标签： Europe

On Thursday, Ukrainian regional officials confirmed that fresh Russian aerial assaults targeting civilian areas across Ukraine have left two civilians dead and at least three more wounded, as both Moscow and Kyiv confirm they are in active preparations for a long-awaited prisoner swap timed to coincide with the Orthodox Easter holiday on April 12.

The deadly attacks mark the latest escalation in ongoing hostilities that have stretched into the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In Dnipropetrovsk region’s Synelnykove district, one civilian was killed in a strike that also left a woman and a 12-year-old boy injured, regional military administrator Oleksandr Hazha confirmed. In Ukraine’s second-largest city Kharkiv, a strike triggered a blaze at a residential apartment building and left a 61-year-old woman wounded, regional governor Oleh Syniehubov reported. A separate ballistic missile attack on the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv claimed one more life and left a 17-year-old girl injured, city military administration head Dmytro Bryzhynskyi added. Authorities also reported that the Odesa region in southern Ukraine was targeted in another wave of attacks, as part of a broader Russian assault that deployed 172 strike drones across the country. Ukraine’s Air Force noted that its air defense teams successfully intercepted 147 of the incoming drones.

Amid the ongoing violence, prisoner exchanges have emerged as one of the only consistent areas of limited progress in U.S.-brokered negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv, talks that have failed to yield breakthroughs on core issues that could bring an end to the full-scale invasion. This year, both sides are working to finalize a new round of swaps ahead of the Orthodox Easter celebration. Tatyana Moskalkova, Russia’s human rights ombudswoman, confirmed the ongoing preparations to reporters on Thursday, noting that extensive work is underway to complete the exchange in time for the holiday. Last week, Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, stated that Kyiv hopes to secure a large-scale “major exchange” of detainees during the Easter period.

The lead-up to this year’s Easter has also seen renewed debates over a potential temporary ceasefire. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently proposed a truce to cover the Easter holiday, but Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov pushed back on the idea earlier this week, saying Moscow prioritizes a permanent, long-lasting peace agreement rather than a short-term halt to hostilities. The discussion of temporary ceasefires comes with prior context: last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin unilaterally announced a 30-hour ceasefire for the Easter period, but both Moscow and Kyiv quickly accused one another of violating the truce within hours of it taking effect.

As French President Emmanuel Macron touched down in Seoul for an official state visit to South Korea, he launched a pointed, comprehensive critique of U.S. President Donald Trump’s approach to the escalating Iran conflict, while also dismissing Trump’s recent personal attacks on his marriage as unbefitting of a head of state.

The ongoing U.S.-Israeli military campaign in Iran has now entered its second month, with France and other European nations offering limited backing for U.S. regional operations but refusing to be drawn into direct participation in the conflict. Macron opened his press briefing by arguing that matters of war and peace demand a steady, serious policy, in a clear rebuke of Trump’s pattern of shifting, contradictory statements on the conflict.

“This is not a public entertainment spectacle. We are discussing questions of war and peace, and the lives of ordinary people,” Macron told reporters. “When you approach this issue with the seriousness it deserves, you do not reverse your position every single day. Perhaps there is no need for constant public commentary; sometimes, allowing tensions to de-escalate is the wiser course.”

The Trump administration has delivered consistently mixed messaging on the Iran war over recent weeks: officials and the president himself have alternately claimed a ceasefire is imminent, declared the conflict already won, and insisted the U.S. will continue military operations indefinitely. Macron also pushed back on Trump’s open questioning of the U.S.’s long-standing commitment to NATO membership, arguing that the alliance’s core strength relies on mutual trust, not constant public wavering.

“Alliances like NATO hold their value in the unspoken understanding between members – the bedrock of trust that underpins every agreement,” Macron explained. “Constantly casting doubt on your own commitment drains the organization of all meaningful purpose. Partners are supposed to stand by their agreements and show up when crises emerge, rather than speculating publicly every day about whether they will honor their commitments. There is far too much unproductive, scattered chatter right now.”

Macron made clear that France would not take ownership of a military campaign that the U.S. and Israel planned and launched independently. “They chose to act alone, and now they express regret that they are alone. This is not our war,” he emphasized.

The French president also called out the inconsistency of Trump’s claims regarding U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities carried out in June 2025. At the time, Trump announced the strikes had completely “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. But following the outbreak of full-scale war in February 2026, Trump described the new offensive as the “last best chance” to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

“I remind everyone that six months ago, we were told all infrastructure had been destroyed and the issue was fully resolved,” Macron noted. He argued that no limited military strike, even one extended over several weeks, can permanently resolve the global concerns around Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, he called for the deployment of independent international inspectors to verify Iran’s nuclear activities and a binding diplomatic framework to halt further uranium enrichment, pointing out that Iranian technical expertise and hidden facilities cannot be eliminated by military force alone.

The tension between the two leaders escalated further after Trump made crude personal remarks about Macron’s marriage to Brigitte Macron during a private lunch this week. The U.S. president mocked Macron’s relationship, imitating a French accent to claim Brigitte Macron mistreats the French president, a comment widely interpreted as referencing a 2025 video that showed Brigitte Macron shoving Macron lightly on the face. When asked about the comments, Macron dismissed them out of hand.

Macron called the remarks “inelegant” and well below the standard expected of a head of state, adding “I will not dignify these comments with a response. They do not deserve one.” The personal attack triggered widespread backlash across the French political spectrum, even from Macron’s most outspoken ideological opponents. Manuel Bompard, a leading figure of the hard-left France Unbowed party, said “For Donald Trump to speak to him like that, and to speak of his wife in such terms, I find that completely unacceptable.”

In response to U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iranian territory, Tehran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, the critical global chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s daily oil supplies pass. With no quick resolution to the closure in sight, Trump has said that nations most affected by the energy supply disruption should handle the situation on their own. Macron rejected calls for a new military operation to reopen the strait, calling the idea completely unrealistic.

“A military operation to reopen the strait would expose any vessels passing through to massive risks from Iranian Revolutionary Guard coastal defenses, ballistic missiles, and a wide range of other threats,” he explained, noting that any such operation would be extremely time-consuming and put countless lives in danger.

In a rare public rebuke of remarks from former U.S. President Donald Trump, French head of state Emmanuel Macron has pushed back against comments Trump made about his personal marriage, calling the statements out of line and lacking basic diplomatic decorum.

The clash between the two high-profile political figures centers on comments Trump made publicly regarding Macron’s marriage to Brigitte Macron, who is 24 years his senior. When asked to respond to the former American president’s words during a recent public appearance, Macron did not hold back in his assessment.

Macron explicitly stated that Trump’s observations about his private marital life fell “neither elegant nor up to standard,” pushing back against what he framed as inappropriate intrusion into his personal affairs by the former U.S. leader. The incident has drawn new attention to the sometimes tense dynamic between Macron and Trump, who have a history of sparring over both policy and personal matters. While the exchange remains focused on the personal comments, it also underscores the broader frictions that have intermittently marked interactions between the two prominent global political figures.

LONDON – A fresh wave of diplomatic tension has emerged between the United States and the United Kingdom after U.S. President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth launched sharp public criticism of the Royal Navy’s operational capabilities, remarks that cut deep for a nation with centuries of iconic maritime heritage – but which also touch on long-running debates about Britain’s eroding military standing.

The friction between the two allies traces back to the outbreak of the Iran war on February 28, when newly installed British Prime Minister Keir Starmer rejected a U.S. request to grant American military forces access to UK military bases. While Starmer’s government has since partially reversed that decision, allowing U.S. operations from bases including the key Indian Ocean outpost Diego Garcia for limited defensive purposes, Trump has remained vocal about feeling betrayed by the UK’s initial refusal.

In an interview with Britain’s Daily Telegraph published Wednesday, Trump went as far as dismissing the Royal Navy’s two flagship new aircraft carriers as mere “toys.” “You don’t even have a navy,” he told the newspaper. “You’re too old and had aircraft carriers that didn’t work.” Not to be outdone, Hegseth took a sarcastic shot at the service, suggesting the “big, bad Royal Navy” should step up to secure commercial shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global chokepoint for energy trade.

The two 65,000-ton carriers at the center of Trump’s attack, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, are the largest and most lethal warships ever built for the Royal Navy. While they are smaller and less power-projected than the U.S. Navy’s supercarriers, defense analysts widely regard them as highly capable platforms, particularly for integrated coalition operations – even if they faced well-documented technical teething problems in their early years of service.

It is true that the Royal Navy of 2025 bears little resemblance to the globally dominant force that controlled the world’s oceans during the height of the British Empire. But experts emphasize that the service is far weaker than its Cold War peak, but not as impotent as Trump and Hegseth’s remarks portray it, holding a similar operational standing to the French Navy, its closest European peer.

“There is a grain of truth to the critique: the Royal Navy is smaller today than it has been in hundreds of years,” explained Professor Kevin Rowlands, editor of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Journal and a former Royal Navy captain. “On the other hand, the service notes it is entering its first period of sustained growth since World War II, with more new ships scheduled for construction than at any point in decades.”

A look back at recent British naval history puts the current size of the fleet in context. As recently as 1982, the UK was able to assemble a 127-ship task force – including two aircraft carriers – to retake the Falkland Islands after Argentina’s invasion, a campaign that then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan openly opposed. That operation is now widely viewed as the final demonstration of Britain’s traditional naval dominance; no deployment of anywhere near that scale could be mounted today.

Analysis of UK Ministry of Defence and House of Commons Library data by the Associated Press shows the steady, dramatic contraction of the Royal Navy’s combat fleet over the past 50 years. In 1975, the service counted 166 active vessels, including aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates, and attack submarines. By 2025, that number had fallen to just 66. The UK went seven years in the 2010s without any operational aircraft carriers at all, despite today having two in service. The destroyer fleet has shrunk by half to just six vessels, while the frigate force has been cut from 60 ships to only 11.

The delayed deployment of the destroyer HMS Dragon to the Middle East in the immediate aftermath of the Iran war outbreak became a high-profile symbol of the Royal Navy’s stretched capabilities for critics. While naval personnel worked around the clock to reconfigure the vessel for its new mission after it had been preparing for a completely different deployment, the incident reinforced widespread perceptions that British military power has dwindled significantly since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

That decline did not happen by accident. During much of the Cold War, the UK invested between 4% and 8% of its annual gross domestic product in defense. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, that share steadily dropped to a low of 1.9% of GDP in 2018, giving ammunition to Trump’s criticisms.

Like many Western allies, successive UK governments embraced the post-Cold War “peace dividend,” redirecting funding once allocated to the military to domestic priorities including public health and education – a shift accelerated by the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, Conservative-led governments introduced harsh austerity measures that froze defense spending even as Russia’s aggression began to reshape European security, most notably after its 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Only after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 did cross-party consensus emerge that decades of defense cuts had gone too far. The previous Conservative government began reversing the trend of declining spending, and since Labour returned to power in the 2024 general election, Starmer has moved to ramp up defense investment – a shift that has required cuts to the UK’s long-standing foreign aid budget.

Starmer has committed to raising UK defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, with an updated target of 3.5% of GDP by 2035 to meet a NATO goal championed by Trump. That commitment translates to tens of billions of pounds in additional defense spending, which would fund a major expansion of military equipment across all three services.

But accelerating that expansion is easier said than done. The UK’s public finances have already been strained by the economic fallout from the Iran war, leaving no clear path to find extra funding for faster military growth.

For his part, RUSI’s Rowlands expects the U.S. criticism to continue despite its overstated claims. “We are dealing with an administration that doesn’t do nuance,” he noted.

As Hungary gears up for its 12 April parliamentary elections, the political landscape of the Central European nation has been upended by a surprising challenger whose rapid rise has sent shockwaves through Viktor Orban’s long-dominant ruling party. Forty-five-year-old Peter Magyar, a one-time insider within Orban’s Fidesz party who only entered full opposition politics two years ago, now stands as the most serious threat to Orban’s 16 consecutive years in power since the prime minister first won office in 2010. Opinion polls currently place Magyar within striking distance of an election victory.\n\nMagyar’s campaign has been defined by relentless energy and a urgent, nationally rooted message. Borrowing his original slogan “Now or Never” from a 19th-century Hungarian revolutionary poet’s rallying cry for national independence, he has condensed the message to just “Now” on campaign materials, crossing out the “or Never” to amplify the sense that this is Hungary’s critical moment for change. Over the course of the campaign, he has crisscrossed every corner of the country, with plans to visit all 106 of Hungary’s parliamentary constituencies, delivering up to six public speeches a day. Over more than two years of grassroots organizing, he has built a robust support base even in the small towns and rural villages that have long been Fidesz’s strongest electoral strongholds. In 2024, he completed a 300-kilometer walk from Budapest to the Romanian border, framing the journey as an effort to “reunite” a divided nation and win over disillusioned traditional Fidesz voters.\n\nMagyar’s break from the party he once belonged to did not come out of nowhere, but it was accelerated by a high-profile 2024 political scandal that brought down two of Fidesz’s top female leaders. Before February 2024, Magyar was deeply embedded in the Fidesz political machine: he joined the party as a university student in 2002, married rising Fidesz star Judit Varga (who would later become Hungary’s justice minister), and held a series of key positions, including a diplomatic posting to Hungary’s permanent mission in Brussels, leadership of Fidesz’s European Parliament negotiating team, and board seats on multiple state-owned enterprises.\n\nThe scandal that shattered Fidesz’s ranks erupted when Hungarian President Katalin Novak granted a pardon to an official who helped cover up systemic sexual abuse at a state-run children’s home. Public outrage forced Novak to resign, and Varga – who had co-signed the pardon as justice minister and was slated to lead Fidesz’s 2024 European election campaign – was also forced to step down, ending her rising political career within the party. With his ex-wife pushed out of Fidesz and their marriage having already ended in 2023, Magyar made a bombshell move: he appeared live on a leading pro-opposition YouTube channel Partizán to publicly renounce the Fidesz leadership. The interview, watched by more than a million viewers in a country of just 9.6 million people, instantly went viral.\n\n”Everyone warned me against it – friends, family, people I’ve known for years,” Magyar told the host during the interview. “I’ve been inside this system, inside this circle, for a very long time.” In a subsequent Facebook post, he declared he would no longer remain part of a system where top leaders hid behind female subordinates to take the blame for their mistakes. Speaking to the BBC after the interview, Magyar noted that his disillusionment with Fidesz had grown gradually over years: “The Fidesz we see today is very, very different from the one I joined in 2002. For a long time, I accepted the argument that holding power required the compromises they made. But 2024 became the turning point.” He also acknowledged he feared for the future of his three children after making the leap into opposition, but said the need for change outweighed those personal risks.\n\nA month after his viral interview, on Hungary’s 15 March national holiday marking the 1848 revolution against Habsburg rule, Magyar cemented his status as the leading opposition voice. While Orban delivered a fiery speech from Budapest’s National Museum attacking the European Union and calling for Hungary to “occupy Brussels,” Magyar addressed a crowd of an estimated 10,000 supporters, accusing Fidesz of widespread systemic corruption and economic mismanagement. He used the event to announce the formation of his new political movement, later taking over a small dormant party called Tisza to qualify for elections. He further escalated his attacks by releasing a secretly recorded 2023 conversation with his ex-wife that referenced a high-profile corruption trial, a move that drew condemnation from Varga, who accused him of abuse – a charge Magyar has repeatedly denied. Orban’s inner circle has attacked Magyar as a traitor who betrayed his family first, then his country, framing him as a proxy for Brussels. Orban himself has downplayed the challenge, dismissing Magyar simply as “someone who left Fidesz.”\n\nDespite the attacks, Magyar’s political momentum proved unstoppable. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, Tisza won 29.6% of the national vote and seven seats, finishing behind Fidesz’s 44.8% but demonstrating that Magyar could draw significant support away from the ruling party. By autumn 2024, Tisza had pulled ahead of Fidesz in national opinion polls. During commemorations of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising last year, Magyar led a rival march to Orban’s, directly challenging the prime minister’s long-standing close ties to the Kremlin. He pointedly asked Orban, who rose to political prominence calling for Soviet troops to withdraw from Hungary in 1989: “Mr. Prime Minister, why won’t you say ‘Russians go home’ any more?” He accused Orban of betraying the legacy of 1956 to remain what he called “the Kremlin’s most loyal ally,” pushing back against Orban’s framing of Tisza as a “warmonger” movement carrying out a “Brussels war agenda.”\n\nA key factor in Magyar’s rise is his positioning as a non-liberal alternative to Orban, unlike the fragmented liberal opposition that repeatedly failed to unseat the prime minister in previous elections. Magyar has openly criticized the old liberal opposition, dismissing former Socialist leader Ferenc Gyurcsany as no better than Orban, and has systematically consolidated anti-Orban support under his own banner. He has also directly confronted the pro-Orban media outlets that dominate Hungary’s media landscape, going public early this year to reveal an alleged Russian-style smear and honey-trap campaign targeting him.\n\nMagyar announced that intelligence operatives had leaked surveillance footage implying he had used drugs during a private meeting with an ex-girlfriend. He pre-empted the leak by acknowledging he had consensual sex with the woman but denied any drug use, calling the incident a set-up by state security services. He subsequently passed multiple drug tests to prove his innocence, and none of the corruption or personal scandals that Orban’s camp has leveled against him have damaged his public support to date.\n\nAs a former insider, Magyar argues he has a unique advantage over Orban: he knows the ruling party’s tactics and vulnerabilities intimately. “I know them, I know their tricks, and I know they are terrified,” he told reporters. For Hungarians, he says, this election is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change the course of the country after 16 years of Orban’s rule. \n\nOn policy, Magyar has centered his campaign on promises to root out systemic corruption, revitalize Hungary’s stagnant economy, reach out to the country’s marginalized Roma community, and unlock billions of euros in frozen EU development funds that have been withheld due to Brussels’ concerns over rule of law erosion under Orban. For his part, Orban has campaigned on framing Magyar as a puppet of the EU and Kyiv, positioning himself as the champion of national sovereignty and a “real party of peace” amid the ongoing war in Ukraine.