#RUSSIA

Armenia is considering applying for European Union membership, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said on Friday, as his country seeks to forge closer ties with the West as tensions with traditional ally Russia rise.

According to Andrej Danko, the Deputy Speaker of the Slovak parliament and head of the Slovak National Party (SNS), a junior coalition partner in the government of Prime Minister Robert Fico, “Russia is not an aggressor” and it is “defending its interests” in Ukraine.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan welcomed Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Istanbul on Friday for discussions concerning the trajectory of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the lapsed Black Sea grain arrangement, and heightened collaboration in the defense industry as confirmed by both parties. According to Erdogan, Turkey is ready to host a summit between Ukraine and Russia to end the war.

The Polish-French relationship has never been closer, the French “Le Figaro” daily wrote on Friday. According to the newspaper, the post-1989 relations between Warsaw and Paris have been, despite great expectations, little more than a series of missed opportunities.

Russian drones killed three people in Ukraine’s south and north on Friday, while a missile strike a day earlier killed two and wounded dozens more, local authorities said.

India has announced the dismantling of a significant human trafficking network. This network lured young men to Russia with false promises of employment, ultimately coercing them into participating in the conflict in Ukraine.

The world is more dangerous today than it was 25 years ago–Russia under Putin has become an existential threat to us, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said at a lecture at the University of Warsaw on Friday, marking Poland’s upcoming 25th anniversary of entering NATO.

Bartosz Cichocki, the former Polish ambassador to Kyiv, stated that even if Ukrainians were to lose their statehood due to a Russian invasion, they would continue to fight in guerrilla warfare. “They have shed too much blood to lay down their arms,” he told the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

The Polish lower house of parliament (Sejm) has suspended Poland’s participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). Out of 460 MPs, 435 voted in favor of the suspension, five were against, and none abstained.

Russia has aggressively resumed its espionage activities against the West, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. Citing intelligence officials and analysts, the article states that after initial failures related to the Ukraine invasion, Russian agencies—the GRU, FSB, and SVR—revised their espionage tactics to bolster Russia's conventional military operations. Their goals remain: stealing Western secrets, deepening NATO divides, and undermining Ukraine support.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has approved the candidacy of former army chief Valeriy Zaluzhnyi as ambassador to Great Britain, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry announced in a statement on Thursday.

The Ministry of Interior (MoI) of Latvia has proposed reinstating a reinforced border security regime at the Latvian-Belarusian border, given the surge in the number of illegal migrants attempting to enter the country. The draft was prepared by the ministry on Thursday.

Today the most important thing is for Europe to believe in its strength - appealed Prime Minister Donald Tusk during the congress of the European People’s Party (EPP) on Thursday in Bucharest. He emphasized that Europe must be ready to defend itself militarily and also guarantee its food security.

The Czech Republic’s relations with Slovakia are at the most strained since the creation of two independent states in 1993, Prague’s Lidové noviny daily wrote on Thursday. On Tuesday evening, the Czech government canceled a planned meeting with the Slovak cabinet down to political reasons, which Bratislava did not take kindly, saying Prague wants to jeopardize relations “because it is interested in supporting the war in Ukraine.”

I appeal to you regarding food security on our continent; this is one of the conditions for us to be safe in all aspects, said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk during the congress of the European People’s Party (EPP) in Bucharest on Thursday. Earlier, he met his Romanian counterpart, Marcel Ciolacu.

Vladimir Putin’s address to the nation, delivered on February 29th, garnered nearly half the viewership among television audiences compared to a similar address in 2023, noted the independent Russian channel Mozhem Objasnit on Telegram.

High oil prices, sanctions evasion, and state investment are furnishing Russia with adequate resources to sustain its current level of engagement in Ukraine for at least another two years, a report by Lithuanian intelligence agencies released on Thursday highlighted.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday following discussions with energy officials regarding safety at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

The situation in Ukraine, sanctions against Russia and Belarus, the conflict in Gaza, transatlantic relations, and Polish foreign policy towards global changes were the topics of discussion at Wednesday’s meeting between Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and ambassadors of G7 countries.

“We are striving to ensure that all sanctions imposed against Russia are extended to Belarus, which collaborates with it,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Władysław Teofil Bartoszewski on Wednesday. He pointed out that currently there are over 1,500 political prisoners in Belarus.