Poland threatens Putin with arrest if he flies through its airspace on way to Hungary
Poland warned Russia’s president Vladimir Putin on Tuesday against travelling through its airspace for a summit in Hungary with US president Donald Trump, saying it could be forced to execute an international arrest warrant if he did, Reuters reports.
Bulgaria, however, would be willing to let Putin use its airspace if the summit is held in Hungary, foreign minister Georg Georgiev was quoted as saying.
Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Radio Rodzina:
I cannot guarantee that an independent Polish court won’t order the government to escort such an aircraft down to hand the suspect to the court in The Hague.
And, therefore, if this summit is to take place, hopefully with the participation of the victim of the aggression, the aircraft will use a different route.
The ICC warrant obligates the court’s member states to arrest Putin if he sets foot on their territory.
Sikorski last week accused Russia of a “tactically stupid and counterproductive” escalation of the war in Ukraine, saying its drone incursion into Poland last month appeared to be deliberate.
Key events
Closing summary
This blog will be closing shortly, but you can find the latest on Europe here. For updates on Ukraine, follow here.
Here is an overview of today’s developments:
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Poland warned Russia’s president Vladimir Putin on Tuesday against travelling through its airspace for a summit in Hungary with US president Donald Trump, saying it could be forced to execute an international arrest warrant if he did. Bulgaria, however, would be willing to let Putin use its airspace if the summit is held in Hungary, foreign minister Georg Georgiev was quoted as saying.
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A Russian drone attack killed four people in Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region on Tuesday, local broadcaster Suspilne reported citing the regional police. A Russian bombardment of energy infrastructure left hundreds of thousands of people in the region without power and some without water on Tuesday, with repairs slowed down by the lingering threat of drone strikes, officials said.
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European leaders issued a joint statement with Ukraine on Tuesday backing US president Donald Trump’s call for peace talks to begin based on the current frontline with Russia. Trump is seeking to broker a peace deal to end the three-and-a-half-year war, triggered by Russia’s 2022 invasion. Last week, he called on Moscow and Kyiv to stop the fighting “where they are” after talks with both sides.
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Moscow’s rejection of an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine appears to have put a summit in Hungary’s Budapest between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in jeopardy, diplomats said on Tuesday, after a preparatory meeting between the top US and Russian diplomats was postponed. The meeting between US secretary of state Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, was expected to take place in Budapest on Thursday.
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Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has arrived at La Santé prison in Paris on Tuesday to start a five-year prison term. Sarkozy, who was the conservative president of France between 2007 and 2012, was handed a five-year jail term in September for criminal conspiracy over a plan for late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to fund his electoral campaign.
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Ukraine’s parliament voted on Tuesday to amend the country’s budget for this year, raising defence spending to a record level as the war with Russia dragged on into its fourth year. Lawmakers approved the increase of about 325 billion hryvnias ($7.7bn), raising Ukraine’s defence spending to a total of about 2.96 trillion hryvnias ($70.86bn) this year.
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French police on Tuesday stepped up the hunt for thieves who stole priceless royal jewels from the Louvre museum, as scrutiny mounted over security at the country’s cultural institutions. Sunday’s audacious daylight robbery – which lasted just seven minutes – was the latest in a string of thefts from French museums in recent months, and has left authorities scrambling to increase protection measures.
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A tornado tore through districts north of Paris on Monday, toppling three construction cranes and killing one person and critically injuring four others, authorities said. The town of Ermont, about 13 miles (20km) north-east of Paris, was worst hit by the sudden twister that caused damage across 10 districts overall.
Ukraine’s parliament voted on Tuesday to amend the country’s budget for this year, raising defence spending to a record level as the war with Russia dragged on into its fourth year, Reuters reports.
Lawmakers approved the increase of about 325 billion hryvnias ($7.7bn), raising Ukraine’s defence spending to a total of about 2.96 trillion hryvnias ($70.86bn) this year.
Finance minister Serhiy Marchenko said:
We understand that the situation is constantly changing, and it is a forced necessity to increase spending to resist aggression effectively.
The government, with the support of the partners, has the sources to secure additional spending for Ukraine’s defenders.
Moscow’s rejection of an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine appears to have put a summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in jeopardy, diplomats said on Tuesday, after a preparatory meeting between the top US and Russian diplomats was postponed, Reuters reports.
Trump, who last week spoke by phone to Putin and met Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has said he aims to hold a summit with the Russian leader in the Hungarian capital Budapest within two weeks in a push to end the war.
But summit preparations have hit a snag, with the sides postponing a preparatory meeting between US secretary of state Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, expected to take place in Budapest on Thursday.
Neither side has publicly abandoned plans for Trump to meet Putin, and efforts to organise a summit in Hungary still appear to be under way. Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, was in Washington on Tuesday, where he posted on Facebook: “We have some serious days ahead”.
But two senior European diplomats said the postponement of the Rubio-Lavrov meeting was a sign the Americans could be reluctant to go ahead with a Trump-Putin summit unless Moscow yields from its demands.
“I guess the Russians wanted too much and it became evident for the Americans that there will be no deal for Trump in Budapest,” one said to Reuters.
The Russians “haven’t at all changed their position, and are not agreeing to ‘stop where they are’,” said the second diplomat. “And I assume Lavrov gave the same spiel, and Rubio was like: ‘See you later’.”
The board of Italy’s Leonardo held a crucial meeting on Tuesday to review a tentative deal to forge a new European satellite manufacturer with its existing partner Thales and rival Airbus, people familiar with the matter said to Reuters.
Barring a last-minute setback, the three companies are expected to announce as early as Wednesday that they intend to press ahead with plans to pool loss-making activities into a new venture to fend off competitors led by Elon Musk, two of the people said.
However, after more than a year of tricky talks over the balance of power, valuations, anti-trust issues and most recently a political crisis in France, there is no guarantee of an immediate sign-off and timing is not confirmed, they warned.
None of the companies agreed to comment.
Reuters reported on Monday that the three companies had agreed the framework of a deal, subject to board and regulatory approvals, with further detailed steps to be implemented later.
Russian strikes in Chernihiv region kill four people, local media reports
A Russian drone attack killed four people in Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region on Tuesday, local broadcaster Suspilne reported citing the regional police according to Reuters.
According to preliminary information, four others were wounded in the town of Novhorod-Siverskyi, including a 10-year-old child, the report said.
A Russian bombardment of energy infrastructure left hundreds of thousands of people in the region without power and some without water on Tuesday, with repairs slowed down by the lingering threat of drone strikes, officials said.
The energy ministry said that the regional capital, also called Chernihiv, and the northern part of the province had lost all electricity supply.
The attack, which also targeted the neighbouring Sumy region of northern Ukraine, was the latest in a campaign of Russian strikes targeting the Ukrainian energy grid ahead of winter.
The Chernihiv region, which had a prewar population of just under 1 million, has been hammered by Russian drone and missile attacks on its power infrastructure in recent weeks, causing regular blackouts and disrupting daily life.
Helena Horton
Helena Horton is an environment reporter for the Guardian
Mosquitoes have been found in Iceland for the first time as global heating makes the country more hospitable for insects.
The country was until this month one of the only places in the world that did not have a mosquito population. The other is Antarctica.
Scientists have predicted for some time that mosquitoes could establish themselves in Iceland as there are plentiful breeding habitats such as marshes and ponds. Many species will be unable to survive the harsh climate, however.
But Iceland is warming, at four times the rate of the rest of the northern hemisphere. Glaciers have been collapsing and fish from warmer, southern climes such as mackerel have been found in the country’s waters.
As the planet warms, more species of mosquito have been found across the globe. In the UK, eggs of the Egyptian mosquito (Aedes aegypti) were found this year, and the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) has been discovered in Kent. These are invasive species that can spread tropical diseases such as dengue, chikungunya and Zika virus.
You can read the full piece from Helena Horton here: Mosquitoes found in Iceland for first time as climate crisis warms country
Here are some of the latests photos coming through to us over the wires:
French police on Tuesday stepped up the hunt for thieves who stole priceless royal jewels from the Louvre museum, as scrutiny mounted over security at the country’s cultural institutions, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.
Sunday’s audacious daylight robbery – which lasted just seven minutes – was the latest in a string of thefts from French museums in recent months, and has left authorities scrambling to increase protection measures.
In a separate case, a prosecutor said on Tuesday that a Chinese woman had been charged over taking part in the theft of more than $1m worth of gold nuggets from another Paris museum last month.
Scores of investigators were still looking for Sunday’s culprits, working on the theory that it was an organised crime group that clambered up a ladder on a truck to break into the museum, then dropped a diamond-studded crown as they fled.
Detectives were scouring video camera footage from around the Louvre as well as of main highways out of Paris for signs of the four robbers, who escaped on scooters.
Italy is set to suffer a further drop in the number of births this year to a new historical low, aggravating the country’s demographic crisis, national statistics bureau ISTAT said on Tuesday.
Last year recorded just 370,000 new births, the lowest figure since Italy’s unification in 1861, and the 16th year in a row in which the figure declined.
In the first seven months of 2025 the negative trend continued, with just under 198,000 newborns, down 6.3% from the same period of 2024, ISTAT said in a statement.
A Ukrainian citizen allegedly working for Russian intelligence services as part of a sabotage campaign was detained in Poland, while two others were arrested in Romania, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Prosecutors said the individuals acting on behalf of the Russian intelligence services were allegedly preparing acts of sabotage involving the sending of shipments containing explosives and incendiary materials to Ukraine, which were intended to spontaneously combust or explode during transport, AP reported.
The goal was to intimidate populations and destabilize EU countries supporting Ukraine, Polish prosecutors said, adding that two more Ukrainian citizens suspected of taking part in the same plot were detained in Romania.
Romanian authorities said Tuesday that two Ukrainians, aged 21 and 24, acting on behalf of Russian intelligence, deposited two parcels containing improvised explosive devices at an international courier company in Bucharest. Specialists from Romanian intelligence defused the devices, and the pair were placed under preventative arrest for 30 days.
The Ukrainian in Poland was one of eight individuals detained by authorities in recent days on suspicion of preparing acts of sabotage across the country, a spokesperson for the National Prosecutor’s Office said.
AI chatbots are “unreliable and clearly biased” when offering voting advice, the Dutch data protection authority (AP) has said, warning of a threat to democracy eight days before national elections.
The four chatbots tested by the AP “often end up with the same two parties, regardless of the user’s question or command”, the authority said in a report ahead of the 29 October election.
In more than half of the cases, the chatbot suggested either the far-right Freedom party (PVV) of Geert Wilders or the leftwing GroenLinks-PvdA led by the former European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans.
Some parties, such as the centre-right CDA, “are almost never mentioned, even when the user’s input exactly matches the positions of one of these parties”, the report said.
The deputy head of the AP, Monique Verdier, said that while chatbots may seem like clever tools, “as a voting aid, they consistently fail”. Voters were being pushed towards a party that did not necessarily align with their political views, she added.
“This directly impacts a cornerstone of democracy: the integrity of free and fair elections,” said Verdier. “We therefore warn against using AI chatbots for voting advice, as their operation is unclear and difficult to verify.”
You can read the full story here: Don’t use AI to tell you how to vote in election, says Dutch watchdog
Russia said on Tuesday its conditions for peace in Ukraine remained unchanged since the August summit between US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin, Reuters reports.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters he was surprised by an “unscrupulous” CNN report which said that the anticipated meeting between him and US secretary of state Marco Rubio had been put on hold for the time being and that unidentified US officials felt that Russia still had a “maximalist stance”.
“I want to officially confirm: Russia has not changed its position compared to the understandings that were reached during the Alaska summit,” Lavrov told reporters, adding that he had told Rubio precisely that.
Lavrov said that the place and the timing of the next Trump-Putin summit was less important than the substance of implementing the understandings reached in Anchorage, Alaska.
The Kremlin said there was no clear date, with spokesperson Dmitry Peskov saying:
Listen, we have an understanding of the presidents, but we cannot postpone what has not been finalised.
Neither President Trump nor President Putin gave exact dates.
A court in Slovakia on Tuesday convicted the man in last year’s attempted assassination of the country’s populist prime minister Robert Fico of a terror attack and sentenced him to 21 years in prison, the Associated Press (AP) reports.
The shooting and the trial have shaken this small, EU and Nato-member country where Fico has long been a divisive figure, criticised for straying from Slovakia’s pro-western path and aligning it closer to Russia.
Juraj Cintula opened fire on Fico on 15 May 2024, as the prime minister greeted supporters after a government meeting in the town of Handlová, about 140km north-east of the capital of Bratislava.
Cintula, 72, was arrested immediately after the attack and ordered to remain behind bars. When questioned by investigators, he rejected the accusation of being a “terrorist.”
Fico was shot in the abdomen and was taken from Handlová to a hospital in nearby city of Banská Bystrica. He underwent a five-hour surgery, followed by another two-hour surgery two days later. He has since recovered.
Cintula has claimed his motive for the shooting was that he disagreed with government policies. He refused to testify before the Specialized Criminal Court in Banská Bystrica, but confirmed that what he had told investigators about his motive remains true.
Jon Henley
Jon Henley is the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, based in Paris
Perhaps France’s most fabled jail, La Santé – where the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has begun a five-year jail term for criminal conspiracy to raise campaign funds from Libya – is the last remaining prison inside the Paris city limits.
Located in the southern Montparnasse district of the capital, it opened in 1867 and was the scene of at least 40 executions, the last in 1972. Partially closed for renovation in 2014, the prison reopened five years later and houses more than 1,100 inmates.
Famous former detainees include the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel, the civil servant and Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, the businessman and politician Bernard Tapie, the 70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and model agent Jean-Luc Brunel.
Prominent or at-risk prisoners are generally held in the jail’s QB4 ward for “vulnerable people” – the so-called “VIP quarters” – in single cells, not the usual three-person units, and kept alone during outdoor activities for security reasons.
Located on the first floor, the ward has 19 identical cells and a dedicated exercise yard so inmates are not obliged to mingle with other prisoners – although they remain subject to whistles, jeers and smartphone photos from nearby cells.
You can read the full piece from Jon Henley here: What can Sarkozy expect in La Santé prison and what has he taken with him?
Poland threatens Putin with arrest if he flies through its airspace on way to Hungary
Poland warned Russia’s president Vladimir Putin on Tuesday against travelling through its airspace for a summit in Hungary with US president Donald Trump, saying it could be forced to execute an international arrest warrant if he did, Reuters reports.
Bulgaria, however, would be willing to let Putin use its airspace if the summit is held in Hungary, foreign minister Georg Georgiev was quoted as saying.
Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Radio Rodzina:
I cannot guarantee that an independent Polish court won’t order the government to escort such an aircraft down to hand the suspect to the court in The Hague.
And, therefore, if this summit is to take place, hopefully with the participation of the victim of the aggression, the aircraft will use a different route.
The ICC warrant obligates the court’s member states to arrest Putin if he sets foot on their territory.
Sikorski last week accused Russia of a “tactically stupid and counterproductive” escalation of the war in Ukraine, saying its drone incursion into Poland last month appeared to be deliberate.
A tornado tore through districts north of Paris on Monday, toppling three construction cranes and killing one person and critically injuring four others, authorities said.
The town of Ermont, about 13 miles (20km) north-east of Paris, was worst hit by the sudden twister that caused damage across 10 districts overall.
