Western military aid to Ukraine has narrowed the spending gap between Ukraine and Russia to $10 billion, as an investment race is spreading globally, according to the latest data on military spending released by SIPRI

In this week's edition: West struggles with time on Ukraine support and Letta's report on defence and enlargement.

The EU's latest electricity market reforms should soon enter into law. But the ongoing dramatic transformation of Europe's electricity system means that these reforms may just be one building block in a much wider policy revolution. 

The US House of Representatives on Saturday approved long-delayed military aid to Ukraine, while also bolstering Israel and Taiwan defenses and threatening to ban Chinese-owned TikTok.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan urged Palestinians to unite amid Israel's war in Gaza following hours-long talks with Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Istanbul on Saturday (20 April), his office said.

The US House of Representatives advanced a $95 billion legislative package on Friday (19 April) providing aid to Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific in a broad bipartisan vote, overcoming hardline Republican opposition that had held it up for months.

Croatia's Constitutional Court ruled on Friday (19 April) that President Zoran Milanović cannot take up the more powerful position of prime minister after this week's elections, saying the firebrand leader could not head any potential coalition.

Armenia has agreed to return several villages to Azerbaijan in what both sides said on Friday (19 April) was an important milestone as they edge towards a peace deal after fighting two wars since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine shot down a Russian strategic bomber on Friday (19 April) after the warplane took part in a long-range airstrike that killed eight people in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Kyiv said.

The EU executive published a proposal on Friday (19 April) to revise the Nitrates Directive to make it easier to use fertilisers made from livestock manure.

Marie Toussaint, the lead of the French Greens' campaign for the June European elections, presented a plan for a "European pharmaceutical sovereignty" at a press conference on Friday (19 April), after media reported that a French pharma company could be acquired by Indian buyers. 

Eurobarometer’s latest survey ahead of European elections in June shows that health is one of the top issues for voters.

When former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta presented his long-awaited report on the future of the single market to European leaders on Thursday, he was careful not to play up its significance.  

In the next meeting on pesticides between the Commission and member states, on Monday and Tuesday, the bloc’s executive will table a regulation to slash to zero the insecticide thiacloprid residues in all food products, after having proposed to raise the limit of the maximum quantity of residues in imported food.

Germany is the worst-performing major economy in the world, but ideological differences within the governing coalition are preventing a strong response, one way or another.

After a first campaign of attacks on transmission infrastructures in 2022-23, Russia has recently started focusing its airstrikes on electricity-generating thermal and hydropower plants, causing an electricity deficit that may take years to make up for.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz just concluded his three-day visit to China with a high-profile business delegation, which attracted great attention from both China and the EU.

The recent decision by U.S. President Biden to temporarily pause approvals for upcoming LNG export projects to assess their impacts on human rights and environment has been attacked on both sides of the Atlantic. But the claims that the pause threatens EU energy security are completely unfounded; on the contrary, locking in decades of even more climate-wrecking fracked LNG is a danger for our energy security and our future as a whole.

A Parliament proposal to ease new EU rules on seed marketing has sparked concern in the European potato sector, as stakeholders warn that the draft legislation could increase the transmission risks of crop diseases.

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