Germany no longer trusts that the US will share intelligence. So Berlin is unshackling its spy agency to stand on its own, after Trump briefly cut Ukraine off.
A new law hands the BND its broadest powers in 70 years, putting the service on a war footing against Russia — FT. 1/
Merz raised the BND budget 25 percent to €1.51 billion and will send parliament a law granting powers it has never held.
Signals intelligence, AI, the right to hack back, and lighter oversight. Chief Martin Jäger calls the BND Germany's first line of defence. 2/
Trump's administration briefly paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March 2025, and the move focused minds across Europe.
Germany realised it can no longer lean on the CIA, the benefactor that long fed the BND its most important information. 3/
Kasparov: Ukraine's drone revolution is the equivalent of gunpowder ending feudalism.
A townsman trained with an arquebus could take down a knight from 50 meters — and the entire medieval vassal system collapsed. What we're witnessing now is a shift of the same magnitude. 1/
Kasparov: The head of Rheinmetall mockingly said a Ukrainian housewife on a 3D printer can make a drone. He didn't realize he was signing the death warrant for the entire military procurement system
A drone for $1,000 that destroys a $10 million tank, that changes everything. 2/
Kasparov: Dictatorships cannot sustain a serious technological race. The war in Ukraine proves this
Russian war bloggers themselves ask why Ukraine has such an advantage, it's mobility, a different system. It's not that Putin is bad. The system is broken. 3/
Snyder: Trump thinks everybody is going to roll over when he says stuff. That's true of a lot of people in his party. It's not true of people in the rest of the world.
Nobody in the world thinks Trump is strong. Nobody. I leave the US— nobody thinks he's strong. 1/
Snyder: They think he has power within a set of institutions that can do things. But they don't think he personally is strong or threatening. He's seen as an incredibly weak leader by everyone.
They're polite to him — you have to be. But everybody sees him as colossally weak. 2/
Snyder: Trump plays a strongman on TV and some people go for that. Similarly the idea he can negotiate — he can't.
He's a worse negotiator than kindergarteners selling lemonade. He can't negotiate at all. But he can play a negotiator on TV. And the charisma is part of it. 3/
Snyder: We've lost this war. I'll make that very clear. We lost it a long time ago.
Americans are very slow to realize we've lost wars, but that doesn't mean we're slow to lose them. We lost this one very quickly. The terms of this peace are basically capitulation. 1/
Snyder: This goes to two issues of American power. First — how incompetent leadership can be. Second — how you get to a situation where radically incompetent leadership is possible.
That second point worries me. We're in a cycle now. And these are wars of whimsy. 2/
Snyder: The answer is Venezuela. That call Trump made to Fox and Friends where he just seemed like he was high. That sentence — we can do this over and over and nobody can stop us.
That's where he switched. From skepticism about war to this utopian idea of violence. 3/
Ex-Ukrainian FM, Kuleba: Trump's G7 softening on Ukraine is not a real shift. Right words at the right table, nothing more. Before the summit he spoke to Putin and called him wonderful.
Every change in tone is situational. This is performance for the camera. 1/
Kuleba: Trump desperately needs a big foreign policy victory. There are only two places left on Earth where he can get one, Cuba and Ukraine.
That is why American efforts on Ukraine will intensify. Not from conviction — from necessity. Trump needs a win he can sell. 2/
Kuleba: One test tells you everything. Kushner is heading to Moscow again. If before Moscow he stops in Kyiv, something is genuinely changing inside the American system.
If he flies straight past, same pattern, same priorities, same war. Watch the itinerary, not the rhetoric. 3X
800,000 — that is how many verified Russian military targets Ukrainian drones hit in the first half of 2026, with an estimated 167,000 Russian casualties.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's defense minister: Today, drones account for more than 90% of enemy targets hit — United24. 1/
The verified hits since January span Russian personnel, air defense, artillery, rocket systems, command posts, ammunition depots, and electronic warfare units.
Ukraine's Defense Forces aim the strikes at logistics routes and key assets behind the front lines. 2/
May was the most productive month for Ukraine's drone units this year. In that month alone they struck more than 181,000 verified targets.
The same strikes killed or seriously wounded 31,530 Russian service members in 31 days. 3/