Politico EU

KYIV — Ukraine isn’t hanging about in trying to fix the damage caused by a megabucks corruption scandal exposed this week.

Top officials are rushing to reassure Kyiv’s Western partners, after the alleged $100 million kickback scheme in the energy sector — which implicated current and former top officials, and some close associates of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — troubled allies.
“We must act quickly and decisively on the battlefield and act equally in vital areas within the state. The government’s task is to show Ukrainian society and partners that under no circumstances will we tolerate corruption and will respond quickly to any facts,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko told POLITICO.
“We value our strong and permanent relations with foreign partners. It is important for us to maintain these relations, based on trust, and any threats to them are unacceptable,” she added.

As the scandal mushroomed this week, Kyiv announced high-profile resignations, sanctions against Zelen..

American top diplomat Marco Rubio said late Wednesday that the U.S. is running out of options to sanction Russia after hammering the Kremlin’s biggest oil giants last month.

“Well, there’s not a lot left to sanction from our part, I mean, we hit their major oil companies, which is what everybody’s been asking for,” Rubio said before a meeting of G7 foreign ministers.

Last month, the U.S. slapped sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil and their subsidiaries, in a bid to reduce Russia’s oil revenues — its main financing source for the war on Ukraine — and push Moscow to the negotiating table in a bid to end the Kremlin’s aggression.

Sanctions come into full force on Nov. 21, but several countries are already thinking about asking for exemptions. Hungary already got a one-year extension from the U.S.

“Sanctions have to be enforced, so you know we don’t put sanctions and then not enforce them. We’re interested in enforcing them as well,” Rubio added.

The sanctions’ success ultimately depend..

House lawmakers released more than 20,000 pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein on Wednesday — and they include communications between the convicted sex offender and high-profile individuals in politics, media, Hollywood and foreign affairs.

One email shows Epstein communicating with a former White House counsel. Some showed offensive emails between Epstein and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Another offers insight into Epstein’s offer to help Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon.

The documents, a small batch released by Democrats and a larger one released by Republicans, also shed light on the disgraced financier’s private musings about Trump and to what extent Trump may have known about his criminal conduct.

The Trump administration pushed back on allegations of wrongdoing Wednesday, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt alleging Democrats “selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump.” Trump, in a s..

BERLIN — A leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Russia doesn’t pose a threat to his country — but that Poland potentially does.

The comments, which echo Kremlin messaging, come at a time when centrist German politicians are increasingly warning that the AfD is using its rising influence to act as a mouthpiece for Putin inside Germany — a claim AfD leaders strongly deny.

Putin “hasn’t done anything to me,” Tino Chrupalla, the co-leader of the AfD, said on German public television. “I don’t see any danger to Germany from Russia at the moment.”

Chrupalla went on to insist that any country can potentially pose a threat to Germany.

“Take Poland, for example,” Chrupalla said, citing the country’s refusal to extradite a Ukrainian citizen German authorities suspect of sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022. “Poland can also be a threat to us.”

German centrists are increasingly portraying the AfD as a party that repre..

LONDON — Britain’s public service broadcaster is in the fight of its life. A blazing row with Donald Trump just made everything harder.

The U.S. president on Monday threatened legal action against the BBC, just hours after two of its top executives resigned over claims of bias in the state-funded corporation’s news coverage.

The dispute — which has been seized on by figures on the British political rightas well as Trump and his allies — comes as BBC bosses prepare to embark on a fraught round of negotiations with ministers over the rules it must abide by and, crucially, how it is funded. The outcome will determine whether the storied British broadcaster, once the voice of an empire, survives in anything like its current form.

Opposition politicians wasted no time defining the terms of battle.

“Just getting rid of two members of staff does not eradicate the cultural problems that lie deep within the BBC and have for many, many decades,” Nigel Farage, a Trump ally who leads Britai..

ROME — The conservative think tank behind Donald Trump’s Project 2025 roadmap is looking for new friends across the Atlantic.

The Heritage Foundation, the intellectual engine behind the 922-page blueprint that has become the key policy manual for Trump’s second term, is partnering with a constellation of European nationalist far-right movements to export its playbook for countering progressive policies.

That included a conference in late October at the frescoed former home of late premier Silvio Berlusconi in Rome focused on Europe’s demographic crisis and the idea that falling birthrates pose a threat to Western civilization. Speakers included Roger Severino, Heritage’s vice president of domestic policy and the architect of the group’s campaign to roll back abortion access in the U.S., as well as Italy’s pro-life family minister Eugenia Roccella, the deputy speaker of the Senate, and members of Italian right-wing think tanks.

Severino and the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kev..

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is privately telling confidants that JD Vance is the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican nomination and that he’d support the vice president if he chose to run, according to two people close to the administration.

Rubio’s private comments are a vivid example of how some Republicans are already gaming out a post-Trump succession battle, less than one year into the president’s term.

“Marco has been very clear that JD is going to be the Republican nominee if he wants to be,” said a person close to the secretary, noting that Rubio has expressed that sentiment privately and publicly.

“He will do anything he can just to support the vice president in that effort,” said the person close to Rubio, who was granted anonymity to share the secretary of state’s private conversations.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly named Vance and Rubio as his two most likely successors, even suggesting last week that the pair should run on the same ticket. Both men have insi..

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Ein Blick zurück auf zwei Jahrzehnte deutscher Russlandpolitik. Katja Gloger und Georg Mascolo, Autoren des Buches Das Versagen, sprechen mit Gordon Repinski über Fehleinschätzungen, Verflechtungen und verpasste Warnsignale. Von den Anfängen in Dresden über Putins Rede im Bundestag bis hin zu Nord Stream und der Annexion der Krim . Ein Gespräch über politische Naivität, wirtschaftliche Interessen und die Lehren aus der Ära Merkel.

Warum glaubte die Bundesregierung so lange an Wandel durch Annäherung? Welche Rolle spielten Schröder, Merkel und die deutsche Industrie? Und warum konnte Putin bis zuletzt sicher sein, dass er mit Deutschland immer wieder ins Geschäft kommt?

Ein analytischer, schonungsloser Rückblick auf die deutsche Russlandpolitik – und die Frage, ob Berlin diesmal wirklich gelernt hat.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum ..

In the secretive cloisters of the Vatican, where bishops and cardinals plot and scheme, Martin Selmayr was seen as a natural (for a Protestant, at least).

But the man who once ran the European Commission with an iron grip devoted his best work to charting his course back to the Berlaymont.

However, his latest scheme for ending his effective exile in Rome, where he is EU ambassador to the Holy See, and returning to Brussels seems to have come apart.

The job that looked set to be his — deputy secretary-general of the European External Action Service (EEAS), a new role strong-arming EU leaders into agreeing on foreign policy — seemed ideal. But it was clumsy politicking that proved to be the downfall of the veteran German civil servant.

According to three officials, granted anonymity to talk about the backroom dealings, `Selmayr looks set to stay in Rome for the foreseeable future after opposition from the top of the European Commission sank his bid, particularly because he has so far..

The White House is exuding confidence heading into Wednesday’s Supreme Court hearing that the justices will uphold President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff powers.

But just in case, aides have a plan B.

Aides have spent weeks strategizing how to reconstitute the president’s global tariff regime if the court rules that he exceeded his authority. They’re ready to fall back on a patchwork of other trade statutes to keep pressure on U.S. trading partners and preserve billions in tariff revenue, according to six current and former White House officials and others familiar with the administration’s thinking, some of whom were granted anonymity to share details of private conversations.

“They’re aware there are a number of different statutes they can use to recoup the tariff authority,” said Everett Eissenstat, former deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council during Trump’s first term. “There’s a lot of tools there that they could go to to make up that tariff revenue.”..