Author: Jourdain David

The successful phasing-out of gas imports from Russia risks making Europe dependent on liquified natural gas (LNG) imports, according to a report published by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) today (June 24). Between 2021 and 2022, LNG imports increased from 80 billion cubic meters (bcm) to 120 bcm — reflecting an increase from 22% to 34% of total gas imports including from Russia and pipeline — according to the ECA. By 2023, the largest LNG global exporters to the EU were Norway (30%), the US (19.4%) and North Africa (14.1%), Russia was still responsible for 6.1% of LNG imports alongside 8.7% via pipeline,…

NATO has only two to three years to prepare before Russia has regained its ability to launch a conventional attack on the alliance, Bloomberg reported on June 3, citing General Eirik Kristoffersen, Norway’s top general. Kristoffersen’s comments were the latest in a series of increasingly dire warnings from Western leaders and defense officials about the threat emanating from Russia and Europe’s current lack of preparedness. “At one point someone said it’ll take 10 years (before Russia reconstitutes its offensive capacity), but I think we’re back to less than 10 years because of the industrial base that is now running in Russia,” Kristoffersen said. “It…

Russia has reportedly lost a staggering amount of troops over the past 24 hours along with dozens of tanks and armoured vehicles as bloody fighting takes its toll on Vladimir Putin’s men. Russia lost a staggering 1,740 troops in a single day, the highest tally of casualties for Moscow since the start of the invasion in 2022, according to Ukraine. In the previous 24 hours, Ukraine also claimed Russia had lost 30 tanks and 42 armoured vehicles. Death toll and military hardware statistics are difficult to assess with both sides giving different or little information. However, Ukraine’s armed forces have claimed Russia has so far lost an eye-watering…

The situation in and around Ocheretyne is desperate for Ukraine This weekend, Russian drones and scouts surveilling the front line just west of the ruins of Avdiivka, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, observed something strange. Ukrainian trenches just east of the village of Ocheretyne, previously manned by soldiers from the Ukrainian army’s elite 47th Mechanized Brigade, were empty. The village was undefended Seizing the opportunity, the Russian army’s 30th Motor Rifle Brigade raced several miles along the railroad threading west from Avdiivka and captured most of Ocheretyne—and potentially also Novobakhmutivka, the village south of Ocheretyne. It’s the fastest penetration into…

French MEP Valérie Hayer will become the new president of Renew Europe with “overwhelming consensus” after current interim President Malik Azmani failed to gather enough support following widespread worries about his party’s involvement with coalition talks with the far-right in the Netherlands. Though the formal election will be on Thursday (25 January) at 8 am, hers is the only official candidacy. As such, she will be elected by acclamation, just like her predecessor Stéphane Séjourné, who left the group’s presidency to become France’s new foreign affairs minister. The formal announcement of Hayer’s candidacy was confirmed to Euractiv by a Renew…

French Jews were only partly reassured when more than 100,000 people, including the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, and two former presidents, turned out to demonstrate in Paris last month against antisemitism and in defence of the secular republic. Why did the president, Emmanuel Macron, not attend, many asked? Where were the leaders of France’s Muslim community? And where were the cultural, intellectual and sports celebrities so often eager to take a public stance on a worthy cause? Since Hamas fighters poured into Israel from the Gaza Strip on 7 October, slaughtering around 1,200 Israeli men, women and children, a wave of antisemitic attacks and hate…

The world’s biggest operational experimental nuclear fusion reactor – a technology in its infancy but billed by some as the answer to humanity’s future energy needs – has been inaugurated in Naka, Japan. Fusion differs from fission, the technique used in nuclear power plants, by fusing two atomic nuclei instead of splitting one. The goal of the JT-60SA reactor is to investigate the feasibility of fusion as a safe, large-scale and carbon-free source of net energy – with more energy generated than is put into producing it. The six-storey-high machine, in a hangar in Naka, north of Tokyo, comprises a doughnut-shaped…

Thieves have stolen parts of a lead sculpture by the German contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer from a warehouse in France, representing a loss of more than $1m (£785,000), a prosecutor said on Friday. Kiefer, 78, is renowned for his bleak sculptures and installations confronting his country’s Nazi past, which sell for millions. Several of his works have featured oversized lead books. The burglars broke into the grounds of the artist’s warehouse in the town of Croissy-Beaubourg, east of Paris, on Thursday before dawn, according to the prosecutor in the nearby town of Meaux, Jean-Baptiste Bladier. “CCTV footage showed four individuals breaching the car…

Reading the obituary of the distinguished French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (24 November) made me think about his sister, Marie Fauroux, who died in 2021. Educated at the École Nationale des Chartes soon after the second world war, her edition of all of the pre-1066 charters of the dukes of Normandy, published in France in 1961, is of fundamental importance to our understanding of the consequences of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and everything that followed. There are those who would argue that it is even more important than Le Roy Ladurie’s book Montaillou for our understanding of the past.…

Two days before reading Zing Tsjeng’s article (What made me love theatre even more? Leaving a bad show at the interval, 28 November), I walked out of a performance for the first time in my life. Having seen Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach at the Barbican in London many years ago, I was excited to take my seat at La Villette in Paris for what I hoped would be a thrilling performance of a much-loved work. It was not to be. On a slowly rotating stage that reminded me of a nightmare Christmas grotto, performers made a series of “significant” gestures…