Hello, this is Mared Gwyn with another packed newsletter to start your Tuesday. Here in Brussels, it’s the last day of Cyprus’ rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, with the baton to be handed to Ireland tomorrow (more on that in tomorrow morning’s edition).
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EU Commissioners head to Turkey: But first, three members of Ursula von der Leyen’s top team of Commissioners – enlargement chief Marta Kos, migration chief Magnus Brunner and foreign policy boss Kaja Kallas – are in Turkey today for talks with top government officials on advancing bilateral EU-Turkey relations.
A Commission spokesperson said the trip would be “an opportunity to review EU-Turkey relations, discuss the common challenges in an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment and also look for additional avenues for cooperation”.
All three will meet Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, in a sign that Brussels is increasingly recognising the geopolitical value of relations with the NATO ally, which will host a crunch NATO summit in Ankara on 7-8 July.
Yet it comes just two months after Commission President Ursula von der Leyen appeared to frame Turkey alongside Russia and China as a hostile power and geostrategic threat to the EU.
The remarks, although brushed aside by Ankara, did prompt outrage in some circles, with critics stunned that the Commission chief could put a NATO ally and EU candidate in the same baskets as its strategic rivals.
It also comes amid continued deadlock on Turkey’s stalled bid to join the EU as a member. Just two weeks ago, the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee slammed a pattern of “authoritarian” drift in the country over the past decade.
Autumn deadline for China results: Meanwhile, EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič said on Monday that the EU will seek to achieve “tangible” results through dialogue with China by October, after a meeting with his counterpart Wang Wentao in Brussels.
As our trade reporter Peggy Corlin reports, tensions between Brussels and Beijing have ramped up in recent weeks after China repeatedly threatened to retaliate against EU moves to protect its market from Chinese overcapacity.
“Today’s discussions were intensive, focused, and constructive,” Šefčovič told reporters between rounds of discussions with Wentao on Monday. “My objective from the outset has been clear: to begin balancing the trade relationship between the European Union and China.”
Šefčovič added that the Chinese and Europeans would “intensify” their dialogue and that he would travel to Beijing this autumn “to assess the progress”, adding that “our teams have a clear mandate and an ambitious timetable to deliver tangible results by October this year”. Peggy has the details.
AC debate still hot: Yesterday, I broke down for you the politics behind calls for mass air-con rollout in Europe. But, does the European Commission support air conditioning as a measure against extreme temperatures? That’s the timely question that my colleague Jorge Liboreiro asked during yesterday’s midday press conference.
Interestingly, the Commission kept it neutral and said it was neither “pro or contra” the cooling systems, which have traditionally divided Europeans. “Regarding air conditioning units in private households, these are issues where the Commission is not micromanaging how people should be going about this,” a spokesperson told Jorge.
The executive, however, left the door open to reviewing its neutral stance if the political context changes. Read the full story.
As our energy and environment reporter Marta Pacheco reports, the debate over air conditioning has also become emblematic of a broader challenge: whether climate policy should also be judged by whether it can reduce emissions without deepening social inequalities. Marta has more.
Also on our radar today: NATO Secretary General, Mr Mark Rutte is travelling to Berlin, Germany, where he’ll meet with Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and the Minister of Defence, Boris Pistorius, our NATO correspondent Shona Murray reports.
The meeting is one of the last staging posts for Rutte ahead of the alliance’s annual summit in Ankara next week. US President Donald Trump confirmed last week he would attend, but reiterated his resentment over NATO allies’ refusal to back him in the war in Iran – a charge several states such as Germany and the UK can refute having allowed the US military basing rights and access to their airspace.
€3BN Airbus loan shows Europe reclaiming its strategic autonomy – Calviño
A record-breaking €3 billion loan to aerospace giant Airbus announced by the European Investment Bank is an “illustration of how Europe is ramping up its capacity and strategic autonomy” in a world where it is being “attacked on all sides”, the President of the European Investment Bank (EIB) Nadia Calviño has told Euronews.
The loan, announced by the EIB on Monday, is designed to boost Airbus’s commercial aerospace and defence projects, and will support investments through 2030 in projects in France, Germany and Spain.
It is the biggest commercial loan ever granted by the Luxembourg-based financing arm.
The move is widely seen as part of a broader European push to restore the continent’s waning competitiveness and sovereignty in the face of stiff competition coming from the US and China, with an initial €1 billion euro tranche signed at a ceremony in Brussels on Monday.
Watch the full interview.
Putin resets deadline for full seizure of Donetsk and Luhansk to year-end, Zelenskyy says
Russia has repeatedly failed to meet self-imposed targets to capture Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, with the latest deadline now pushed back to 31 December, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.
In his evening address on Monday, Zelenskyy said Moscow had set “around 15 deadlines” since the start of its full-scale invasion, each of which had ultimately been missed.
“This year, the Russians have once again postponed the date for the capture of the Donetsk region,” he said. “Initially, they set a deadline of 31 March, then 1 September, and now the deadline stands at 31 December.”
Russia has sought to take full control of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions since Moscow’s first invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014. More than a decade on, however, its forces still do not hold the entirety of either region, our Ukraine correspondent Sasha Vakulina writes.
Zelenskyy also pointed to mounting domestic strain inside Russia, with fuel shortages across Russia due to Ukraine’s intensified strikes on energy infrastructure.
“The Russians themselves, queuing for petrol in various regions, can clearly see that their ‘three-day war’ has now been going on for five years,” he said. “Even this oil-rich nation — once dubbed a ‘petrol station’ — is now facing fuel shortages.”
More from our newsrooms
Explainer: Why Péter Magyar is reluctant to align with the EU on Ukraine. Hungary’s new prime minister ended Budapest’s veto on Ukraine’s EU accession talks in June, but is resisting further progress, citing minority rights, fairness towards the Western Balkans, and domestic political pressures. Sandor Zsiros explains why he’s digging in.
Christine Lagarde’s Sintra speech signals a new ECB playbook. Lagarde used the opening of the European Central Bank’s annual forum in Sintra on Monday to declare the end of one era in monetary policy, indicating that the ECB can once again rely on interest rates as its main tool to keep inflation under control. Piero Cingari has more.
Burnham vows to ‘rewire Britain’ with devolution push and ‘No. 10 North’ in Manchester. The man likely to be the UK’s next PM has used his first major speech to promise the biggest shake-up of political power in modern British history, pledging to hand sweeping new authority to local leaders and relocate part of the prime minister’s office to Manchester. Rebecca Rommen hasthe story.
We’re also keeping an eye on
- European Commission Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera is in Paris for the 50th Anniversary OECD Global Forum on Responsible Conduct
That’s it for today. Angela Skujins, Sandor Zsiros, Vincenzo Genovese, Sasha Vakulina, Jorge Liboreiro, Marta Pacheco and Shona Murray contributed to this newsletter.
