Au moins 37 personnes sont mortes dans une frappe russe sur un entrepôt près de la capitale ukrainienne, tard vendredi, selon un bilan des autorités, qui ont également évacué plus de 200 personnes dans la nuit. Une enquête a été ouverte portant sur "la légalité" du stockage d'explosifs sur place.
Ukraine has been littered with mines since Putin invaded the country in 2022, posing a devastating risk to civilians. Antonina Kulhava, a humanitarian deminer, tells Maira Butt how she is trying to make her country safer
Quelque 273 000 électeurs sont appelés à voter samedi lors d'un référendum sur une reprise des négociations d'adhésion à l'Union européenne, treize ans après que les discussions ont été gelées par l'arrivée d'un gouvernement eurosceptique au pouvoir. La question de la pêche, cruciale pour l'économie locale, est l'un des principaux points de friction.
The Ukrainian president has promised to punish those responsible as munitions were unknowingly stored in the area causing a huge fire to spread from the explosion
Finnish police and the Border Guard suspect a scheme that turned paper employment into residence permits and citizenship, Yle reported. Investigators believe one man organized it through companies that did little or no business, and that it may have run for more than two decades. The suspected organizer and the people who obtained citizenship are Russian nationals.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine pushed European states to restrict Russian travel, freeze assets, and harden their borders, while Moscow expanded sabotage, espionage, and recruitment across the continent. A passport from any member state carries movement, residence, and work rights across the whole union, so documents issued on false grounds in one country become an opening into all of them.
Jobs that existed only in documents
Authorities suspect the main figure arranged fictitious employment relationships for foreign nationals. That paperwork let them apply for Finnish residence permits and, later, for citizenship. From 2003 he registered several companies in southeastern Finland, police and the Border Guard said. The firms either did no real business at all or very little of it. The suspected criminal arrangement appeared shortly after 2003.
Applicants are suspected of paying for the fictitious jobs and for help assembling their documents.
Explore further
Russian spies buying properties near military bases across Europe, three intelligence agencies warn
At least 12 citizenships, five unfinished applications
At least 12 people obtained Finnish citizenship without grounds, by the investigation's account. Five more naturalizations were still unfinished when the preliminary investigation opened in 2024. Criminal police commissioner Teppo Tähtinen said the scale of the case came as a surprise to investigators.
Investigators also believe the arrangement ran further back, with people naturalized earlier possibly involved. The statute of limitations has expired on those cases.
Explore further
Russia will be combat-ready again by 2027 — Estonia’s military chief sets a two-year clock for NATO
The preliminary investigation found that the main suspect and his accomplices sat Finnish language exams for other people. They also completed study assignments in Finnish on their behalf. Without that, the applicants probably could not have obtained citizenship, the investigation found.
Naturalization normally requires five to eight years ofresidence on a residence permit, Finnish or Swedish at B1 level, and confirmed income, The Moscow Times reported. In 2025, 14,689 people received Finnish citizenship. Russians were among the nationalities filing the most applications, together with citizens of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
Finland's harder line toward Russia
Finland has kept its eastern border with Russia closed, and Helsinki has accused Moscow of steering migrants toward the crossings. The country has also rearmed since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, raising its reserve age and setting a long-term troop target. Last week Finnish authorities opened an inquiry into a suspected Russian airspace violation over the Gulf of Finland.
Donald Trump has downplayed a visit to Moscow by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, as “semi-routine” after he turned up in the Russian capital unannounced, triggering a wave of speculation about the reasons for his trip.
Ratcliffe was reported to have flown to Moscow on a government transport plane on Tuesday in a rare visit after taking off from the Andrews air force base in Maryland.
Slovak police foiled a planned arson attack on a drone factory in the country's east, the force said on 25 August. Investigators charged three foreigners with preparing the attack on commission and seized incendiary material and equipment at the scene. The plant belongs to the Ukrainian drone maker Skyeton, Militarnyi reported.
Russia's war has an arm inside Europe that usually works without missiles against Ukraine supporters — agents and recruited locals, carrying out arsons, parcel fires, flying an explosive drone at a Ukrainian cargo plane in Germany, plotting against arms-industry figures — and the point of hiring strangers to light fires is that a burned production hall costs Moscow nothing it can be held to account for.
Had the attack in Slovakia gone ahead, it risked a large fire, danger to life and health, and damage on a large scale, police stated. About 70 employees could have been in the building at the time, by preliminary estimates. Property inside the production hall is worth tens of millions of euros, according to the findings so far.
Officers seized a larger quantity of incendiary mixture, along with tools, mobile phones, an action camera, and a hand-made plan. The police Criminalistics and Expertise Institute gave a preliminary finding that the substance was a mixture of gasoline and polystyrene, commonly called napalm. Slovakia's anti-crime unit ÚBOK, part of the Police Presidium, identified the people preparing the attack and stopped it. Nobody was hurt and no property was damaged, police said.
Items seized during the operation, and one of the detained men, eastern Slovakia, August 2026. Photo: Police of the Slovak Republic
The charges, and where the three were detained
An ÚBOK investigator charged the three foreigners with preparing a particularly serious crime of general endangerment, committed as co-perpetrators on order. Officers detained two of them in Slovakia, and the investigator moved to have both taken into custody. German authorities detained the third on a European arrest warrant. The investigation continues, and the legal classification of the men's actions may still change.
Explore further
About 50 grams of suspected military explosive lay in a German field 10 days after the attempt on Ukraine’s plane
The plant, and a company Russia has already hit
Slovakia, a NATO and EU member, borders Ukraine on its eastern edge. Skyeton builds the Raybird, a fixed-wing reconnaissance drone that has served with Ukraine's Armed Forces since 2018 and stays airborne for up to 28 hours. The company began production in Slovakia in 2024, and more than €10 million in foreign investment went into the plant, one of several sites Ukrainian firms opened abroad to cut the risk of Russian attacks.
That risk is not theoretical. Russia destroyed Skyeton's Kyiv office in May, and the company said it had already spread production capacity across Ukraine and abroad in anticipation.
A Skyeton representative told Militarnyi:
"The recent attempt on our production in Slovakia is another sign that Ukrainian arms makers are already a bone in their throat, which means we are on the right path."
2024
WSJ: Russian sabotage groups suspected for arson attack on plant producing air defense systems for Ukraine
Arson against Ukraine's defense partners in Europe
Companies working for Ukraine have been hit across several countries this year and earlier.
In March, suspects who claimed a pro-Palestinian motive set fire to the Pardubice production of Archer, a Ukrainian maker of thermal imaging sights, destroying nearly all of the company's capacity in Czechia.
Estonia opened a Russian-link investigation this month into a suspected arson at a military robot maker supplying Ukraine, and Lithuania charged six people in January over an attempt to burn a factory that supplied radio-wave scanners.
A powerful explosion of undetermined cause hit EMCO, one of Bulgaria's largest private arms makers, which produces artillery ammunition for Ukraine, on 10 August.
While the president remains the most dominant figure in the world, other leaders and institutions are pushing back more vigorously than at the beginning of his second term.
Lawyer Baltasar Garzón, representing Chambers, said case against his client is ‘very strange’ as US requests extradition
FBI agents raided the Ibiza, Spain, vacation rental of 41-year-old James “Fergie” Chambers, a US citizen and wealthy donor to leftwing and humanitarian projects worldwide, in the days following his arrest last month, the Guardian has learned.
Baltasar Garzón, a human rights lawyer representing Chambers, revealed the details in an exclusive interview. Chambers is wanted for extradition by the Trump administration for alleged financial support of Hamas, as well as other charges.
Unannounced trip reported by US media is said to be Ratcliffe’s first known visit to Russia as CIA chief
The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, has made an unannounced visit to Moscow, US media reported, after flight data showed an American military aircraft flew to the Russian capital, where a US diplomatic motorcade was later spotted.
CBS News quoted sources familiar with the situation as confirming Ratcliffe’s trip, saying it was his first known visit to Russia as CIA chief. Axios separately confirmed the visit, quoting a US official.
A combine harvester threshing wheat in a field in Seeluebbe, Germany, this month. Yields in the country are down for several crops, including wheat, because of drought and heat.
The mysterious collapse of a European cryptocurrency exchange helps to explain why the industry hasn’t shaken off its reputation as a magnet for criminals.
The US is engaged in a lawless quest to protect American and Israeli officials
The Trump administration has taken another step in its crusade against the international criminal court by imposing sanctions on two more senior ICC officials. The growing number of sanctioned jurists – now 13 – does not change the lawless nature of this quest.
Donald Trump and his henchman, Marco Rubio, want to make the world safe for US and Israeli war criminals. No one should let them.
The suspect is accused of being a member of a team of Ukrainian divers that allegedly planted explosives on the pipelines between Russia and Germany in 2022
The Italian prime minister is leading what will soon be the longest-lasting government in the country’s postwar history. She shows herself by turns funny and fierce in a rare interview.
Ukraine increasingly contributes battlefield-tested designs and operational knowledge, while Britain can provide engineering expertise, industrial capacity, certification, capital and access to international markets
Connexion
