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.

TIRANA — Student demonstrations in Tirana spiraled out of control Wednesday as protesters clashed with police for over 10 hours, setting buildings on fire, entering government institutions and looting.

While Albania has seen daily protests since the end of May over opposition to a Jared Kushner-linked resort in the south of the country, on Tuesday, students took to the streets over conditions in universities and dorms, the cost of living, and grievances over governance.

“The right to peaceful protest is a foundation of democracy and the state’s obligation to guarantee it. But violence cannot be a means of expressing dissatisfaction, nor should the use of force by the police exceed the limits of the law and proportionality,” President Bajram Begaj said in a public statement Wednesday. He called for the youth to engage in dialogue with him.

Starting outside the Ministry of Education on Wednesday morning, masked individuals threw stones, paving slabs, bottles and improvised pyrotechnics at the institution. They ripped up metal railings from the side of the road and used them to batter the iron gates of the building. After several hours, police with batons, tear gas guns, water cannons, and riot gear moved in, forcibly removing protesters and citizens from the vicinity.

Over the following hours, the situation escalated further as protestors set fire to benches, trees, and several buildings. They breached the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of Finance, damaged several private businesses and billboards, then moved to the main boulevard and encircled the prime minister’s office. They later broke into shopping centers and banks.

Economy Minister Delina Ibrahimaj condemned the “burning and destruction of institutional premises,” calling them “unacceptable acts.”

As of Wednesday evening, at least 40 demonstrators had been arrested and dozens of injuries had been reported by protestors, civilians, and the police. Several journalists reported being prevented from conducting their work by police who physically blocked them or seized their equipment. On Tuesday evening, one young man had his legs broken and required emergency surgery following an altercation with police.

The situation remains tense as protestors, mostly in masks, and police continue to battle it out on the city’s main boulevard, home to several parliament buildings, the president’s office, and the prime minister’s office.

The U.S. Embassy in Tirana warned its citizens to be vigilant and avoid areas impacted by the protest, noting that it could spread. Explosions and sirens continue to be heard throughout the city center on Wednesday evening.

Meanwhile, the delegation of the European Union to Albania stated it has taken note of allegations of excessive violence by police against protestors and journalists and expects the police to prioritize full investigations. The EU delegation also called for de-escalation from both sides.

European organizations have to reckon with how to keep up with the modern world without sacrificing sovereignty. Geopolitical instability, tightening regulatory expectations and the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) mean that, for many organizations, sovereignty now sits alongside resilience and business continuity in board-level risk discussions. The question they can no longer defer is how to harness the opportunities of the modern cloud without surrendering control over their own data. Answering it requires honesty about what sovereignty means, and about where it can actually be found.

A definition Europe can trust

The European Commission’s forthcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) is the right vehicle for that honesty: giving Europe a shared, enforceable definition of what “sovereign” actually means. Without such a definition, the market is filled with commercial offerings that claim the sovereignty label without delivering the substance, a practice described as “sovereignty washing.” This gap has led some organizations to treat open source as the answer. But open source software is a licensing model, not an operating model, and it doesn’t settle questions about infrastructure or jurisdiction or even reliability and access. It’s not a route out of dependency, it’s a different dependency on project sponsors and code maintainers. A definition gives policymakers a way to properly assess claims of sovereignty against a consistent standard rather than taking marketing at face value.

Europe should not wait for CADA to take effect before acting, though. European cloud service providers (CSPs) have been partnering with established technology providers to deliver real sovereign capability, without rebuilding the entire technology stack from scratch.

The best time to plant the sovereign tree was 10 years ago

If Europe wants to grow its industrial base, it has to support the ecosystem as it is now, not as it may in 10 years’ time. CADA’s own roadmap assumes roughly five to seven years to triple the EU’s data-center capacity. Providers who have already built capacity by blending EU capabilities with proven non-EU technologies would have to spend the intervening years relinquishing their growth. It is scale, not a shortage of skills or innovation, that is the biggest practical obstacle facing a stronger European cloud market. This is precisely why partnership with proven technology sources deserves a central place in the sovereignty debate rather than being treated as a second-best option.

Partnership shortens that timeline considerably, letting European CSPs deliver sovereign, scaled services now instead of waiting for domestic capacity to catch up organically. In Italy, IPZS, owned by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, is using this model to build a modern Digital Application Platform for the Italian EUDI wallet, a foundational EU digital identity initiative. It provides a live example of that model working in Europe today, at the scale and speed the policy window demands.

It is through scale that the local industrial base can deliver sovereign capabilities, compete, capture market share, and invest in developing and integrating home-grown technologies. Hoping for the alternative to happen, that is for a European technological stack to fully emerge and be adopted, is the equivalent of putting the cart before the horse.

The rules need to allow for a model that’s already working

Providers, such as evoila, are now operating well beyond Europe’s borders, alongside Uniserver. This shows the model working at a broader scale, combining local operational and jurisdictional control with proven technology. Sovereignty spans jurisdictional, technological, operational and supply-chain dimensions, and a partnership model can address all four while drawing on technology already proven at scale, rather than asking every layer to be rebuilt from first principles by a single European provider.

Alongside its cloud platform, developed in-house and operated from data centers in Europe under EU jurisdiction, IONOS also offers customers a dedicated VMware-based private cloud. It is also operated within the EU and designed to provide European data sovereignty and operational control.

Broadcom’s role in that model is deliberately narrow. It supplies the VMware cloud software layer to the CSP, while the CSP itself runs the infrastructure and holds the customer relationship, so that no European customer data passes through Broadcom or is subject to its access. Trust, in this model, follows the architecture rather than the brand. If CADA’s tiers implicitly assume that sovereignty can only be delivered by a fully European-built stack, CADA would shut out precisely the route that is already allowing Europe to scale fastest: partnership between local operators and proven technology providers.

The path forward

Europe does not have to choose between moving quickly and building sovereignty. The two are compatible, provided the legislation is calibrated to recognize it. As the European Parliament and European Council work on CADA, the priority should be for it to recognize and reward the partnership models already delivering sovereign capability across Europe today.

The above column is sponsor-generated content.

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A Russian attack that killed at least 17 people including three children in Ukraine are Moscow’s “thanks for the lifting on sanctions on diesel exports,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday.

A series of strikes on the south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia also injured at least 18 people, including three children, Ukraine’s state emergency services said on Saturday afternoon.

“People continue to be searched for under the rubble of destroyed houses. Rescue operations continue,” said Mykhailo Semikin, acting head of Zaporizhzhia regional military administration in a Telegram post.

“Today, Russia expressed its thanks for the lifting of sanctions on diesel exports by dropping five glide bombs on residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia,” Zelenskyy said on X.

The strikes took place just one day after U.S. President Donald Trump announced he would temporarily lift sanctions on Russian diesel in a bid to bring soaring prices down.

Ukrainian officials were meeting on the same day with European and U.S. officials in Miami in a fresh diplomatic push to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Zelenskyy criticized the deal on Friday and accused Trump of using the peace talks as a “smokescreen” while pursuing a deal with the Kremlin.

Even though the talks were supposed to last two days, the Ukrainian team decided to return home earlier then planned “because they managed to talk everything through earlier,” a senior official familiar with the matter told POLITICO. Ukraine will continue to bomb Russian oil refineries despite US-Russia deals, the official added.

The Ukrainian armed forces said Saturday they struck a major oil facility in Russia’s Samara region overnight.

Zelenskyy is currently busy coordinating with Europeans and preparing several high-level meetings, the official said. He spoke on Saturday with leaders of France, Norway and Finland.

“Russian strikes killed over 80 Ukrainian civilians in two days. Moreover, it has stepped up its hybrid attacks against Europe, both EU Member States and NATO Allies,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said Saturday. “Suspending sanctions on Russian diesel provides Moscow with more revenues to wage war.”

“On Monday, EU Foreign Ministers intend to approve the biggest set of sanctions listings targeting Russia’s war machine since the start of the war,” Kallas added.

This article was updated.

LONDON — Zack Polanski promised to smash Britain’s two-party political system — but his campaign for a U.K. parliamentary seat has leaned heavily on the idea that he can keep the existing prime minister honest.

POLITICO analysis of the online battleground in the Holborn and St. Pancras by-election – which takes place Thursday — shows the Green leader has been pitching himself as a protest vote for Labour-backing constituents in the London seat, which has been held by Labour since its creation in 1983.

The party has spent nearly £5,000 pushing ads on Meta’s platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram, promising that a Green win would help “keep the government in check.”

In one campaign video, Polanski takes credit for a series of Labour U-turns on their “most unpopular policies” over the last 12 months. A victory in the seat, he claims, would add further pressure on Prime Minister Andy Burnham to listen to the Greens, rather than “Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, or their corporate donors.”

An additional £7,000 has been spent by the party promoting graphics of recent newspaper headlines it thinks demonstrate the influence it holds over Burnham’s Labour government — including a Guardian story flagging a possible delay on North Sea gas field decisions until after the by-election.

“When Zack Polanski speaks, Labour listens. That is the power of the leader of the Green Party,” the accompanying ad copy states.

Building Brand Zack

The by-election marks Polanski’s first attempt to win a seat in the House of Commons.

The left-wing leader oversaw a rapid polling increase for the Greens after taking charge in September 2025, snatching a Labour safe seat in Gorton and Denton under former Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer the following February.

But its polling momentum appears to have stalled since Labour switched to Burnham, and the party has also faced internal rows over anti-semitism.

The party has spent around £8,000 on targeted ads highlighting endorsements for Polanski from local residents, including former independent candidates and NHS workers.

And at least £500 of that has been spent promoting effusive praise of the Green leader from his own local hairdresser.

Alongside a picture of the pair hugging, barber Rami is quoted saying: “I’ve been cutting Zack’s hair for years. When you chat to him you can tell how much he really cares.”

A significant number of the showcased endorsements come from former Labour backers and members as Polanski seeks to convince voters that Burnham’s majority — and the mid-term timing of the contest — means they can register a protest vote in the symbolic seat previously held by Starmer.

One standalone advert features former Labour member Gopa, who says: “We all know there will still be a Labour government whoever wins, so I’m excited for a Green candidate who will listen to us and help push Labour to do better.”

Other endorsements include a Labour member of three decades who says she is now backing Polanski after her former party “lost its way and let me down.” Ex-Labour councillor Naser says he’s switched his allegiance to “keep the pressure on, and keep Labour in check.”

The Labour pitch

By contrast, Labour candidate Sagal Abdi-Wali has kept her campaign local.

She has spent more than £21,000 with Meta promoting dozens of slick cinematic clips and polished graphics pitching herself as a “local champion.”

Supported by Labour’s well-oiled digital team, Abdi-Wali’s online campaign focuses heavily on her experience of arriving in the area as a child refugee, and her subsequent career as a local councillor.

Labour has also pumped more than £20,000 into Google’s ad program. The majority of that sum was spent on bitesize YouTube ads, with the remainder spent on buying up sponsored Google search results in an attempt to grab the attention of voters hunting for information about the contest.

Also running

Britain’s hard-right Restore Britain has also been making a pitch to voters in Holborn and St Pancras — while openly admitting it has no chance of winning in “one of the most left-wing seats in Britain.”

Rupert Lowe’s party has spent around £30,000 on Meta ads positioning itself as a “genuine patriotic alternative” to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK — which has not spent significant cash in the contest.

Restore’s spending included £1,500 promoting a “quiz” comparing comments from Reform politicians with Restore’s more hard-line agenda. A further £2,000 went on promoting a graphic of the “ten reasons” why voters should support it.

That list includes removing “millions of foreign nationals who hate who we are,” a promise to “reverse the Islamification” of London, deport “foreign tramps who ruin our city” and force “healthy” benefit claimants to clean graffiti and pick litter.

In a further attempt to present his insurgent party as a credible alternative to Reform or the Conservatives, Lowe’s paid online content repeatedly describes the by-election as a “free hit” for right-wing voters to “vote with your heart.”

“They don’t want the capital reformed, or conserved,” one paid ad states. “They want London restored.”

Decades ago, the world treated global trade as a neutral ground that helped energy markets in becoming more integrated, as we still see them today. The standard view in policy circles was that trade made countries more secure and stable. Governments therefore now use tariffs and export controls as a chokepoint of power. Today interdependence between countries became a double-edged sword. Europe, for instance, faced this back in 2022, when the Russian gas that it long treated as a reliable commodity became a prominent tool of pressure overnight.

Despite the shifts towards digital economies and the massive investments that countries have been pouring in it, a major share of world trade still goes through narrow water ways. The Strait of Hormuz, Suez Canal, bab el-Mandeb Strait and many more corridors could lead to world trade disruption if partly closed. In 2023 attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea led to big containers switching their usual route through the Suez Canal and going around Africa instead. It resulted in higher insurances, increased fuel consumption and longer delivery times. At the same time, extreme drought forced the Panama Canal to cut daily Transits. Two of the worlds key sea shortcuts were constrained at once. Securing energy and trade flows in geo-economic conflicts is no longer only about protecting ships and pipelines; it is also about building systems flexible enough to absorb shocks that are now certain to come. The Hormuz crisis of 2026 made that lesson costly, and the states that act on it now will set the terms of the next era of global trade.

Despite the shifts towards digital economies and the massive investments that countries have been pouring in it, a major share of world trade still goes through narrow water ways.

Two years later, on the 28th of February 2026 as the US-Israel-Iran war started, The Iran Revolutionary Guard shut the Strait of Hormuz to control the oil that was being exported from the Gulf Cooperation Council. Within two weeks, the International Energy Agency ‘IEA’ reported that the exports through the Strait of Hormuz had fallen to a tenth of normal flows. Asian importers took the worst hit, as they highly depend on the Gulf’s crude. The damage, however, showed up in prices other than oil; for instance, urea fertilizers also flow through the strait, and its supply disruption led to higher food prices. Gulf countries demonstrated their resilience by finding alternatives to exporting away from the strait of Hormuz. The UAE, for example, Created the Habshan-Fujeirah line, which started construction in 2008 and was finished in 2012, to secure energy trade even if faced by geographical obstacles. Securing energy and trade flows is a significant topic to be discussed at the TRENDS Annual Forum on October 12, 2026, under the theme “Sustainable Security: The Post-War Future of the Middle East”.

The Middle East plays a crucial role in the global economy. It’s often faced with exposure to regional conflict, but it can secure trade through several approaches.

The Middle East plays a crucial role in the global economy. It’s often faced with exposure to regional conflict, but it can secure trade through several approaches. First, spreading the risk by creating more routes through land. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, currently in the developments phase, is one initiative that seeks to connect several countries through one line of trade. The second approach is “Friend-shoring”, which protects sensitive supply chains by moving them to ally countries. This can be high in cost but works most efficiently when a country is faced by war. This approach demonstrates the benefits of economic partnerships and investing in ports in different geographies to secure supply chains especially given that more the 80 percent of world trade moves by sea. The third option is stockpiling. In March of 2026 the IEA agreed to release 400 million barrels of emergency reserves. Those reserves will not end the whole crises but will provide time for diplomacy to act.

These matters influence not just local residents but also have global repercussions, affecting everyday experiences worldwide through shifting costs for fuel, farming, and food supplies.

Trends Global, operating as part of TRENDS Group, is organizing its Annual Forum to examine critical issues and inquiries impacting the security of the Middle East. These matters influence not just local residents but also have global repercussions, affecting everyday experiences worldwide through shifting costs for fuel, farming, and food supplies. By gathering a diverse group of political figures, scholars, and leaders from the corporate and defense sectors, the event intends to explore the ongoing transformation of the territory. Establishing lasting stability in the post-conflict Middle East requires a departure from past patterns, ensuring that future security is not merely a reaction to a continuous cycle of emergencies.

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3. Gulf producers race to bypass Hormuz and bab el-mandeb – oil & gas middle east. Accessed September 27, 2026. https://www.oilandgasmiddleeast.com/news/gulf-producers-race-to-bypass-hormuz-and-bab-el-mandeb
4. International Energy Agency. (2026, March 11). IEA member countries to carry out largest ever oil stock release amid market disruptions from Middle East conflict. https://www.iea.org/news/iea-member-countries-to-carry-out-largest-ever-oil-stock-release-amid-market-disruptions-from-middle-east-conflict 
5. International Monetary Fund. (2024, March 7). Red Sea attacks disrupt global trade. https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/03/07/red-sea-attacks-disrupt-global-trade