It should have been concluded long ago. After the trilogue on political advertising on the Internet was initially postponed time and again, tonight’s meeting is finally expected to bring a breakthrough.
The new regulation is intended to safeguard the European elections in June against manipulation and external interference and to help prevent abuse such as by Cambridge Analytica or in the Brexit referendum. In the future, only personal information that has been expressly released by citizens may be used for targeted political advertising. But controversial points remain.
These include clauses on non-discrimination and a ban on the sale of ads to non-EU citizens and foreign organizations, as well as an EU-wide database for advertising campaigns, as demanded by the Greens. Also still in dispute is what exactly political advertising looks like. The definition had already burdened the negotiations in the IMCO committee. The ban on personalized advertising is also not yet in the bag.
“We hope this will be the final trilogue, but we can’t say for sure,” says Green MEP Alexandra Geese. Skepticism also still prevails among the SPD. “In Germany, too, there have been numerous incidents of foreign interference and non-transparent election advertising in recent years,” says René Repasi, internal market policy spokesman for the European SPD. That is why a speedy agreement is also in Germany’s interest, he said. We will report.
Have a good start to the day!
The Commission announced it will launch a review of its support for Palestine following Hamas’ attack on Israel. EU Foreign Affairs Chief Josep Borrell has called an emergency meeting of foreign ministers to discuss the issue and the next steps, a Commission spokesman said Monday. And the EU is in no way funding the terrorist organization Hamas or its activities, he added.
In the afternoon, EU Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi caused confusion when he posted on the short message service X that there can be no “business as usual.” He announced the EU Commission would evaluate its entire “portfolio” worth no less than €691 million. In doing so, he was apparently talking about the amount of EU money pledged and not yet disbursed to the Palestinians. All payments would be suspended with immediate effect and all projects and budget support would be reviewed, said the Commissioner for Enlargement and Neighborhood.
This was apparently a solo effort by the Commissioner: In the evening, the Commission then stated there could be no question of a suspension. The Commission was launching an urgent review, as soon as possible and in coordination with the member states. Since no payments are planned at the moment there will be no suspension in the meantime.
The EU had already stopped payments once in 2021, in a dispute over funding Palestinian schoolbooks that propagated hatred of Jews and incited violence against Israel. Temporarily, hospitals ran out of medication and patients could no longer be treated. It was not until a year later that the funds were released. Among other things, the EU finances civil servants’ salaries and pensions at the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, but also the expansion of the water supply in Gaza.
From 2021 to 2024, the EU has earmarked funds amounting to €1.177 billion for the Palestinian territories in its multiannual financial framework. It is quite possible that the Commission moved forward on Monday under pressure from individual member states. Austria’s Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg announced that his country would put all development projects on hold. Specifically suspended are funds amounting to nearly €20 million. In Berlin, the development minister announced Germany would also review payments.
The EU and its member states are by far the largest donors to the Palestinians, ahead of the USA and the Gulf states. But the political influence of the Europeans is limited. Not least because the EU states can usually only agree on the lowest common denominator when it comes to the Middle East conflict. In an initial reaction over the weekend, EU Council President Charles Michel attempted the balancing act and vaguely warned against “further escalation” while simultaneously emphasizing Israel’s right to self-defense.
On Monday, it initially remained unclear to what extent the halt in payments was a solo effort by the Hungarian commissioner. Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn immediately criticized the suspension as wrong, saying it punished the entire Palestinian population. Spain and Ireland were also said to be unhappy with the decision. Asselborn stressed that the decision was the sole responsibility of the foreign ministers. They are to meet today in Oman’s capital Muscat on the fringes of a planned meeting of representatives of the Gulf states and the EU. Counterparts not on site will be able to join by video.
The response to the announced suspension of funds from the EU Parliament was mainly positive. “The Commission’s decision to initially freeze all payments as a first step and to carefully review financial support to the Palestinian territories is the right one,” wrote Rasmus Andresen, spokesman for the Green Group on Europe. There is a need for humanitarian aid, but the EU must not finance terror, either directly or indirectly, he said.
Conservative MEP Monika Hohlmeier (CSU) also calls for payments to be frozen until the terror against Israel stops and responsible aid for humanitarian purposes can be secured. She said the Palestinian Authority has so far shown too little openness and transparency in this regard. The announcement to freeze all EU funds for the Palestinians is the “only right signal in these difficult times for Israel,” said Niclas Herbst (CDU), Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Budgets in the EU Parliament.
In the Kyiv office of Alex Lissitsa hangs a picture of a cutting board and a knife. The picture has text that reads, “When you share a lot, there’s nothing left to govern.” It may be an allusion to the war between Russia and Ukraine; after all, Russian troops had occupied a good 20 percent of Ukrainian territory in the interim. In any case, the message of the picture fits the thoughts and actions of the managing director of the Ukrainian agricultural company IMC Agro.
With 120,000 hectares of cultivated land, it is the country’s tenth-largest agricultural company. The invasion of the Russian army in February 2022 hit the group immediately. “100,000 hectares were occupied, including 1000 dairy cows and some silos,” Lissitsa reports. The occupiers controlled this area in the north and east of Ukraine for 44 days, leaving behind significant problems.
A year and a half later, 35,000 hectares were considered “war-affected” – the area was mined or damaged by projectiles so that it could not be used temporarily. A silo in Chernihiv was riddled with rockets, cows were not supplied for a long time and finally had to be emergency slaughtered. 5,000 hectares can not be used because they are mined. Twice already, tractor drivers have driven onto uncleared land without permission, mines exploded, the tractors were damaged, the company drivers survived. But in other cases, as Reuters reported as recently as mid-September, mines in the fields are killing farmers.
According to new estimates by the Minister of Economy Yulia Sviridenko, 174,000 square kilometers are considered potentially contaminated by warfare agents. In the north, east and south of Ukraine, many farmers face the same problems:
Some 32.8 million hectares of land in Ukraine are designated as agricultural land – a good five million hectares, more than 15 percent, cannot currently be used as a result of war. The longer the war lasts, the more mines are laid and explode, the more artillery shells are fired, the more agricultural land will be damaged, says the GLOBSEC study on mining in Ukraine, “Walking on Fire: Demining in Ukraine.”
“Nobody cares about the soil at the moment, now, surviving is most important. It is obvious that there is damage,” says Lissitsa, an entrepreneur. According to a study by the Ukrainian environmental protection organization Ecoaction, the fighting is damaging the fertile soil in several ways: alteration of the soil due to explosions, trenches, buried heavy equipment, exposure to heat and vibrations, and heavy metals and chemical effects after explosions.
Mines and artillery shells from Soviet production in particular (for howitzers D-20 and D-30) released heavy metals that were deposited in the humus. As an example, the NGO Ecoaction has conducted more detailed soil analyses in two regions in the east and in the south. It concludes that some of the agricultural soils are too heavily contaminated and should be abandoned as agricultural land, explains Mariia Diachuk on request. More concrete information is difficult at the moment, she said. “First, the area must be cleared of mines, then complex soil surveys would have to be carried out.”
It took the IMC Agro company eight months to clear most of the area of mines and war remnants after 44 days of occupation, Lissitsa reported. State deminers and private demining companies – a new industry in the country – helped, he said. “But we haven’t done soil analysis yet,” he said.
Some farmers are taking the problem into their own hands for lack of deminers. They convert tractors into self-propelled vehicles, switch on heavy rollers and drive the fields. They find mines, often having to repair the rollers or replace them altogether after the explosions. A major problem, however, is that the exact number of mines and where they are laid in the fields is unknown, a farmer from the Kharkiv region tells the Ukrainian portal dumka.media.
Although many farmers cannot cultivate their land because of the war, government agencies report a very good harvest this year. Lissitsa also confirms this: “Who could have guessed that we would have such a good harvest with less fertilizer and fewer pesticides. The weather played along well,” he explains. But that also applies to Russia, he says. “They’re flooding the world market with their wheat right now, which is depressing the price.”
Russia additionally hinders the export of Ukrainian products. “We have wheat and corn worth €10 million in the Odesa port. But after six months, the quality is now such that it is only enough for fodder,” says Lissitsa. After Moscow withdrew from the grain agreement in July, the wheat and corn could no longer be exported. In addition, Russia is shelling both the storage facilities in the Odesa port and the port facility on the Danube in Ismajil, right on the Romanian border.
IMC Agro is responding to the major problems with large investments: “We have just ordered 75 MAN trucks and received a loan for them from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development,” says Lissitsa. Previously, they would have had service providers handle the removal, but the prices for logistics are now too high. So they do it themselves.
And the plans do not stop with the trucks. Alex Lissitsa, who studied in Germany, wants to raise standards at IMC Agro. He says in the long term, agriculture in Ukraine should be oriented toward EU standards.
With his recent trip abroad to the Western Balkans and EU accession candidate Moldova, German Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir (Greens) has shown colors: Economic and political development usually go hand in hand – cooperation in the agricultural and food sector across national borders is worthwhile for all of us.
The ministerial trip took place – once again – in difficult times: Russia has been at war with Ukraine for almost two years. In July, Russia did not renew the grain agreement that had been painstakingly negotiated and reached under United Nations mediation. The Russian aggressor once again considers Black Sea ships, which want to transport Ukrainian grain from Ukrainian ports all over the world, as a legitimate military target. As a result, grain prices are rising worldwide. Russia is also leaving other partners in the lurch: some 100,000 refugees are the result of the war over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus.
The land export routes for globally traded Ukrainian agricultural products, which have become bitterly necessary because of Russia’s war, now run through the European Union accordingly. However, several Eastern European member states that border directly on Ukraine are imposing import bans because they fear a loss of income for their own farmers. The well-rehearsed interaction of production, processing and logistics is therefore under great pressure – and all this after a global pandemic whose consequences for the economy and society, including food supply chains, have not yet been overcome.
So why is Özdemir paying a visit to remote, tiny Moldova, of all places? The small former Soviet republic lies inland not far from the Black Sea coast and does not have it easy geopolitically either. Nevertheless, the country has taken in tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine without complaint. Moldova is special, however, primarily because of its access to the Danube. At the southern border triangle between Romania and Ukraine, access to the Danube is limited to only 450 meters.
The importance of the country’s small and only Danube port in the village of Giurgiulești is all the greater. Here, grain exports can be handled despite Russia’s war against Ukraine. Last Thursday evening, Minister Özdemir met there with his Moldovan counterpart Vladimir Bolea. The tense situation in Giurgiulești was palpable: Moldovan grain trucks jammed for days in the late summer heat heading toward the EU, Ukrainian fuel trucks coming toward Odesa to meet them, guard dogs yapping at the two border guard towers on the river and at the man-high earthen embankments Ukraine has heaped up for its own protection.
Only shortly before the meeting did Moldovan Agriculture Minister Bolea learn that Romania wants to close the border to Moldovan grain – a real blow to Bolea, who wants to lead his country into the EU by 2030 and does not need any setbacks.
The region’s potential for Western companies is considerable: Not only does the EU accession process that has begun require new technologies and audits, the need for modernization of agricultural technology is great, the climate crisis also requires stress resilience in crop cultivation and resource conservation in animal husbandry in Moldova. The climatic conditions are ideal for winegrowing (Moldova’s wineries speak for themselves), and there are the extremely fertile podsol soils in the south for which Ukraine is world-famous.
Demonstrating commitment here for predictable political framework conditions, for economically strong rural areas and sustainable approaches in agriculture in peace and freedom – this is a real investment in the future in our troubled times. One thing is clear: With a sense of political proportion, future EU enlargement rounds can also be a success story. Because regardless of whether it is politics or business: food security concerns us all.
It should have been concluded long ago. After the trilogue on political advertising on the Internet was initially postponed time and again, tonight’s meeting is finally expected to bring a breakthrough.
The new regulation is intended to safeguard the European elections in June against manipulation and external interference and to help prevent abuse such as by Cambridge Analytica or in the Brexit referendum. In the future, only personal information that has been expressly released by citizens may be used for targeted political advertising. But controversial points remain.
These include clauses on non-discrimination and a ban on the sale of ads to non-EU citizens and foreign organizations, as well as an EU-wide database for advertising campaigns, as demanded by the Greens. Also still in dispute is what exactly political advertising looks like. The definition had already burdened the negotiations in the IMCO committee. The ban on personalized advertising is also not yet in the bag.
“We hope this will be the final trilogue, but we can’t say for sure,” says Green MEP Alexandra Geese. Skepticism also still prevails among the SPD. “In Germany, too, there have been numerous incidents of foreign interference and non-transparent election advertising in recent years,” says René Repasi, internal market policy spokesman for the European SPD. That is why a speedy agreement is also in Germany’s interest, he said. We will report.
Have a good start to the day!
The Commission announced it will launch a review of its support for Palestine following Hamas’ attack on Israel. EU Foreign Affairs Chief Josep Borrell has called an emergency meeting of foreign ministers to discuss the issue and the next steps, a Commission spokesman said Monday. And the EU is in no way funding the terrorist organization Hamas or its activities, he added.
In the afternoon, EU Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi caused confusion when he posted on the short message service X that there can be no “business as usual.” He announced the EU Commission would evaluate its entire “portfolio” worth no less than €691 million. In doing so, he was apparently talking about the amount of EU money pledged and not yet disbursed to the Palestinians. All payments would be suspended with immediate effect and all projects and budget support would be reviewed, said the Commissioner for Enlargement and Neighborhood.
This was apparently a solo effort by the Commissioner: In the evening, the Commission then stated there could be no question of a suspension. The Commission was launching an urgent review, as soon as possible and in coordination with the member states. Since no payments are planned at the moment there will be no suspension in the meantime.
The EU had already stopped payments once in 2021, in a dispute over funding Palestinian schoolbooks that propagated hatred of Jews and incited violence against Israel. Temporarily, hospitals ran out of medication and patients could no longer be treated. It was not until a year later that the funds were released. Among other things, the EU finances civil servants’ salaries and pensions at the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, but also the expansion of the water supply in Gaza.
From 2021 to 2024, the EU has earmarked funds amounting to €1.177 billion for the Palestinian territories in its multiannual financial framework. It is quite possible that the Commission moved forward on Monday under pressure from individual member states. Austria’s Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg announced that his country would put all development projects on hold. Specifically suspended are funds amounting to nearly €20 million. In Berlin, the development minister announced Germany would also review payments.
The EU and its member states are by far the largest donors to the Palestinians, ahead of the USA and the Gulf states. But the political influence of the Europeans is limited. Not least because the EU states can usually only agree on the lowest common denominator when it comes to the Middle East conflict. In an initial reaction over the weekend, EU Council President Charles Michel attempted the balancing act and vaguely warned against “further escalation” while simultaneously emphasizing Israel’s right to self-defense.
On Monday, it initially remained unclear to what extent the halt in payments was a solo effort by the Hungarian commissioner. Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn immediately criticized the suspension as wrong, saying it punished the entire Palestinian population. Spain and Ireland were also said to be unhappy with the decision. Asselborn stressed that the decision was the sole responsibility of the foreign ministers. They are to meet today in Oman’s capital Muscat on the fringes of a planned meeting of representatives of the Gulf states and the EU. Counterparts not on site will be able to join by video.
The response to the announced suspension of funds from the EU Parliament was mainly positive. “The Commission’s decision to initially freeze all payments as a first step and to carefully review financial support to the Palestinian territories is the right one,” wrote Rasmus Andresen, spokesman for the Green Group on Europe. There is a need for humanitarian aid, but the EU must not finance terror, either directly or indirectly, he said.
Conservative MEP Monika Hohlmeier (CSU) also calls for payments to be frozen until the terror against Israel stops and responsible aid for humanitarian purposes can be secured. She said the Palestinian Authority has so far shown too little openness and transparency in this regard. The announcement to freeze all EU funds for the Palestinians is the “only right signal in these difficult times for Israel,” said Niclas Herbst (CDU), Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Budgets in the EU Parliament.
In the Kyiv office of Alex Lissitsa hangs a picture of a cutting board and a knife. The picture has text that reads, “When you share a lot, there’s nothing left to govern.” It may be an allusion to the war between Russia and Ukraine; after all, Russian troops had occupied a good 20 percent of Ukrainian territory in the interim. In any case, the message of the picture fits the thoughts and actions of the managing director of the Ukrainian agricultural company IMC Agro.
With 120,000 hectares of cultivated land, it is the country’s tenth-largest agricultural company. The invasion of the Russian army in February 2022 hit the group immediately. “100,000 hectares were occupied, including 1000 dairy cows and some silos,” Lissitsa reports. The occupiers controlled this area in the north and east of Ukraine for 44 days, leaving behind significant problems.
A year and a half later, 35,000 hectares were considered “war-affected” – the area was mined or damaged by projectiles so that it could not be used temporarily. A silo in Chernihiv was riddled with rockets, cows were not supplied for a long time and finally had to be emergency slaughtered. 5,000 hectares can not be used because they are mined. Twice already, tractor drivers have driven onto uncleared land without permission, mines exploded, the tractors were damaged, the company drivers survived. But in other cases, as Reuters reported as recently as mid-September, mines in the fields are killing farmers.
According to new estimates by the Minister of Economy Yulia Sviridenko, 174,000 square kilometers are considered potentially contaminated by warfare agents. In the north, east and south of Ukraine, many farmers face the same problems:
Some 32.8 million hectares of land in Ukraine are designated as agricultural land – a good five million hectares, more than 15 percent, cannot currently be used as a result of war. The longer the war lasts, the more mines are laid and explode, the more artillery shells are fired, the more agricultural land will be damaged, says the GLOBSEC study on mining in Ukraine, “Walking on Fire: Demining in Ukraine.”
“Nobody cares about the soil at the moment, now, surviving is most important. It is obvious that there is damage,” says Lissitsa, an entrepreneur. According to a study by the Ukrainian environmental protection organization Ecoaction, the fighting is damaging the fertile soil in several ways: alteration of the soil due to explosions, trenches, buried heavy equipment, exposure to heat and vibrations, and heavy metals and chemical effects after explosions.
Mines and artillery shells from Soviet production in particular (for howitzers D-20 and D-30) released heavy metals that were deposited in the humus. As an example, the NGO Ecoaction has conducted more detailed soil analyses in two regions in the east and in the south. It concludes that some of the agricultural soils are too heavily contaminated and should be abandoned as agricultural land, explains Mariia Diachuk on request. More concrete information is difficult at the moment, she said. “First, the area must be cleared of mines, then complex soil surveys would have to be carried out.”
It took the IMC Agro company eight months to clear most of the area of mines and war remnants after 44 days of occupation, Lissitsa reported. State deminers and private demining companies – a new industry in the country – helped, he said. “But we haven’t done soil analysis yet,” he said.
Some farmers are taking the problem into their own hands for lack of deminers. They convert tractors into self-propelled vehicles, switch on heavy rollers and drive the fields. They find mines, often having to repair the rollers or replace them altogether after the explosions. A major problem, however, is that the exact number of mines and where they are laid in the fields is unknown, a farmer from the Kharkiv region tells the Ukrainian portal dumka.media.
Although many farmers cannot cultivate their land because of the war, government agencies report a very good harvest this year. Lissitsa also confirms this: “Who could have guessed that we would have such a good harvest with less fertilizer and fewer pesticides. The weather played along well,” he explains. But that also applies to Russia, he says. “They’re flooding the world market with their wheat right now, which is depressing the price.”
Russia additionally hinders the export of Ukrainian products. “We have wheat and corn worth €10 million in the Odesa port. But after six months, the quality is now such that it is only enough for fodder,” says Lissitsa. After Moscow withdrew from the grain agreement in July, the wheat and corn could no longer be exported. In addition, Russia is shelling both the storage facilities in the Odesa port and the port facility on the Danube in Ismajil, right on the Romanian border.
IMC Agro is responding to the major problems with large investments: “We have just ordered 75 MAN trucks and received a loan for them from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development,” says Lissitsa. Previously, they would have had service providers handle the removal, but the prices for logistics are now too high. So they do it themselves.
And the plans do not stop with the trucks. Alex Lissitsa, who studied in Germany, wants to raise standards at IMC Agro. He says in the long term, agriculture in Ukraine should be oriented toward EU standards.
With his recent trip abroad to the Western Balkans and EU accession candidate Moldova, German Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir (Greens) has shown colors: Economic and political development usually go hand in hand – cooperation in the agricultural and food sector across national borders is worthwhile for all of us.
The ministerial trip took place – once again – in difficult times: Russia has been at war with Ukraine for almost two years. In July, Russia did not renew the grain agreement that had been painstakingly negotiated and reached under United Nations mediation. The Russian aggressor once again considers Black Sea ships, which want to transport Ukrainian grain from Ukrainian ports all over the world, as a legitimate military target. As a result, grain prices are rising worldwide. Russia is also leaving other partners in the lurch: some 100,000 refugees are the result of the war over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus.
The land export routes for globally traded Ukrainian agricultural products, which have become bitterly necessary because of Russia’s war, now run through the European Union accordingly. However, several Eastern European member states that border directly on Ukraine are imposing import bans because they fear a loss of income for their own farmers. The well-rehearsed interaction of production, processing and logistics is therefore under great pressure – and all this after a global pandemic whose consequences for the economy and society, including food supply chains, have not yet been overcome.
So why is Özdemir paying a visit to remote, tiny Moldova, of all places? The small former Soviet republic lies inland not far from the Black Sea coast and does not have it easy geopolitically either. Nevertheless, the country has taken in tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine without complaint. Moldova is special, however, primarily because of its access to the Danube. At the southern border triangle between Romania and Ukraine, access to the Danube is limited to only 450 meters.
The importance of the country’s small and only Danube port in the village of Giurgiulești is all the greater. Here, grain exports can be handled despite Russia’s war against Ukraine. Last Thursday evening, Minister Özdemir met there with his Moldovan counterpart Vladimir Bolea. The tense situation in Giurgiulești was palpable: Moldovan grain trucks jammed for days in the late summer heat heading toward the EU, Ukrainian fuel trucks coming toward Odesa to meet them, guard dogs yapping at the two border guard towers on the river and at the man-high earthen embankments Ukraine has heaped up for its own protection.
Only shortly before the meeting did Moldovan Agriculture Minister Bolea learn that Romania wants to close the border to Moldovan grain – a real blow to Bolea, who wants to lead his country into the EU by 2030 and does not need any setbacks.
The region’s potential for Western companies is considerable: Not only does the EU accession process that has begun require new technologies and audits, the need for modernization of agricultural technology is great, the climate crisis also requires stress resilience in crop cultivation and resource conservation in animal husbandry in Moldova. The climatic conditions are ideal for winegrowing (Moldova’s wineries speak for themselves), and there are the extremely fertile podsol soils in the south for which Ukraine is world-famous.
Demonstrating commitment here for predictable political framework conditions, for economically strong rural areas and sustainable approaches in agriculture in peace and freedom – this is a real investment in the future in our troubled times. One thing is clear: With a sense of political proportion, future EU enlargement rounds can also be a success story. Because regardless of whether it is politics or business: food security concerns us all.
