instituted background checks on Russian and Belarusian athletes in 2023, in November 2025 it became the first major sports organization to fully reinstate Russian athletes — allowing them to compete under their national flag for the first time since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.

It was part of Moscow’s use of sports as a route back onto the global stage, from comebacks in major tournaments to broader Olympic rehabilitation — and a potential return at the 2028 Games, tacitly backed by Kirsty Coventry, president of the International Olympic Committee.

That has triggered alarm in Brussels, where top EU foreign policy officials are currently circulating ideas — from sanctioning athletes to cutting EU funds for sports federations that welcome Russia back — in a bid to slam the door on Russian reintegration, according to a European External Action Service document, dated Sept. 16 and seen by POLITICO.

While the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine continues unabated, Russia has nonetheless managed to retain influence at the top of international sports federations, including in chess, fencing and boxing. Moscow has found platforms to advance its soft-power agenda that have rankled Kyiv and European officials, who described how sport has “increasingly become a tool of political instrumentalisation by Russia and Belarus,” in the EEAS memo.

Vizer’s IJF, for its part, decried banning Russian athletes from sport, even as Putin was suspended as the honorary president of the organization days after the Kremlin’s tanks rolled over the border into Ukraine. 

“Russia uses propaganda to promote the idea that sport is apolitical, while money and influence help it regain its place in international sport,” Dubrova said.

Putin’s judo brotherhood

A mutually beneficial relationship between the Russian elite and international judo long predates the invasion of Ukraine. Under Putin, himself a judoka, it became a social network and loyalty system linking top political and business figures in Russian society.

Some of Putin’s closest allies are old friends from Leningrad’s judo circles in the 1960s–80s, forming what one analyst called a “judo brotherhood” or “judocracy” inside Russia, in an essay for Foreign Policy magazine in 2014.

The judocracy’s influence spread to the top of the sport globally. Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, Putin’s childhood training partners, built construction and infrastructure empires in Russia through major state contracts, including the Crimean Bridge, which Ukraine views as an illegal attempt to connect mainland Russia with the occupied Black Sea peninsula. 

In 1998, Arkady Rotenberg took over the Yavara-Neva judo club in St. Petersburg, founded at Putin’s behest when he headed the country’s Federal Security Service. The Russian leader remains its honorary president, while Arkady Rotenberg served on the IJF executive committee from 2013 to 2022.

Vizer became president of the Romanian Judo Federation in 1995, led the European Judo Union from 2000 to 2007 and has headed the IJF since 2007. “Of course, [Vizer and the Rotenbergs] know each other,” former Georgian-Ukrainian judoka Georgii Zantaraia, now chair of the athletes’ commission of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine, told POLITICO. “Putin was the honorary president of the International Judo Federation … [Vizer] was part of this structure.” 

The influence of Vizer as a sports powerbroker became clear in 2019, when world champion Saeid Mollaei said Iranian officials had pressured him to withdraw from the World Championships to avoid facing Israeli judoka Sagi Muki. The IJF suspended Iran and helped Mollaei continue his career abroad after he fled the country.

The spotlight then fell on Vizer’s ties to Putin, who appeared alongside him in Budapest that year. The Russian president held an informal meeting over tea with Vizer and IJF honorary Vice President Sándor Csányi — a symbolic public display of the Russian president’s privileged place within Vizer’s international judo network, reinforcing perceptions of his role as an important political ally.

The EU response

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion started, Vizer has echoed Russian officials and the state-backed Roscongress Foundation in arguing that sport should remain separate from politics, a stance that critics view as tacit backing for Russian aggression. 

Though many Russian Olympic athletes are also members of the armed forces, the judo chief has also insisted through his organization that athletes should not be held responsible for governmental actions.

“As sporting events and sport itself promote peace and solidarity worldwide, we consider that those athletes who participate in international sporting events are promoting peace and international solidarity,” the IJF said in early March 2022, while Russian forces closed in on Kyiv. “On this basis, the global decision to sanction all Russian athletes, regardless of the different opinions many have expressed, is not considered to be justified. We cannot condemn the athletes for what is happening.”

Four-and-a-half years on, representatives for Ukrainian athletes argue that restoring Russian competitors and national symbols normalizes Moscow’s ongoing aggression. “The flag came back, and that is what is important for Russia,” said Dubrova.

Ukrainian Sports Minister Matvii Bidnyi told POLITICO in July that the IOC is “effectively functioning as a pressure release valve” for Russia.

“It is up to each International Federation (IF) as the sole authority for its international competitions, outside of the Olympic Games, to decide on this question [restoring Russian athletes’ participation under the Russian flag, emblem and anthem]. For more, we kindly refer you to the IJF,” the IOC said in comments.

The IOC did not address the question about whether it had ever investigated potential Russian political or financial influence on decision-making within the IJF.

The IOC’s deferred decision on flags, anthems and team colors until an unspecified, later moment, “leaves scope for coordinated EU action to prevent the normalisation and political instrumentalisation of sport while the war of aggression continues,” EU officials noted in the Sept. 16 document.

The EU could press sports federations to keep Russian flags, anthems and officials out of competitions, they wrote, and withhold EU grants from bodies that let Moscow’s teams compete under national colors.

A more striking proposal targets the money around major events: EU countries could review where TV-rights revenue flows and use coordinated pressure to deter broadcasters and sponsors from backing competitions that give Russia a platform, the officials wrote.

The options also include visa restrictions for athletes competing under national colors and efforts to bring “like-minded” countries such as Britain, Norway and Switzerland into a wider coalition against Russian reintegration.

The Ukraine war’s spillover into the Black Sea is creating a growing European security and commercial risk: Drones are hitting ships and killing sailors, grain routes are under strain, and insurers and investors are weighing the cost of operating through Ukraine’s ports.

Five commercial vessels have been hit in Bulgarian and Romanian waters over the past week alone, leaving at least four people dead, several sailors missing and others injured. In response, Black Sea countries Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey have raised the issue at NATO, asking for more focus toward the region and joint support, according to two alliance diplomats.

“The attack within Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone is absolutely unacceptable. It constitutes a serious breach of maritime and international law and will further jeopardise safe navigation in the Black Sea,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said on X after the attacks last week.

Russia has been attacking Ukrainian ports and cities in the area since the start of its full-scale invasion. But the recent strikes have brought the spillover into NATO territory. If they continue, EU leaders will face pressure to protect Black Sea shipping and keep Ukrainian trade moving.

Those questions will be top of mind at Thursday’s European Council summit. According to draft conclusions obtained by POLITICO, leaders are expected to discuss the “immediate restoration of safe passage for grain cargo ships.”

A wider problem

Russia is not the only country using naval drones in the Black Sea. Ukraine has also used them against Russian-linked shipping. In June, a Ukrainian sea drone exploded in Romania’s Constanța port after Kyiv said it had veered off course because of Russian electronic interference.

“The Black Sea situation is quite dangerous because attacks are coming from both [sides],” said an EU shipping representative, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “You have to worry about both.”

Attribution can also be difficult. Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said Wednesday that investigators still have not proven that Russia is behind the strikes — although some have attributed his reticence to his broadly softer approach toward the Kremlin.

Drone operations by both Russia and Ukraine are likely to continue as long as each has the money and production capacity to sustain them, said Cristian Vlas, assistant research manager for Eastern Europe at the think tank ACLED.

Oleksii Goncharenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and founder of the Black Sea Security Forum, told POLITICO that a “serious diplomatic initiative” was needed, bringing together Ukraine, Russia and a third-party guarantor, such as Turkey, “to restore freedom of navigation in the Black Sea.”

Grain routes under pressure

The security risk is disrupting routes that carry Ukraine’s harvest to market, with consequences for EU transport links. Black Sea ports are Ukraine’s main export gateway, handling around 95 percent of the country’s grain exports, as well as significant volumes of iron ore. Shipping traffic has fallen as the security risk has grown.

Some cargo is being rerouted to the River Danube, but capacity there has been stretched in recent months as drought pushes water levels to record lows. Operators are trying to add rail capacity, but that risks moving the bottleneck westward to Romania.

Moving more Ukrainian grain overland also risks reviving tensions with farmers in neighboring EU countries, Vlas said. Romanian farmers have worried that Ukrainian produce meant only to transit could stay on the domestic market, he added, while transport operators are already juggling competing demands for capacity.

Ukraine’s Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi has warned that millions of tons of unsold grain is piling up, and that farmers who can’t sell won’t be able to afford to resow all their land.

Bulgaria is working with Romania and Turkey on a joint initiative to protect freedom of navigation in the Black Sea, which Radev plans to bring to EU leaders on Thursday.

Following the Black Sea countries’ request at NATO, military officials are likely to look into possible options such as shifting counter-drone systems to the region, the two alliance diplomats said. Radev said Sofia will convene his counterparts in Ankara and Bucharest to examine further proposals, while a senior Bulgarian official called for new joint anti-drone systems with Romania, partly financed by the EU.

Investment at risk

The attacks also threaten what had started to look like a renewed bet on Ukraine’s ports. MSC, the world’s largest container line, was among the biggest and newest investors, reportedly acquiring a majority stake in a container terminal at a port near Odesa in May.

Ukraine has also been offering investors a long-term concession at the Chornomorsk terminal near Odesa. This terminal is one of Ukraine’s largest planned port public-private partnerships and part of what is expected to be a multibillion-euro reconstruction effort involving European companies.

But people who work in Ukraine’s ports say the case for rebuilding is collapsing.

“No one is ready to invest and rebuild, since you know that tomorrow there will be another missile, another pack of drones,” Oleg Grygoriuk, chairman of Ukraine’s Marine Transport Workers’ Trade Union, said.

MONACO — Ukraine is taking its war effort from the muddy Donbas trenches and halls of European power to an iconic London football stadium this week.

Originally driven from its home in 2014 by marauding Russian-backed forces, Shakhtar Donetsk — Ukraine’s top team — will take up a residency at Stamford Bridge, home of Chelsea FC, in Europe’s premier football competition Wednesday night.

As air raid sirens sounded relentlessly back home, the club’s Chief Executive Sergei Palkin and Sporting Director Darijo Srna met POLITICO in the marbled lobby of a Monaco hotel to discuss Shakhtar Donetsk’s UEFA Champions League prospects — and why they’re playing for something much bigger than on-field success. 

“At this point we are not representing just Shakhtar Donetsk. We are representing the whole country,” said Palkin, ahead of four matches in London this fall and winter. “For us, it’s also to support Ukrainian people who left their homes and moved to London, to England. And therefore, these games completely change context. It’s very important every time to send messages to support Ukraine.”

Shakhtar’s survival among Europe’s elite is emblematic of Ukraine’s own endurance against Moscow’s bombardment. Forced out of Donetsk in 2014, the club has spent more than a decade moving between temporary host cities while keeping its Champions League ambitions alive throughout the war, despite the difficulty of attracting top European signings while based in a war zone. 

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022, Shakhtar Donetsk has played “home” matches in Poland and Germany. Club bosses are thrilled to be based in England for this season’s games against Greece’s AEK Athens, Portugal’s Sporting CP, Turkey’s Fenerbahçe and Spain’s Real Madrid. “[London] is the capital of the football world,” Palkin said.

“We don’t have pressure. We want to play football. We are 24/7 under stress in Ukraine. And we want to just go out and play for our fans, for Ukraine,” added Srna, a former star defender for Shakhtar Donetsk and the Croatian national team. 

Invest in Ukraine

Large white letters adorn Shakhtar Donetsk’s orange and black jersey bearing the name of SCM, the country’s biggest private financial and industrial investment company, owned by Ukraine’s richest man and the club owner, Rinat Akhmetov.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unabating assault has cost tens of thousands of lives in Ukraine, and also caused hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure across the country. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has crisscrossed the globe in recent months trying to maintain Western support for Kyiv, as it runs short on cash and critical air defenses. 

Closely connected to Shakhtar Donetsk, officials at SCM are appealing to Western investors that they are the key to Ukraine’s reconstruction — and that it can start already. Natalya Yemchenko, chief corporate affairs officer at SCM, said that any investment would pay an immediate dividend for Europe.

“It’s a good time to invest in Ukraine, not from the point of view of big and easy money. It’s a great time to invest from the view of strategic security issues, energy security issues [and] food security issues. It’s a very good time to create strength in Ukraine to protect Europe and to make Europe more ready for the next years,” Yemchenko told POLITICO at a separate event in Monaco.

While some of the military and reconstruction financing that has poured into Ukraine during the war has ended up in the crosshairs of anti-graft investigations — including one prominent case that ensnared a former minister in Zelenskyy’s government, and the president’s top aide Andriy Yermak — Yemchenko emphasized SCM’s commitment to anti-corruption. 

“We have zero tolerance [for] corruption inside of our business. And I would say from our experience, when you see some big cases, it means that the anti-corruption system works. It would be much worse if during the war we would not see any cases of fighting this corruption,” she said.

Russia’s hybrid campaign against Europe has sharpened SCM’s case for investment in Ukraine. The company argues that Ukraine is already Europe’s first line of defense — and that keeping its economy strong helps make the rest of the continent safer.

For Yemchenko, the investment case is inseparable from the war. Ukraine cannot keep defending Europe if its economy fails. She said Russia’s recent attacks on businesses are meant to leave people feeling desolate.

“They would like to demotivate Ukrainian business. Shopping malls, logistics centers: They are the main target for the last two months. And I do believe that they would like to make life in Ukraine almost impossible,” she said. 

“We saw it in Mariupol, what they started to do from the very beginning. They start to create a humanitarian catastrophe. Their first target was telecoms. Then it was heating. Then water. They destroy everything connected to basic needs. Why? Because they think that people will leave cities, including Kyiv,” she added.

“And again, this war is a Ukrainian war, but to a big extent, it’s a European war, unfortunately.”

KYIV — Russia’s Vladimir Putin is preparing for a broader confrontation with Europe amid an uptick in the Kremlin’s hybrid attacks on the continent, Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has warned.

In an interview with the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, Kuleba, who was Ukraine’s foreign policy chief from 2020 to 2024, said that Russia’s continued war preparations and anti-European propaganda are signs that Putin is planning attacks on other European countries.

“Anti-European hysteria is being fueled in Russia, which I interpret as the preparation for a broader conflict with the rest of Europe,” said Kuleba, before adding: “We [Ukrainians] don’t have to drag you — Putin will drag you into the war.”

European officials say Moscow has upped its hybrid campaign across the continent in recent months, using cyberattacks, sabotage and disinformation to disrupt critical infrastructure and weaken support for Ukraine.

Kuleba said the failed drone attack on the Leipzig airport in Germany in August was a sign of “growing preparation” for an offensive on the continent. “They see how your intelligence operates. They see how your security forces operate. They see how you react and they draw conclusions,” he added.

In the aftermath of the incident, the German government concluded that Moscow was responsible for the attack, and ordered a review of security around sensitive locations.

However, Kuleba, who stood down as Ukraine’s foreign policy chief in September 2024, does not think Russia is preparing a full-scale offensive beyond Ukraine. In his view, Moscow is more likely to launch an attack on NATO countries involving drones targeting key infrastructure that would test the alliance’s unity and preparedness.

“The truth is that Russia does not need 400,000 more people to wage that war. It needs five drones,” he said, adding that in the event of an attack, “[Europeans] can call for NATO consultations… can call for restraint. But this will only encourage Putin to make the next step … He will always have enough drone and missile capabilities.”

Kuleba no longer believes Putin can be persuaded to end the war through negotiations. “He’s not looking for a solution, for a pause, and there will be no moment when he will start looking for it,” he said, concluding: “Putin is a guarantee of war: anyone after Putin is a chance for peace.”

According to Kuleba, any attempts at negotiating with Putin, or pushing for peace, are a waste of time. “The sooner we come to terms with reality, the better policies we can develop to address it,” he said.

He noted that while Europe’s political culture is based on “a win-win approach” in which both sides can benefit, Putin’s outlook is very different: “For him, a solution that benefits both sides is not the best option. For him, the world works on the principle of victory and defeat. One side has to win and the other has to lose,” said Kuleba.

The former foreign minister also warned that Ukraine would face its worst ever winter as Moscow ups its attacks against civilians in a bid to break their spirit.

In recent months, Russian strikes have hit Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and transport links, including bridges over the Dnipro river, as well as homes and civilian sites such as bus stops, schools, postal depots and internet providers. The attacks have disrupted power, transport and daily life as winter approaches.

On Thursday, at least 33 people were killed in a Russian attack on two buses in Kramatorsk in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Kuleba explained why he believed Moscow has now sharply escalated its airstrikes: “The bombing of cities is a direct consequence of Russia’s failure to defeat Ukraine on the battlefield.” He continued: “The main target of Russian drones and missiles is the Ukrainians’ will to resist — but also the will of Ukraine’s friends abroad to keep supporting it.”

He added:“They don’t just want to turn out the lights in Ukraine. They want to paralyze the country.”

Kuleba described the worst-case scenario in Ukraine as “the collapse of the systems that make life in a big city possible,” such as electricity, water and drainage services.

Could Russia succeed? “I believe Ukraine is too large, too mobile and too adaptable. That’s why I think we’ll get through this winter,” said Kuleba.

“The price will be much higher than last year’s.”

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, The Telegraph, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.