Closing summary
… and on that note, it’s a wrap!
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that “Ukraine is only the first” country facing Russian aggression as he urged UN leaders to oppose Vladimir Putin and the world in which only “friends and weapons,” and not international laws, can protect countries as the rules-based system faces unprecedented pressures (15:26, 15:29, 15:33, 15:36, 15:38, 15:45).
Zelenskyy called for more support for Ukraine, saying that if it succeeds in pushing back against Russian aggression, “it will mean that people were able to make national security not a privilege for a few nations, but a right for everyone.”
His warnings were also echoed by other regional leaders, including Czech (16:34) and Latvian presidents (17:00) as they warned that “Russia wants a world where brute force prevails over international law.”
These comments come a day after an apparent major shift in US president Donald Trump’s policy on Russia and Ukraine (14:11).
Earlier today, a Spanish military jet carrying the country’s defence minister faced GPS disruptions when flying over the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad (11:34, 12:25).
Separately,
Spanish king Felipe urged the UN leaders to “stop this massacre now” as he called for immediate attention to the situation in Gaza and passionately defended the international rules-based order in an “unusually direct” speech to the general assembly (15:18, 16:09).
And that’s all from me, Jakub Krupa, for today.
If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at [email protected].
I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.
Netherlands to set up national maritime security centre to deal with risks to subsea cables, wind turbines, shipping lanes
A national maritime security centre to deal with the threat of subsea cables being cut in the North Sea will be established in the Netherlands, the army chief of the North Sea infrastructure programme has revealed.
It will provide situational awareness, risk threat assessments and protections to the 1,955 wind turbines around the Netherlands, the sub sea cables and to shipping lanes.
“It will collect data in one place, analyse [data and threat levels] in one place and give us a clearer picture of what is going on at sea,” said Eduard de van der Schueren, programme director for the protection of North Sea infrastructure at the Dutch ministry of defence.
Speaking at a conference hosted by the International Institute for European Affairs in Dublin, he said bringing private and public sectors together was vital to help countries around Europe to “become more resilient against hybrid threats”.
Russian spy ships have entered British, Irish, Dutch and French waters on several occasions in the past two years raising fears over the security of maritime infrastructure.
Ireland’s former deputy prime minister Simon Coveney said the “neutrality” of the country was “not a protection”. “In many ways neutral countries have to spend more of defence,” he added.
