The best thing that can happen to us in 2026, and the worst – some voices
This is the time for good resolutions and great expectations, as befits the beginning of a new year, which started with quite a few jolts, between Venezuela and Greenland, passing through Russian bombs on Ukraine – and one cannot say that 2025 ended in calm and peace. Given that the world is turning upside down […]
European artists find refuge in Warsaw
One of the venues most frequented by artists and critics in the Polish capital is a small Japanese restaurant located in a low concrete and glass pavilion on Adolfa Pawinskiego Street: Sato gotuje (literally: Sato cooks), run by an amusing Japanese gentleman who fell in love with a Polish young lady about fifteen years ago […]
The Balkans: the EU’s unfinished business
In December 1998, as Serbia’s president Slobodan Milošević was waging a brutal war in Kosovo, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac met in Saint-Malo and issued a joint declaration that would shape the European Union’s Common Security and Defence Policy. The declaration opened with a blunt statement: “The European Union needs […]
The Yale center that tracks Ukrainian children deported to Russia risks closing
The research center at Yale University that has been monitoring for years the forced removals and deportations of Ukrainian children by Russia could shut down any day now, “unless we receive further individual donations or Europe finally steps up,” Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), tells Foglio Europeo. In February 2025, […]
Kyriakos Pierrakakis, a profoundly European story
Europe cannot afford to be pessimistic, said the president of the Eurogroup, Greek Finance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis, inaugurating 2026: Europe cannot afford to be excessively accommodating either, because amid these global upheavals, “we must act with greater speed and decisiveness.” Pierrakakis, 43 years old, educated at Harvard and MIT, with a background in Greek social […]
Why on earth would Trump need Greenland?
“We need Greenland,” said Donald Trump on the plane taking him back to Washington from his shadow White House in Mar-a-Lago, where the American president had done, during the Christmas holidays, some negotiations on Gaza and Ukraine, and where he had set up a situation room to follow the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. […]
The autonomy mantra and lingering uncertainties, starting with Ukraine
Cyprus at the head of the EU Since January first, the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union belongs to Cyprus, one of the smallest and most peripheral of its member states, but one that has the ambition to act as a bridge with the Middle East and the southern shore of the […]
Telling jokes, listening to music and dancing our way through this challenging 2026
14-17 January. ESNS EUROSONIC NOORDERSLAG / GRONINGEN, THE NETHERLANDS Eurovision’s indie brother Paolo Giordano wrote days ago on Corriere della Sera that he hoped Europe could rediscover a new vocation, a current meaning to the word “freedom”: not the wild one of the Wild West, but one in which “we have the courage to regulate […]
The Ukrainian struggle for freedom is a life-affirming story
I don’t know how historians in the future will call this historical period. The world order, based on the UN Charter and international law, is collapsing before our eyes. It did cope more or less with global challenges before, but now it is stalling and reproducing ritualistic movements. Fires occur more and more frequently in […]
In the Kyiv hangar where civilians go to drone classes
In a large hangar inside a former factory on the outskirts of Kyiv, tires hang from the ceiling at different heights. About a meter from the ground, there are iron hoops, large and small: there are many of them scattered around. They are part of a course that serves as the training ground for Ukrainian […]