KYIV — The Russian army attacked Ukraine with more than 90 killer drones in the early hours of Thursday morning, causing complete blackouts in the key industrial regions of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv’s energy ministry reported. “While energy workers managed to restore power in the Zaporizhzhia region in the morning, some 800,000 households in the nearby Dnipro region were still without electricity and heating on Thursday morning,” Artem Nekrasov, acting energy minister of Ukraine, said during a morning briefing. In Dnipro, eight coal mines stopped working because of a power outage. All the miners were safely evacuated to the surface, Nekrasov added. Power outages were also reported in Chernihiv, Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Poltava and other regions. Freezing weather is coming to Ukraine over the next three days, with temperatures forecast to drop to minus 20° C during the night, when Russia often launches massive missile and drone attacks. Precipitation and cold could cause additional electricity supply disruptions due to snow accumulating on power lines, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said Wednesday evening. “Ukraine’s energy system is under enemy attack every day, and energy workers work in extremely difficult conditions to provide people with light and heat. Deteriorating weather conditions create additional stress on critical infrastructure. We are working to minimize the consequences of bad weather,” Svyrydenko added. Local governors in the eastern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro reported that hospitals and other critical infrastructure had to turn to emergency power supplies because of the latest Russian attack. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked Ukrainian energy workers for the speedy power restoration in Zaporizhzhia, and used the opportunity to remind Kyiv’s partners around the world they need to respond “to this deliberate torment of the Ukrainian people by Russia.” “There is absolutely no military rationale in such strikes on the energy sector and infrastructure that leave people without electricity and heating in wintertime. This is Russia’s war specifically against our people, against life in Ukraine — an attempt to break Ukraine,” Zelenskyy added.

Thousands rallied in the Albanian capital of Tirana on Monday as the opposition demanded Prime Minister Edi Rama’s resignation over corruption charges against his deputy, Belinda Balluku, whose parliamentary immunity has so far blocked her arrest. The political crisis in the Balkan nation has been building for weeks since anti-corruption prosecutors accused Balluku of interfering in major state contracts. It reached its tipping point Monday night after Molotov cocktails were hurled at Rama’s office. Four protesters were arrested during clashes and seven more put under investigation. Two police officers were injured, and one protester accidentally set himself on fire, local media reported. The protest, organized by veteran opposition leader Sali Berisha and his Democratic Party, followed scenes of chaos in Albania’s parliament last week, when police intervened after lawmakers brawled and set off flares inside the chamber. “We do not condone any form of violence — especially violence exercised by those in power. There is no more blatant form of violence than the extortion and systematic looting carried out by Edi Rama and his ministers against the Albanian people,” Berisha told POLITICO Tuesday via his spokesperson, saying the protests were intended to “stop this violence.” Prosecutors and opposition lawmakers are pushing to lift Balluku’s immunity so that anti-corruption prosecutors can arrest and try her. Rama and his ruling Socialist Party have so far stalled the vote, saying they will wait for a Constitutional Court ruling that is expected in January. Balluku is accused, along with several other officials and private companies, of manipulating public tenders to favor specific companies on major infrastructure projects, including Tirana’s Greater Ring Road and the Llogara Tunnel. She has called the allegations against her “insinuations,” “half-truths” and “lies,” and agreed to cooperate with the judicial process fully. Balluku is also minister of infrastructure, overseeing some of the country’s largest public projects. Rama has also defended Balluku amid the corruption charges, accusing the anti-corruption agency, known as SPAK, of normalizing pre-trial arrests, saying they amount to “arrests without trial” and fall short of European democratic standards. The prime minister told POLITICO in an interview Wednesday that it was “normal” for SPAK to make errors as it is a “newborn institution with a newborn independent power” that has made “plenty of mistakes.” When asked for a statement Tuesday about the protests’ violent turn, Rama refused to comment. He said he did not want to impugn his political opponents, “because in the end they are not enemies to be exposed to the world, but just desperate fellow Albanians, to be confronted and dealt with within the bounds of our own domestic political life.” Berisha hit back, accusing Rama of stealing elections and telling him it was time to go. “He has no legitimacy to remain in government for even one more day,” Berisha told POLITICO. Rama was reelected in May for a fourth term.

A fair, fast and competitive transition begins with what already works and then rapidly scales it up.  Across the EU commercial road transport sector, the diversity of operations is met with a diversity of solutions. Urban taxis are switching to electric en masse. Many regional coaches run on advanced biofuels, with electrification emerging in smaller applications such as school services, as European e-coach technologies are still maturing and only now beginning to enter the market. Trucks electrify rapidly where operationally and financially possible, while others, including long-haul and other hard-to-electrify segments, operate at scale on HVO (hydrotreated vegetable oil) or biomethane, cutting emissions immediately and reliably. These are real choices made every day by operators facing different missions, distances, terrains and energy realities, showing that decarbonization is not a single pathway but a spectrum of viable ones.  Building on this diversity, many operators are already modernizing their fleets and cutting emissions through electrification. When they can control charging, routing and energy supply, electric vehicles often deliver a positive total cost of ownership (TCO), strong reliability and operational benefits. These early adopters prove that electrification works where the enabling conditions are in place, and that its potential can expand dramatically with the right support. > Decarbonization is not a single pathway but a spectrum of viable ones chosen > daily by operators facing real-world conditions. But scaling electrification faces structural bottlenecks. Grid capacity is constrained across the EU, and upgrades routinely take years. As most heavy-duty vehicle charging will occur at depots, operators cannot simply move around to look for grid opportunities. They are bound to the location of their facilities.  The recently published grid package tries, albeit timidly, to address some of these challenges, but it neither resolves the core capacity deficiencies nor fixes the fundamental conditions that determine a positive TCO: the predictability of electricity prices, the stability of delivered power, and the resulting charging time. A truck expected to recharge in one hour at a high-power station may wait far longer if available grid power drops. Without reliable timelines, predictable costs and sufficient depot capacity, most transport operators cannot make long-term investment decisions. And the grid is only part of the enabling conditions needed: depot charging infrastructure itself requires significant additional investment, on top of vehicles that already cost several hundreds of thousands of euros more than their diesel equivalents.  This is why the EU needs two things at once: strong enablers for electrification and hydrogen; and predictability on what the EU actually recognizes as clean. Operators using renewable fuels, from biomethane to advanced biofuels and HVO, delivering up to 90 percent CO2 reduction, are cutting emissions today. Yet current CO2 frameworks, for both light-duty vehicles and heavy-duty trucks, fail to recognize fleets running on these fuels as part of the EU’s decarbonization solution for road transport, even when they deliver immediate, measurable climate benefits. This lack of clarity limits investment and slows additional emission reductions that could happen today. > Policies that punish before enabling will not accelerate the transition; a > successful shift must empower operators, not constrain them. The revision of both CO2 standards, for cars and vans, and for heavy-duty vehicles, will therefore be pivotal. They must support electrification and hydrogen where they fit the mission, while also recognizing the contribution of renewable and low-carbon fuels across the fleet. Regulations that exclude proven clean options will not accelerate the transition. They will restrict it.  With this in mind, the question is: why would the EU consider imposing purchasing mandates on operators or excessively high emission-reduction targets on member states that would, in practice, force quotas on buyers? Such measures would punish before enabling, removing choice from those who know their operations best. A successful transition must empower operators, not constrain them.  The EU’s transport sector is committed and already delivering. With the right enablers, a technology-neutral framework, and clarity on what counts as clean, the EU can turn today’s early successes into a scalable, fair and competitive decarbonization pathway.  We now look with great interest to the upcoming Automotive Package, hoping to see pragmatic solutions to these pressing questions, solutions that EU transport operators, as the buyers and daily users of all these technologies, are keenly expecting. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT * The sponsor is IRU – International Road Transport Union  * The ultimate controlling entity is IRU – International Road Transport Union  More information here.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission is cracking down on two Chinese companies, airport scanner maker Nuctech and e-commerce giant Temu, that are suspected of unfairly penetrating the EU market with the help of state subsidies. The EU executive opened an in-depth probe into Nuctech under its Foreign Subsidies Regulation on Thursday, a year and a half after initial inspections at the company’s premises in Poland and the Netherlands. “The Commission has preliminary concerns that Nuctech may have been granted foreign subsidies that could distort the EU internal market,” the EU executive said in a press release.  Nuctech is a provider of threat detection systems including security and inspection scanners for airports, ports, or customs points in railways or roads located at borders, as well as the provision of related services.  EU officials worry that Nuctech may have received unfair support from China in tender contracts, prices and conditions that can’t be reasonably matched by other market players in the EU.  “We want a level playing field on the market for such [threat detection] systems, keeping fair opportunities for competitors, customers such as border authorities,” Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera said in a statement, noting that this is the first in-depth investigation launched by the Commission on its own initiative under the FSR regime.  Nuctech may need to offer commitments to address the Commission’s concerns at the end of the in-depth probe, which can also end in “redressive measures” or with a non-objection decision.   The FSR is aimed at making sure that companies operating in the EU market do so without receiving unfair support from foreign governments. In its first two years of enforcement, it has come under criticism for being cumbersome on companies and not delivering fast results.  In a statement, Nuctech acknowledged the Commission’s decision to open an in-depth investigation. “We respect the Commission’s role in ensuring fair and transparent market conditions within the European Union,” the company said. It said it would cooperate with the investigation: “We trust in the integrity and impartiality of the process and hope our actions will be evaluated on their merits.” TEMU RAIDED In a separate FSR probe, the Commission also made an unannounced inspection of Chinese e-commerce platform Temu.  “We can confirm that the Commission has carried out an unannounced inspection at the premises of a company active in the e-commerce sector in the EU, under the Foreign Subsidies Regulation,” an EU executive spokesperson said in an emailed statement on Thursday.   Temu’s Europe headquarters in Ireland were dawn-raided last week, a person familiar with Chinese business told POLITICO. Mlex first reported on the raids on Wednesday.  The platform has faced increased scrutiny in Brussels and across the EU. Most recently, it was accused of breaching the EU’s Digital Services Act by selling unsafe products, such as toys. The platform has also faced scrutiny around how it protects minors and uses age verification.  Temu did not respond to a request for comment.

President Donald Trump’s latest round of Europe-bashing has the U.S.’s allies across the Atlantic revisiting a perennial question: Why does Trump hate Europe so much? Trump’s disdain for America’s one-time partners has been on prominent display in the past week — first in Trump’s newly released national security strategy, which suggested that Europe was suffering from civilizational decline, and then in Trump’s exclusive interview with POLITICO, where he chided the “decaying” continent’s leaders as “weak.” In Europe, Trump’s criticisms were met with more familiar consternation — and calls to speed up plans for a future where the continent cannot rely on American security support. But where does Trump’s animosity for Europe actually come from? To find out, I reached out to a scholar who’d been recommended to me by sources in MAGA world as someone who actually understands their foreign policy thinking (even if he doesn’t agree with it). “He does seem to divide the world into strength and weakness, and he pays attention to strength, and he kind of ignores weakness,” said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on Trump’s strained relations with the continent. “And he has long characterized the Europeans as weak.” Shapiro explained that Trump has long blamed Europe’s weakness on its low levels of military spending and its dependence on American security might. But his critique seems to have taken on a new vehemence during his second term thanks to input from new advisers like Vice President JD Vance, who have successfully cast Europe as a liberal bulwark in a global culture war between MAGA-style “nationalists” and so-called globalists. Like many young conservatives, Shapiro explained, Vance has come to believe that “it was these bastions of liberal power in the culture and in the government that stymied the first Trump term, so you needed to attack the universities, the think tanks, the foundations, the finance industry, and, of course, the deep state.” In the eyes of MAGA, he said, “Europe is one of these liberal bastions.” This conversation was edited for length and clarity. Trump’s recent posture toward Europe brings to mind the old adage that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. Do you think Trump hates Europe, or does he just think it’s irrelevant? My main impression is that he’s pretty indifferent toward it. There are moments when specific European countries or the EU really pisses him off and he expresses something that seems close to hatred, but mostly he doesn’t seem very focused on it. Why do you think that is? He does seem to divide the world into strength and weakness, and he pays attention to strength, and he kind of ignores weakness. And he has long characterized the Europeans as weak for a bunch of different reasons having to do with what seems to him to be a decadence in their society, their immigration, their social welfare states, their lack of apparent military vigor. All of those things seem to put them in the weak category, and in Trump’s world, if you’re in the weak category, he doesn’t pay much attention to you. What about more prosaic things like the trade imbalance and NATO spending? Do those contribute to his disdain, or does it originate from a more guttural place? I get the impression that it is more at a guttural level. It always seemed to me that the NATO spending debate was just a stick with which to beat the NATO allies. He has long understood that that’s something that they felt a little bit guilty about, and that’s something that American presidents had beat them about for a while, so he just sort of took it to an 11. The trade deficit is something that’s more serious for him. He’s paid quite a bit of attention to that in every country, so it’s in the trade area where he takes Europeans most seriously. But because they’re so weak and so dependent on the United States for security, he hasn’t had to deal with their trade problems in the same way. He’s able to threaten them on security, and they have folded pretty quickly. Does some of his animosity originate from his pre-presidency when he did business in Europe? He likes to blame Europeans for nixing some of his business transactions, like a golf course in Ireland. How serious do you think that is? I think that’s been important in forming his opinion of the EU rather than of Europe as a whole. He never seems to refer to the EU without referring to the fact that they blocked his golf course in Ireland. It wasn’t even the EU that blocked it, actually — it was an Irish local government authority — but it conforms to the general MAGA view of the EU as overly bureaucratic, anti-development and basically as an extension of the American liberal approach to development and regulation, which Trump certainly does hate. That’s part of what led Trump and his movement more generally to put the EU in the category of supporters of liberal America. In that sense, the fight against the EU in particular — but also against the other liberal regimes in Europe — became an extension of their domestic political battle with liberals in America. That effort to pull Europe as a whole into the American culture war by positioning it as a repository of all the liberal pieties that MAGA has come to hate — that seems kind of new. That is new for the second term, yeah. Where do you think that’s coming from? It definitely seems to be coming from [Vice President] JD Vance and the sort of philosophers who support him — the Patrick Deneens and Yoram Hazonys. Those types of people see liberal Europe as quite decadent and as part of the overall liberal problem in the world. You can also trace some of it back to Steve Bannon, who has definitely been talking about this stuff for a while. There does seem to be a real preoccupation with the idea that Europe is suffering from some sort of civilizational decline or civilization collapse. For instance, in both the new national security strategy and in his remarks to POLITICO this week, Trump has suggested that Europe is “decaying.” What do you make of that? This is a bit of a projection, right? If you look at the numbers in terms of immigration and diversity, the United States is further ahead in that decay — if you want to call it that — than Europe. There was this view that emerged among MAGA elites in the interregnum that it wasn’t enough to win the presidency in order to successfully change America. You had to attack all of the bastions of liberal power. It was these bastions of liberal power in the culture and in the government that stymied the first Trump term, so you needed to attack the universities, the think tanks, the foundations, the finance industry and, of course, the deep state, which is the first target. It was only through attacking these liberal bastions and conquering them to your cause that you could have a truly transformative effect. One of the things that they seem to have picked up while contemplating this theory is that Europe is one of these liberal bastions. Europe is a support for liberals in the United States, in part because Europe is the place where Americans get their sense of how the world views them. It’s ironic that that image of a decadent Europe coexists with the rise of far-right parties across the continent. Obviously, the Trump administration has supported those parties and allied with them, but at least in France and Germany, the momentum seems to be behind these parties at the moment. That presents them with an avenue to destroy liberal Europe’s support for liberal America by essentially transforming Europe into an illiberal regime. That is the vector of attack on liberal Europe. There has been this idea that’s developed amongst the populist parties in Europe since Brexit that they’re not really trying to leave the EU or destroy the EU; they’re trying to remake the EU in their nationalist and sovereigntist image. That’s perfect for what the Trump people are trying to do, which is not destroy the EU fully, but destroy the EU as a support for liberal ideas in the world and the United States. You mentioned the vice president, who has become a very prominent mouthpiece for this adversarial approach to Europe — most obviously in his speech at Munich earlier this year. Do you think he’s just following Trump’s guttural dislike of Europe or is he advancing his own independent anti-European agenda? A little of both. I think that Vance, like any good vice president, is very careful not to get crosswise with his boss and not contradict him in any way. So the fact that Trump isn’t opposed to this and that he can support it to a degree is very, very important. But I think that a lot of these ideas come from Vance independently, at least in detail. What he’s doing is nudging Trump along this road. He’s thinking about what will appeal to Trump, and he’s mostly been getting it right. But I think that especially when it comes to this sort of culture war stuff with Europe, he’s more of a source than a follower. During this latest round of Trump’s Euro-bashing, did anything stand out to you as new or novel? Or was it all of a piece with what you had heard before? It was novel relative to a year ago, but not relative to February and since then. But it’s a new mechanism of describing it — through a national security strategy document and through interviews with the president. The same arguments have achieved a sort of higher status, I would say, in the last week or so. You could sit around in Europe — as I did — and argue about the degree to which this really was what the Trump administration was doing, or whether this was just a faction — and you can still have that argument, because the Trump administration is generally quite inconsistent and incoherent when it comes to this kind of thing — but I think it’s undoubtedly achieved a greater status in the last week or two. How do you think Europe should deal with Trump’s recurring animosity towards the continent? It seems they’ve settled on a strategy of flattery, but do you think that’s effective in the long run? No, I think that’s the exact opposite of effective. If you recall what I said at the beginning, Trump abhors weakness, and flattery is the sort of ultimate manifestation of weakness. Every time the Europeans show up and flatter Trump, it enables them to have a good meeting with him, but it conveys the impression to him that they are weak, and so it increases his policy demands against them. We’ve seen that over and over again. The Europeans showed up and thought they had changed his Ukraine position, they had a great meeting, he said good things about them, they went home and a few weeks later, he had a totally different Ukraine position that they’re now having to deal with. The flattery has achieved the sense in the Trump administration that they can do anything they want to the Europeans, and they’ll basically swallow it. They haven’t done what some other countries have done, like the Chinese or the Brazilians, or even the Canadians to some degree, which is to stand up to Trump and show him that he has to deal with them as strong actors. And that’s a shame, because the Europeans — while they obviously have an asymmetric dependence on the United States, and they have some weaknesses — are a lot stronger than a lot of other countries, especially if they were working together. I think they have some capacity to do that, but they haven’t really managed it as of yet. Maybe this will be a wake-up call to do that.

BRUSSELS — Postponing the start of the EU’s new carbon levy for building and road transport emissions by one year to 2028 is going to cost European governments lots of money, according to a top Danish official. Denmark, for instance, is estimated to lose half a billion euros in future revenues from the delay of the new carbon market (known as ETS2), said Christian Stenberg, deputy permanent secretary of state at the Danish climate ministry, at POLITICO’s Sustainable Future Summit. “The delay will mean that we will lack that tool for one year,” he told a panel discussion. “It will cost us quite a bit of revenue that we could have gotten,” he added. “About €0.5 billion.” “For the Danish economy [it] is not little.” To bring more skeptical EU countries on board, like Poland, Italy and Romania, and reach a deal on the EU’s new climate target for 2040, environment ministers pushed the European Commission to agree to postpone the new carbon pricing mechanism by one year. Stenberg explained that, as the talks over the 2040 climate target stretched overnight, he “had to go back to my finance ministry in the middle of the night and say the compromise will cost us this in revenue.” But the ETS2, which has raised concerns in a majority of EU governments that it will increase energy bills, is “the most cost effective way of reaching our targets within transportation and buildings,” Stenberg argued. “And cost effectiveness, at the end of the day, is to the benefit of the economy.” Chiara Martinelli, director of the NGO Climate Action Network Europe, also said on the panel that the delay of the new carbon market is “problematic,” and called on the EU to ensure that social measures to support people in the green transition come with the ETS2.

BRUSSELS — When the colonial governments of Belgium and Portugal ordered the construction of a railway connecting oil- and mineral-rich regions in the African interior to the Atlantic, their primary objective was to plunder resources such as rubber, ivory and minerals for export to Western countries.  Today, that same stretch of railway infrastructure, snaking through Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola to the port of Lobito, is being modernized and extended with U.S. and EU money to facilitate the transport of sought-after minerals like cobalt and copper. Just this month, Jozef Síkela, the EU commissioner for international partnerships, signed a €116 million investment package for the corridor, often hailed as a model initiative under Global Gateway, the bloc’s infrastructure development program. This time around, however, Brussels says it’s committed to resetting its historically tainted relationship with the region — a message European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa will stress when they address African and EU leaders at a Nov. 24-25 summit in Luanda, Angola, which is this year celebrating 50 years of independence from Portuguese rule.  “Global Gateway is about mutual benefits,” von der Leyen said in a keynote speech in October. The program should “focus even more on key value chains,” including the metals and minerals needed in everything from smartphones to wind turbines and defense applications.  The aim, she said, is to “build up resilient value chains together. With local infrastructure, but also local jobs, local skills and local industries.”  Yet Brussels is scrambling to enter a region only to find that China got there first. Batches of copper sheets are stored in a warehouse and wait to be loaded on trucks in Zambia. | Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images African countries are already the primary suppliers of minerals to Beijing, which has secured access to their resource wealth — unhindered by any historical baggage of colonial exploitation — and is now the world’s dominant processor. Europe’s emphasis on retaining economic value in host countries — rather than merely extracting resources for export — answers calls by African leaders for a more equitable and sustainable approach to developing their countries’ natural resources.  “The EU has been quite vocal, since the beginning of the raw minerals diplomacy two years ago, saying: We want to be the ethical partner,” said Martina Matarazzo, international and EU advocacy coordinator at Resource Matters, a Belgian NGO focusing on resource extraction, which also has an office in Kinshasa, DRC.  But “there is a big gap” between what’s being said and what’s being done, she added, pointing out that it is still unclear how the Lobito Corridor can be a “win-win” project, rather than just facilitating the shipping of minerals abroad.  Brussels finds itself under growing pressure to diversify its supply chains of lithium, rare earths and other raw materials away from China — which has demonstrated time and again it is ready to weaponize its market dominance. To that end, it is drafting a new plan, due on Dec. 3, to accelerate the bloc’s diversification efforts.   In African countries, however, Brussels is still struggling to establish itself as an attractive, ethical alternative to Beijing, which has long secured vast access to the continent’s resources through large-scale investments in mining, processing and infrastructure.  To enter the minerals space, the EU needs to walk the talk in close cooperation with African leaders — doing so may be its only chance to secure resources while moving away from its extractivist past, POLITICO has found in conversations with researchers, policymakers and civil society.  RESOURCE RUSH Appetite for Africa’s vast natural riches first drew colonizers to the continent — and laid “the foundation for post-independence resource dependency and external interference,” according to the Africa Policy Research Institute. Now, the continent’s deposits of vital minerals have turned it into a strategic player, with Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema last year setting a goal of tripling copper output by the end of the decade, for instance. Beijing has often used Belt and Road, its international development initiative, to secure mining rights in exchange for infrastructure projects. Washington, which lags far behind Beijing, is also stepping up its game, with investments into Africa quietly overtaking China’s. President Donald Trump has extended the U.S. security umbrella to war-torn areas in exchange for access to resources, for example brokering a — shaky — peace deal between Rwanda and the DRC. EU companies are “really trying to catch up,” said Christian Géraud Neema Byamungu, an expert on China-Africa relations and the Francophone Africa editor of the China Global South Project. “They left Africa when there was a sense that Africa is not really a place to do business.” DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY Against this backdrop, the key question for the EU is: What can it offer to set itself apart from other partners? On paper, the answer is clear: a responsible approach to resource extraction that prioritizes creating local economic value, along with high environmental and social standards.  “We want to focus on the sustainable development of value chains and how to work with our African partners to support their rise of the value chains,” said an EU official ahead of the Luanda summit, where minerals will be a key topic. “This is not about extraction only,” they added. But so far, that still has to translate into a concrete impact on the ground. “We are not at the point where we can see how really the EU is trying to change things on the ground in terms of value addition in DRC,” said Emmanuel Umpula Nkumba, executive director of NGO Afrewatch. “I am not naïve, they are coming to make money, not to help us,” he added.  Not only has offtake from the Lobito Corridor been slow, but the project has also come under fire for prioritizing Western interests over African development and agency, and for potentially leading to the destruction of local forests, community displacement and an overall lack of benefits for local populations.  The 2024 Lobito Corridor Trans-Africa Summit | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images The EU, however, views the corridor as “a symbol of the partnership between the African and European continent and an example of our shared investment agenda,” according to a Commission spokesperson, who called it “a lifeline towards sustainable development and shared prosperity.” Finally, while “value addition” has become a catchphrase, it’s unclear whether EU and African leaders see eye to eye on what the term means.  African industry representatives and officials often point to building a domestic supply chain up to the final product. EU officials, by contrast, tend to envision refining minerals in the country of origin and then exporting them, according to a report published by the European Council on Foreign Relations. A SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS CASE? The second component of the EU’s approach — strong sustainability and human rights safeguards — faces major trouble, not least in the name of making the EU more competitive.  In Brussels, proposed rules that would require companies to police their supply chains for environmental harm and human rights violations are dying a slow death, as conservative politicians channel complaints from businesses that they can’t bear the cost of complying. An investigation by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre of the 13 mining, refining and recycling projects outside the bloc labeled “strategic” by the EU executive — including four in Africa — identified “an inconsistent approach to key human rights policies.”  However, under pressure from African leaders, stricter safeguards are slowly becoming more important in the sector: “high [environmental, social and governance] standards” are a core component of the African Union’s mining strategy published in 2024.  The Chinese, too, are adapting quickly.  “China’s also getting good with standards,” said Sarah Logan, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who co-authored the assessment of African and European interpretations of value addition. “If they are made to, Chinese mining companies are very capable of adhering to ESG standards.”  Therefore, besides massively scaling up investment, the EU and European companies will need to turn their promise of being a reliable and ethical partner into reality — sooner rather than later. “The only way to distinguish ourselves from the Chinese is to guarantee these benefits for communities,” Spanish Green European lawmaker Ana Miranda Paz told a panel discussion on the Lobito Corridor in Brussels. This story has been updated with comment from the European Commission.

By ALEX PERRY in Paris Illustrations by Julius Maxim for POLITICO This article is also available in French When Patrick Pouyanné decided to spend billions on a giant natural gas field in a faraway warzone, he made the call alone, over a single dinner, with the head of a rival energy company. Pouyanné, the chairman and CEO of what was then called Total, was dining with Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental Petroleum. It was late April 2019, and Hollub was in a David and Goliath battle with the American energy behemoth Chevron to buy Anadarko, like Occidental a mid-sized Texan oil and gas explorer. The American investor Warren Buffett was set to back Hollub with $10 billion, but it wasn’t enough. So Hollub flew to Paris to meet Pouyanné. Hollub’s proposal: Pouyanné would pitch in $8.8 billion in exchange for Anadarko’s four African gas fields, including a vast deep-sea reserve off northern Mozambique, an area in the grip of an Islamist insurgency. The Frenchman, who had previously approached Anadarko about the same assets, said yes in a matter of minutes. Advertisement “What are the strengths of Total?” Pouyanné explained to an Atlantic Council event in Washington a few weeks later. “LNG,” he went on, and the “Middle East and Africa,” regions where the company has operated since its origin in the colonial era. “So it’s just fitting exactly and perfectly.” Total, “a large corporation,” could be “so agile,” he said, because of the efficacy of his decision-making, and the clarity of his vision to shift from oil to lower-emission gas, extracted from lightly regulated foreign lands. In the end, “it [was] just a matter of sending an email to my colleague [Hollub],” he added. “This is the way to make good deals.” Six years later, it’s fair to ask if Pouyanné was a little hasty. On Nov. 17, a European human rights NGO filed a criminal complaint with the national counterterrorism prosecutor’s office in Paris accusing TotalEnergies of complicity in war crimes, torture and enforced disappearances, all in northern Mozambique. The allegations turn on a massacre, first reported by POLITICO last year, in which Mozambican soldiers crammed about 200 men into shipping containers at the gatehouse of a massive gas liquefaction plant TotalEnergies is building in the country, then killed most of them over the next three months. The complaint, submitted by the nonprofit European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), alleges that TotalEnergies became an accomplice in the “so-called ‘container massacre’” because it “directly financed and materially supported” the Mozambican soldiers who carried out the executions, which took place between June and September 2021. “TotalEnergies knew that the Mozambican armed forces had been accused of systematic human rights violations, yet continued to support them with the only objective to secure its facility,” said Clara Gonzales, co-director of the business and human rights program at ECCHR, a Berlin-based group specializing in international law that has spent the past year corroborating the atrocity. In response to the complaint, a company spokesperson in Paris said in a written statement: “TotalEnergies takes these allegations very seriously” and would “comply with the lawful investigation prerogatives of the French authorities.” Last year, in response to questions by POLITICO, the company — through its subsidiary Mozambique LNG — said it had no knowledge of the container killings, adding that its “extensive research” had “not identified any information nor evidence that would corroborate the allegations of severe abuses and torture.” This week, the spokesperson repeated that position. Advertisement Asked in May in the French National Assembly about the killings, Pouyanné dismissed “these false allegations” and demanded the company’s accusers “put their evidence on the table.” Questioned about the complaint on French television this week, he again rejected the allegations and described them as a “smear campaign” motivated by the fact that TotalEnergies produces fossil fuels. The war crimes complaint is based on POLITICO’s reporting and other open-source evidence. In the last year, the container killings have been confirmed by the French newspaper Le Monde and the British journalism nonprofit Source Material. The British Mozambique expert Professor Joseph Hanlon also said the atrocity was “well known locally,” and an investigation carried out by UK Export Finance (UKEF) — the British state lender, which is currently weighing delivery of a $1.15 billion loan to Total’s project — has heard evidence from its survivors.  The massacre was an apparent reprisal for a devastating attack three months earlier by ISIS-affiliated rebels on the nearby town of Palma, just south of the border with Tanzania, which killed 1,354 civilians, including 55 of Total’s workforce, according to a house-to-house survey carried out by POLITICO. Of those ISIS murdered, it beheaded 330. TotalEnergies has previously noted that Mozambique has yet to issue an official toll for the Palma massacre. In March, a French magistrate began investigating TotalEnergies for involuntary manslaughter over allegations that it abandoned its contractors to the onslaught.  After the jihadis left the area in late June, Mozambican commandos based at Total’s gas concession rounded up 500 villagers and accused them of backing the rebels. They separated men from women and children, raped several of the women, then forced the 180-250 men into two metal windowless shipping containers that formed a rudimentary fortified entrance to Total’s plant. There, the soldiers kept their prisoners in 30-degree-Celsius heat for three months. According to eleven survivors and two witnesses, some men suffocated. Fed handfuls of rice and bottle caps of water, others starved or died of thirst. The soldiers beat and tortured many of the rest. Finally, they began taking them away in groups and executing them. Only 26 men survived, saved when a Rwandan intervention force, deployed to fight ISIS, discovered the operation. A second house-to-house survey conducted by POLITICO later identified by name 97 of those killed or disappeared. Along with the new ECCHR complaint and the British inquiry, the killings are the subject of three other separate investigations: by the Mozambican Attorney General, the Mozambican National Human Rights Commission, and the Dutch government, which is probing $1.2 billion in Dutch state financing for TotalEnergies’ project. This week’s complaint was lodged with the offices of the French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor, whose remit includes war crimes. The prosecutor will decide whether to open a formal inquiry and appoint an investigating magistrate.  Should the case move ahead, TotalEnergies will face the prospect of a war crimes trial.  Such an eventuality would represent a spectacular fall from grace for a business that once held a central place in French national identity and a CEO whose hard-nosed resolve made him an icon of global business. Should a French court eventually find the company or its executives liable in the container killings, the penalties could include fines and, possibly, jail terms for anybody indicted. How did TotalEnergies get here? How did Patrick Pouyanné? ‘POUYANNÉ PETROLEUM’ Born in Normandy in 1963, the son of a provincial customs official and a post office worker, Pouyanné elevated himself to the French elite by winning selection to the École Polytechnique, the country’s foremost engineering university, and then the École des Mines, where France’s future captains of industry are made. Following a few years in politics as a minister’s aide, he joined the French state petroleum company Elf as an exploration manager in Angola in 1996. After moving to Qatar in 1999 as Elf merged with Total, Pouyanné ascended to the top job at Total in 2014 after his predecessor, Christophe de Margerie, was killed in a plane crash in Moscow. Pouyanné led by reason, and force of will. “To be number one in a group like Total … is to find yourself alone,” he said in 2020. “When I say ‘I don’t agree,’ sometimes the walls shake. I realize this.” A decade at the top has seen Pouyanné, 62, transform a company of 100,000 employees in 130 countries into a one-man show — “Pouyanné Petroleum,” as the industry quip goes. His frequent public appearances, and his unapologetically firm hand, have made him a celebrated figure in international business. “Patrick Pouyanné has done an extraordinary job leading TotalEnergies in a complex environment, delivering outstanding financial results and engaging the company in the energy transition quicker and stronger than its peers,” Jacques Aschenbroich, the company’s lead independent director, said in 2023. Advertisement Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega, director of energy and climate at the French Institute of International Relations, agreed. “His involvement is his strength,” he said. “He’s able to take a decision quickly, in a much more agile and rapid way.” Still, Eyl-Mazzega said, “I’m not sure everyone is happy to work with him. You have to keep up the pace. There are often departures. He’s quite direct and frank.”  Among employees, Pouyanné’s lumbering frame and overbearing manner has earned him a nickname: The Bulldozer. The moniker isn’t always affectionate. A former Total executive who dealt regularly with him recalled him as unpleasantly aggressive, “banging fists on the table.” The effect, the executive said, has been to disempower the staff: “The structure of Total is trying to guess what Pouyanné wants to do. You can’t make any decisions unless it goes to the CEO.” In a statement to POLITICO, TotalEnergies called such depictions “misplaced and baseless.” ‘DON’T ASK US TO TAKE THE MORAL HIGH GROUND’ What’s not in dispute is how Pouyanné has used his authority to shape Total’s answer to the big 21st-century oil and gas puzzle: how to square demand for fossil fuels with simultaneous demands from politicians and climate campaigners to eliminate them. His response has been diversification, moving the company away from high-emission fuels towards becoming a broad-based, ethical energy supplier, centered on low-carbon gas, solar and wind, and pledging to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The change was symbolized by Pouyanné’s renaming of the company TotalEnergies in 2021. A second, more unsung element of Pouyanné’s strategy has been moving much of his remaining fossil fuel operation beyond Western regulation.  Speaking to an audience at Chatham House in London in 2017, he said the catalyst for his move to favor reserves in poorer, less tightly policed parts of the planet was the penalties imposed on the British energy giant BP in the United States following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, in which 11 men died and an oil slick devastated the Gulf of Mexico coast. Pouyanné declared that the fines — between $62 billion and $142 billion, depending on the calculation used — represented an excessive “legal risk” to oil and gas development in the West. While other, more troubled territories came with their share of dangers, Pouyanné put the cost of failure of any project outside the West at a more manageable $2 to $3 billion, according to his Chatham House remarks. As a way of assessing risk, it was efficient. “Other players would spend a lot of money on consultancies and write 70 reports to conclude that a project is risky,” Eyl-Mazzega said. “Pouyanné, on the other hand, is prepared to take risks.” Asked by the French Senate in 2024 how he chose where to invest, however, Pouyanné admitted that his math was strictly about the bottom line. “Don’t ask us to take the moral high ground,” he said. ‘A COLLAPSE WILL NOT PUT TOTAL IN DANGER’ The first oil and gas prospectors arrived in northern Mozambique in 2006 as part of a Western effort to broaden supply beyond the Middle East. When Anadarko found gas 25 miles out to sea in 2010, the talk was of Mozambique as the new Qatar. At 2.6 million acres, or about a third of the size of Belgium, Rovuma Basin Area 1 was a monster, thought to hold 75 trillion cubic feet of gas, or 1 percent of all global reserves. An adjacent field, Area 4, quickly snapped up by ExxonMobil, was thought to hold even more. To cope with the volume of production, Anadarko’s Area 1 consortium drew up a plan for a $20 billion onshore liquefaction plant. Together with ExxonMobil’s field, the cost of developing Mozambique’s gas was estimated at $50 billion, which would make it the biggest private investment ever made in Africa. But in 2017, an ISIS insurgency emerged to threaten those ambitions.  By the time Pouyanné was preparing to buy Anadarko’s 26.5 percent share in Area 1 two years later, what had begun as a ragtag revolt against government corruption in the northern province of Cabo Delgado had become a full-scale Islamist rebellion.  Insurgents were taking ever more territory, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and regularly staging mass beheadings. Even under construction, the gas plant was a regular target. It was run by Europeans and Americans, intending to make money for companies thousands of miles away while displacing 2,733 villagers to build their concession and banning fishermen from waters around their drill sites. After several attacks on plant traffic to and from the facility, in February 2019, the militants killed two project workers in a village attack and dismembered a contract driver in the road.  A further risk had its origins in a ban on foreigners carrying guns. That made the plant reliant for security on the Mozambican army and police, both of which had a well-documented record of criminality and repression. Initially, Pouyanné seemed unconcerned. The gas field was outside international law, as Mozambique had not ratified the Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court. And Pouyanné appeared to see the pursuit of high-risk, high-reward projects almost as an obligation for a deep-pocketed corporation, telling the Atlantic Council in May 2019, soon after he agreed the Mozambique deal, that Total was so big, it didn’t need to care — at least, not in the way of other, lesser companies or countries. “We love risk, so we have decided to embark on the Mozambique story,” he said. “Even if there is a collapse, [it] will [not] put Total in danger.” Advertisement In September 2019, when Total’s purchase was formally completed, the company declared in a press release: “The Mozambique LNG project is largely derisked.” In one of several statements to POLITICO, TotalEnergies explained the term echoed the boss’s focus on “the project’s commercial and financial fundamentals. To infer this was a dismissal of security concerns amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the sector operates.” Still, for workers at the project, it was an arresting statement, given that a Mozambique LNG worker had recently been chopped to pieces. Around the same time, the project managers at Anadarko, many of whom were now working for Total, tried to warn their new CEO of the danger posed by the insurgency. It was when they met Pouyanné, however, that “things then all started to unwind,” said one. Pouyanné regaled the team who had worked on the Mozambique project for years with a speech “on how brilliant Total was, and how brilliantly Total was going to run this project,” a second executive added. Pouyanné added he had “a French hero” running the company’s security: Denis Favier who, as a police commander, led a team of police commandos as they stormed a hijacked plane on the tarmac at Marseille in 1994, and in 2015, as France’s most senior policeman, commanded the operation to hunt and kill the Islamist brothers who shot dead 12 staff at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris. “This is easy for him,” Pouyanné said. Asked about the transition from Anadarko to Total, the company maintained it was responsive to all concerns expressed by former Anadarko workers. “We are not aware of any such dismissal of security concerns by TotalEnergies or its senior management,” the company said. “It is incorrect to state that advice from the ground was not listened to.” Still, after meeting Pouyanné, the old Anadarko team called their Mozambique staff together to brief them on their new boss. “Well, holy shit,” one manager began, according to a person present. “We’ve got a problem.” ‘VERY VULNERABLE’ A third former Anadarko staffer who stayed on to work for Total said that on taking over, the company also put on hold a decision to move most contractors and staff from hotels and compounds in Palma to inside its fortified camp — a costly move that Anadarko was planning in response to deteriorating security. “This was a danger I had worked so hard to eliminate,” the staffer said. “Palma was very vulnerable. Almost nobody was supposed to be [there]. But Total wouldn’t listen to me.” Other measures, such as grouping traffic to and from the plant in convoys and flanking them with drones, also ended. One project contractor who regularly made the run through rebel territory described the difference between Anadarko and Total as “night and day.” Then in June 2020, the rebels captured Mocimboa da Praia, the regional hub, and killed at least eight subcontractors. In late December that year, they staged another advance that brought them to Total’s gates. At that, Pouyanné reversed course and assumed personal oversight of the security operation, the first Anadarko manager said. Despite no expertise in security, “[he] had to get into every little last possible detail.” The second executive concurred. “It went from, ‘I don’t care, we’ve got the best security people in the business to run this’ to ‘Oh my God, this is a disaster, let me micromanage it and control it,’” he said. The company was “not aware of any … criticism that Mr. Pouyanné lacks the necessary expertise,” TotalEnergies said, adding the CEO had “first-hand experience of emergency evacuation … [from] when Total had to evacuate its staff from Yemen in 2015.” The insurgents’ advance prompted Pouyanné to order the evacuation of all TotalEnergies staff. By contrast, many contractors and subcontractors, some of them behind schedule because of Covid, were told to keep working, according to email exchanges among contractors seen by POLITICO. “Mozambique LNG did not differentiate between its own employees, its contractors or subcontractors when giving these instructions,” the company said, but added that it was not responsible for the decisions of its contractors. Advertisement Then, in February 2021, Pouyanné flew to Maputo, the Mozambican capital, to negotiate a new security deal with then Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi. Afterward, the two men announced the creation of the Joint Task Force, a 1,000-man unit of soldiers and armed police to be stationed inside the compound.  The deal envisaged that the new force would protect a 25-kilometer radius around the gas plant, including Palma and several villages. In practice, by concentrating so many soldiers and police inside the wire, it left Palma comparatively exposed. “It is incorrect to allege that Palma was left poorly defended,” the company said. “However, it is a fact that these security forces were overwhelmed by the magnitude and violence of the terrorist attacks in March 2021.” TotalEnergies added it is not correct to say that “Mr. Pouyanné personally managed the security deal setting up the Joint Task Force.” ‘TRAIN WRECK’ By this time, the company’s own human rights advisers were warning that by helping to create the Joint Task Force — to which the company agreed to pay what it described as “hardship payments” via a third party, as well as to equip it and accommodate it on its compound — Pouyanné was effectively making TotalEnergies a party to the conflict, and implicating it in any human rights abuses the soldiers carried out. Just as worrying was TotalEnergies’ insistence — according to a plant security manager, and confirmed by minutes of a Total presentation on security released under a Dutch freedom of information request — that all major security decisions be handled by a 20-man security team 5,000 miles away in Paris. That centralization seemed to help explain how, when the Islamists finally descended on Palma on March 24, 2021, Total was among the last to know. One Western security contractor told POLITICO he had pulled his people out 10 days before the assault, based on intelligence he had on guns and young men being pre-positioned in town. In the days immediately preceding the attack, villagers around Palma warned friends and relatives in town that they had seen the Islamists advancing. WhatsApp messages seen by POLITICO indicate contractors reported the same advance to plant security on March 22 and March 23. Advertisement Nonetheless, at 9 a.m. on March 24, TotalEnergies in Paris announced that it was safe for its staff to return. Hours later, the Islamists attacked. “Neither Mozambique LNG nor TotalEnergies received any specific ‘advance warnings’ of an impending attack prior to March 24,” the company said. Faced with a three-pronged advance by several hundred militants, the plant security manager said TotalEnergies’ hierarchical management pyramid was unable to cope. Ground staff could not respond to evolving events, paralyzed by the need to seek approval for decisions from Paris. Total’s country office in Maputo was also in limbo, according to the security manager, neither able to follow what was happening in real-time, nor authorized to respond.  ‘WHO CAN HELP US?!’ Two decisions, taken as the attack unfolded, compounded the havoc wreaked by the Islamists. The first was Total’s refusal to supply aviation fuel to the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), a small, South African private military contractor working with the Mozambican police. With the police and army overrun, DAG’s small helicopters represented the only functional military force in Palma and the only unit undertaking humanitarian rescues. But DAG’s choppers were limited by low supplies of jet fuel, forcing them to fly an hour away to refuel, and to ground their fleet intermittently. Total, as one of the world’s biggest makers of aviation fuel, with ample stocks at the gas plant, was in a position to help. But when DAG asked Total in Paris for assistance, it refused. “Word came down from the mountain,” DAG executive Max Dyck said, “and that was the way it was going to be.” Total has conceded that it refused fuel to DAG — out of concern for the rescuers’ human rights record, the company said — but made fuel available to the Mozambican security services. DAG later hired an independent lawyer to investigate its record, who exonerated the company. Advertisement A second problematic order was an edict, handed down by Pouyanné’s executives in Paris in the months before the massacre, according to the plant security manager, that should the rebels attack, gate security guards at the gas plant were to let no one in. It was an instruction that could only have been drawn up by someone ignorant of the area’s geography, the man said.  If the Islamists blocked the three roads in and out of Palma, as conventional tactics would prescribe, the only remaining ways out for the population of 60,000 would be by sea or air — both routes that went through TotalEnergies’s facility, with its port and airport. By barring the civilians’ way, the company would be exposing them. So it proved. TotalEnergies soon had 25,000 fleeing civilians at its gates, according to an internal company report obtained under a freedom of information request by an Italian NGO, Recommon. Among the crowd were hundreds of project subcontractors and workers. Witnesses described to POLITICO how families begged TotalEnergies’ guards to let them in. Mothers were passing their babies forward to be laid in front of the gates. But TotalEnergies in Paris refused to allow its guards on the ground to open up. On March 28, the fifth day of the attack, Paris authorized a ferry to evacuate 1,250 staff and workers from the gas plant, and make a single return trip to pick up 1,250 civilians, who had sneaked inside the perimeter. That still left tens of thousands stranded at its gates. On March 29, a TotalEnergies community relations manager in Paris made a panicked call to Caroline Brodeur, a contact at Oxfam America. “He’s like, ‘There’s this huge security situation in Mozambique!’” Brodeur said. “An escalation of violence! We will need to evacuate people! Who can help us? Which NGO can support us with logistics?’” Thirty minutes later, the man called back. “Wait,” he told Brodeur. “Don’t do anything.” TotalEnergies’ senior managers had overruled him, the man said. No outsiders were to be involved. “I think he was trying to do the right thing,” Brodeur said in an interview with POLITICO. “But after that, Total went silent.” Over the next two months, the jihadis killed hundreds of civilians in and around Palma and the gas plant before the Rwandan intervention force pushed them out. The second former Anadarko and Total executive said the rebels might have attacked Palma, whoever was in charge at the gas project. But Total’s distant, centralized management made a “train wreck … inevitable.” Advertisement TotalEnergies said its response to the attack “mitigated as much as was reasonably possible the consequences.” Confirming the phone call to Oxfam, it added: “There was no effort by whoever within TotalEnergies to shut any possibility for external assistance down.” The company was especially adamant that Pouyanné was not at fault.  “The allegation that Mr. Pouyanné’s management of TotalEnergies exacerbated the devastation caused by the attacks in Mozambique is entirely unsubstantiated,” it said. “Mr. Pouyanné takes the safety and security of the staff extremely seriously.” In his television appearance this week, Pouyanné defended the company’s performance. “We completely evacuated the site,” he said. “We were not present at that time.” He said he considered that TotalEnergies, whose security teams had helped “more than 2,000 civilians evacuate the area,” “had carried out heroic actions.” ‘AN ALMOST PERFECT DINNER PARTY’  TotalEnergies’ troubles in Mozambique have come amid a wider slump in the country’s fortunes and reputation. Years of climate protests outside the company’s annual general meetings in central Paris peaked in 2023 when police dispersed activists with batons and tear gas. For the last two years, TotalEnergies has retreated behind a line of security checks and riot police at its offices in Défense, in the western part of Paris. Though the company intended 2024, its centenary year, as a celebration, the company succeeded mostly in looking past its prime. When Pouyanné took over in 2014, Total was France’s biggest company, and 37th in the world. Today, it is France’s seventh largest and not even in the global top 100.  Several French media houses chose the occasion of TotalEnergies’ 100th birthday to declare open season on the company, portraying it as a serial offender on pollution, corruption, worker safety, and climate change. Pouyanné has also presided over a rift with the French establishment. Last year, when he suggested listing in New York to boost the stock, French President Emmanuel Macron berated him in public. Advertisement The division grew wider a few weeks later when the French Senate concluded a six-month inquiry into the company with a recommendation that the formerly state-owned enterprise be partly taken back into public ownership.  The company has faced five separate lawsuits, civil and criminal, claiming it is breaking French law on climate protection and corporate conduct.  In a sixth case, brought by environmentalists in Paris last month, a judge ordered TotalEnergies to remove advertising from its website claiming it was part of the solution to climate change. Given the company’s ongoing investments in fossil fuels, that was misleading, the judge said, decreeing that TotalEnergies take down its messaging and upload the court’s ruling instead. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has also led protests against TotalEnergies’ East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline. That project, intended to pump oil 1,000 miles from Uganda across Tanzania to the Indian Ocean, is similarly embroiled in accusations of human rights abuses, drawing criticism from the European Parliament plus 28 banks and 29 insurance companies who have refused to finance it. Pouyanné has also taken hits to his personal brand. A low point came in 2022 when he chose the moment his countrymen were recovering from Covid and struggling with soaring fuel prices to defend his salary of €5,944,129 a year. He was “tired” of the accusation that he had received a 52 percent rise, he wrote on Twitter. His pay, he added, had merely been restored to pre-pandemic levels.  Overnight, the CEO became the unacceptable face of French capitalism. “Pouyanné lives in another galaxy, far, far away,” said one TV host. Under a picture of the CEO, an MP from the leftist France Unbowed movement wrote: “A name, a face. The obstacle in the way of a nation.” So heated and widely held is the contempt that in 2023 the company produced a guide for its French employees on how to handle it. Titled “An Almost Perfect Dinner Party,” the booklet lays out arguments and data that staff might use to defend themselves at social occasions. “Have you ever been questioned, during a dinner with family or friends, about a controversy concerning the Company?” it asked. “Did you have the factual elements to answer your guests?” ‘FALSE ALLEGATIONS’ The war crimes case lodged this week against TotalEnergies was filed in France, despite the alleged crimes occurring in Mozambique, because, it argues, TotalEnergies’ nationality establishes jurisdiction.  The case represents a dramatic example of the extension of international justice — the prosecution in one country of crimes committed in another. A movement forged in Nuremberg and Tokyo in the wake of World War II, the principles of international justice have been used more recently by national and international courts to bring warlords and dictators to trial — and by national courts to prosecute citizens or companies implicated in abuses abroad where local justice systems are weak. U.S. courts have ordered ExxonMobil and banana giant Chiquita to stand trial for complicity in atrocities committed in the late 1990s and early 2000s by soldiers or militias paid to protect their premises in Indonesia and Colombia, respectively. Exxon settled a week before the case opened in 2023. A Florida court ordered Chiquita to pay $38 million to the families of eight murdered Colombian men in June 2024; Chiquita’s appeal was denied that October.  In Sweden, two executives from Lundin Oil are currently on trial for complicity in war crimes after Sudanese troops and government militias killed an estimated 12,000 people between 1999 and 2003 as they cleared the area around a company drill site. The executives deny the accusations against them. Advertisement ECCHR has initiated several international justice cases. Most notably, in 2016, it and another legal non-profit, Sherpa, filed a criminal complaint in Paris against the French cement maker Lafarge, accusing its Syrian plant of paying millions of dollars in protection money to ISIS. Earlier this month, Lafarge and eight executives went on trial in Paris, accused of funding terrorism and breaking international sanctions — charges they deny. The war crimes complaint against TotalEnergies cites internal documents, obtained under freedom of information requests in Italy and the Netherlands, that show staff at the site knew the soldiers routinely committed human rights abuses against civilians while working for the company.  There were “regular community allegations of JTF [Joint Task Force] human rights violations,” read one, including “physical violence, and arrests/disappearances.” The report also referred to “troops who were allegedly involved in a [human rights] case in August [2021].” These were deemed so serious that TotalEnergies suspended pay to all 1,000 Joint Task Force soldiers and the army expelled 200 from the region, according to the internal document. The ECCHR complaint accuses TotalEnergies and “X”, a designation leaving open the possibility for the names of unspecified company executives to be added. Among those named in the document’s 56 pages are Pouyanné and five other TotalEnergies executives and employees. Favier, the company’s security chief, is not among them. TotalEnergies declined to make any of its executives or security managers available for interviews. In April 2024, when Pouyanné was questioned about his company’s Mozambique operation by the French Senate, he stated that while the government was responsible for the security of Cabo Delgado, “I can ensure the security of whichever industrial premises on which I might operate.” Asked about the container executions before the National Assembly this May, Pouyanné reaffirmed his faith in the Mozambican state, saying: “I think we help these countries progress if we trust their institutions and don’t spend our time lecturing them.” Apparently forgetting how he helped negotiate a security deal to place Mozambican soldiers on Total’s premises, however, he then qualified this statement, saying: “I can confirm that TotalEnergies has nothing to do with the Mozambican army.” A company spokesperson clarified this week: “TotalEnergies is not involved in the operations, command or conduct of the Mozambican armed forces.” In addition to the war crimes complaint, TotalEnergies’ Mozambique operation is already the subject of a criminal investigation opened in March by French state prosecutors. The allegation against the company is that it committed involuntary manslaughter by failing to protect or rescue workers left in Palma when ISIS carried out its massacre. Though POLITICO’s previous reporting found that 55 project workers were killed, TotalEnergies — through its subsidiary, Mozambique LNG — initially claimed it lost no one. “All the employees of Mozambique LNG, its contractors and subcontractors were safely evacuated from the Mozambique LNG Project site,” Maxime Rabilloud, Mozambique LNG’s managing director, told POLITICO last year. Advertisement That assertion notwithstanding, the death of at least one British subcontractor, Philip Mawer, is the subject of a formal inquest in the U.K.  In December 2024, the company’s Paris press office adjusted its position on the Palma attack. “TotalEnergies has never denied the tragedy that occurred in Palma and has always acknowledged the tragic loss of civilian lives,” it told POLITICO. For the first time, it also admitted “a small number” of project workers had been stationed outside its secure compound during the attack and exposed to the bloodbath.  A resolution to the French manslaughter investigation will take years. A decision on whether to open a formal investigation into the new claims against TotalEnergies for complicity in war crimes, let alone to bring the case to trial, is not expected until 2026, at the earliest. Should anyone eventually be tried for involuntary manslaughter, a conviction would carry a penalty of three years in prison and a €45,000 fine in France, escalating to five years and €75,000 for “a manifestly deliberate violation of a particular obligation of prudence or safety.” For complicity in war crimes, the sentence is five years to life. ‘CAN YOU ACTUALLY LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR?’ The war crimes accusation adds new uncertainty to the 20-year effort to develop Mozambique’s gas fields. In the aftermath of the 2021 Palma massacre, TotalEnergies declared a state of “force majeure,” a legal measure suspending all contracted work due to exceptional events. The following four and a half years of shutdown have cost TotalEnergies $4.5 billion, in addition to the $3.9 billion that Pouyanné originally paid Anadarko for the Mozambique operation. Billions more in costs can be expected before the plant finally pumps gas, which Total now predicts will happen in 2029. The manslaughter case and the war crimes complaint have the potential to cause further holdups by triggering due diligence obligations from TotalEnergies’ lenders, preventing them from delivering loans of $14.9 billion — without which Pouyanné has said his star project will collapse. Total also faces a Friends of the Earth legal challenge to a $4.7 billion U.S. government loan to the project. A TotalEnergies spokesperson said this week that the project was able to “meet due diligence requirements by lenders.” Advertisement All this comes as the situation on the ground remains unstable. After a successful Rwandan counter-attack from 2021 to 2023, the insurgency has returned, with the Islamists staging raids across Cabo Delgado, including Palma and the regional hub of Mocimboa da Praia. The International Organization for Migration says 112,185 people fled the violence between September 22 and October 13. Among those killed in the last few months were two gas project workers — a caterer, murdered in Palma, and a security guard, beheaded in a village south of town. TotalEnergies has consistently said that neither recent legal developments nor the upsurge in ISIS attacks will affect its plans to formally reopen its Mozambique operation by the end of the year. “This new complaint has no connection with the advancement of the Mozambique LNG project,” a spokesperson said this week. Pouyanné himself has spent much of this year insisting the project is “back on track” and its financing in place. In October, in a move to restart the project, the company lifted the force majeure.  Still, in a letter seen by POLITICO, Pouyanné also wrote to Mozambican President Daniel Chapo asking for 10 more years on its drilling license and $4.5 billion from the country to cover its cost overruns.  Mozambique, whose 2024 GDP was $22.42 billion — around a tenth of TotalEnergies’ revenues for the year of $195.61 billion — has yet to respond. A final issue for TotalEnergies’ CEO is whether a formal accusation of war crimes will fuel opposition to his leadership among shareholders. At 2024’s annual general meeting, a fifth of stockholders rejected the company’s climate transition strategy as too slow, and a quarter declined to support Pouyanné for a fourth three-year term. In 2025, several institutional investors expressed their opposition to Pouyanné by voting against his remuneration. In the statement, the TotalEnergies spokesperson pointed to the 2023 comments by Aschenbroich, the independent board member: “The Board unanimously looks forward to his continued leadership and his strategic vision to continue TotalEnergies’ transition.” Yet, there seems little prospect that his popularity will improve, inside or outside the company. “Patrick Pouyanné is everyone’s best enemy,” says Olivier Gantois, president of the French oil and gas lobby group UFIP-EM, “the scapegoat we love to beat up on.” Recently, the 62-year-old Pouyanné has begun to sound uncharacteristically plaintive. At TotalEnergies’ 2022 shareholder meeting, he grumbled that the dissidents might not like CO2 emissions, “but they sure like dividends.” At last year’s, he complained that TotalEnergies was in an impossible position. “We are trying to find a balance between today’s life and tomorrow’s,” he said. “It’s not because TotalEnergies stops producing hydrocarbons that demand for them will disappear.” Advertisement TotalEnergies’ articles of association require Pouyanné to retire before he reaches 67, in 2030, around the time that TotalEnergies currently forecasts gas production to begin in Mozambique. Henri Thulliez, the lawyer who filed both criminal complaints against TotalEnergies in Paris, predicts Pouyanné’s successors will be less attached to the project — for the simple reason that Mozambique turned out to be bad business. “You invest billions in the project, and the project has been completely suspended for four years now,” Thulliez says. “All your funders are hesitating. You’re facing two potential litigations in France, maybe at some point elsewhere, too. You have to ask: what’s the point of all of this?” As for Pouyanné, two questions will haunt his final years at TotalEnergies, he suggests. First, “Can shareholders afford to keep you in your job?” Second, “Can you actually look at yourself in the mirror?” Aude Le Gentil and Alexandre Léchenet contributed to this report.

Liz Truss looks out of place. In her neat pink jacket and white blouse, the former U.K. prime minister, who served a brief but eventful 49 days in the role back in 2022, strikes a contrast to the hoopla around her in the packed ballroom. Truss has come to Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia this October evening for the yearly “CEO summit,” drawing corporate figures, conservative influencers and donors for a night of fiery speeches about the triumphs of the MAGA movement — seasoned with the university’s Christian conservative tradition of mixing politics with prayer. Truss rises somberly as the crowd is enjoined to repent, soul-search and double down on tithe payments to the Baptist mega-church originally founded by the late televangelist Jerry Falwell. From the stage at the front of the room, she nods along to the heady mixture of God and politics, waiting to start a talk about the so-called “deep state” — which, she claims, includes the Bank of England and the U.K. Treasury. She announces that she is “on a mission” to transform the U.K., and when someone cries a noisy “amen,” that throws her for a moment before she resumes. If the juxtaposition between the ex-prime minister and fire-and-brimstone MAGA evangelicals seems unlikely — Truss later tells me she is still a stalwart of the Church of England, which is much more establishment than evangelical, even if she thinks it has gone a bit “woke” on social issues like trans rights — her presence here nonetheless represents an increasingly popular trend. A transatlantic “Magafication” movement is luring traditional conservatives from the U.K. to identify with the provocative style of U.S. President Donald Trump — and to try their hands at imitating him on his home turf, participating in rousing conservative speaking events across the U.S. For some, like Truss, these events are a lucrative, mood-enhancing chance to establish a new identity after the stinging defeat of the Tory party at the last general election in July 2024. For her more charismatic predecessor Boris Johnson, they are a chance to hear the roar of the crowd that more sedate speaking gigs with hedge funds and law firms can’t deliver. For Nigel Farage, from the ultraconservative Reform UK party, they are a chance to re-forge British politics in the image of Trump — a benediction and a bro-mance all in one. Whether it’s connecting with voters on either side of the Atlantic, however, is a less certain proposition. Most of the students going about their early evening outside the hall don’t seem to know who Truss is. “They kind of told us she was the leader in the U.K.,” muses one business studies major, “but I never heard of her.” Just a few weeks earlier, it was Johnson — the premier who rose on the wings of Brexit and preceded Truss in a carousel of Tory leaders after the Leave vote — who spoke on campus at the new-term convocation, following a sequence of Christian rock numbers.  “We’re in a congregation, folks, convocation — I mean, we’ve been convoked,” Johnson riffed. The ruffle-haired charm and Old Etonian levity were a preamble to a speech about the Christian university as a “bastion of freedom” and a paean to the memory of Charlie Kirk, the murdered conservative activist, whom Johnson hailed as “a martyr to our inalienable right as human beings to say what is in our hearts.” Later, he zoned in on the need to keep supporting Ukraine and lambasted the authoritarianism of Russian President Vladimir Putin — to a muted response from the audience. It’s not exactly a popular take here; there are no follow-up questions on the topic. And at the CEO event, none of the speakers mention Ukraine or the U.S. role in its future at all. Much like the isolationism Johnson encountered, the British MAGA trail is a sign of the times. Trump’s twofold electoral success is attractive to some U.K. conservatives who feel there must be something in the president’s iconoclasm they can bottle and take home. And unlike tight-lipped debate forums in the U.K., such events give them a chance to be noisy and outspoken, to paint arguments in bold and provocative colors. In other words, to be Brits on tour — but also more like Trump. And, for added appeal, these tours are a lucrative field for former inhabitants of 10 Downing Street. One person who has previously worked at the Washington Speakers Bureau, one of the main hubs for booking A-list speakers, said that the fee for a former premier is around $200,000 for a substantial speech, plus private plane travel and commercial flights for a support team. That is a level of luxury unparalleled at home. Well known figures like Johnson and David (Lord) Cameron, the British premier from 2010 to 2016, can aim even higher if travel is complicated. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Having “former prime minister” in front of your name in writing may open a lot of doors, but these politicians nonetheless have to tailor their resumes to appeal to American audiences.” Political CVs are duly bowdlerized to appeal to the target market of U.S. institutions and interests. Johnson’s profile at the Harry Walker agency in Washington, for instance, stresses his interest in deregulation and claims that he “successfully delivered Brexit — taking back control of U.K. law, marking the biggest constitutional change for half a century and enabling the United Kingdom to generate the fastest vaccine approval in the world.” This sequence of events and superlatives is debatable at best. Failures are routinely airbrushed out — Johnson’s premiership crashed in a mess of mismanagement during the pandemic and party divisions unleashed by the Brexit vote and his controversial handling of the aftermath, including the temporary dissolution of parliament to push through his legislation. But for characters whose legacy at home is either polarizing (like Johnson) or more likely to elicit a sly British eye roll outside a small fan base (Truss), there is also a degree of absolution on the American performance circuit that feels refreshing, in the same way that U.K. Indie bands stubbornly try to conquer America. Neither of the former Conservative leaders however, have as much to gain or lose by speaking at Trump-adjacent events as Farage, the leader of Britain’s Reform party — an “anti-woke,” Euro-skeptic, immigration-hostile party that is leading in the polls and attempting to expand its handful of lawmakers in the House of Commons into a party in contention for the next government. Farage has the closest access to Trump — a status previously enjoyed by Johnson, who last met Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2024 to discuss Ukraine. Proximity to Trump is the ultimate blessing, but it’s far harder to secure out of office than in it. Johnson endorsed Trump’s comeback at CPAC in February 2024 and wrote a column in support of Trump’s attack on the BBC for splicing footage of the January 6 uprising, which was deemed to be misleading and led to the abrupt departure of the broadcaster’s director general. Johnson was at Trump’s inauguration along with Truss (no other former U.K. politician was asked), but the invitations appear to have dropped off since chummy relations in Trump world can be ephemeral. Farage, by contrast, is a frequent visitor at both Mar-a-Lago and the White House. On November 7, he joined Trump at a fundraising auction for military veterans and has arranged to donate the prize of a walk with a centenarian veteran on Omaha beach, commemorating the D-Day landing site for U.S. forces. “I see him often,” he told me of his visits to Trump. Farage’s relationship with Trump could prove advantageous to him if he and his party claim greater power at home. He’d have the ear of the president, perhaps even the ability to sway Trump into a more sympathetic stance toward the U.K., even as the Americans embrace a more isolationist foreign policy. For now, Farage is certainly the most in-demand Brit on the MAGA circuit. He was the main speaker at the $500-a-head Republican party dinner in Tallahassee, Florida in March. Guests paid around $25,000 for a VIP ticket, which included having a photograph taken with the Reform UK leader. For the leader of a party that has a skimpy presence in parliament and faces the challenge of keeping its surge momentum and newsworthiness intact on a long road to the next election, being in the Trump limelight is a vote of confidence and a sign that he is taken seriously across the pond. The quid pro quo is performative loyalty — Farage, by turns genial and threatening in his manner, has echoed the president’s rancorous tone toward public broadcasters and media critics of MAGA. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- All of this transatlantic networking has threatened to ensnare the British visiting troupe in ethical quagmires about how their lucrative American freelancing relates to duties and strictures at home. Farage has attracted envious attention among his peers in parliament for earning around $1.5 million a year in addition to his MP salary, but he was forced to apologize recently for failing to declare the March dinner appearance and any fees associated with it in the official registry. So far, he’s revealed only that the trip was “remunerated in three separate installments over the course of two months,” without naming the funder.  Even Farage’s friendship with Trump — the envy of his compatriots on the MAGA trail — could present vulnerabilities among the U.K. electorate. Farage’s base of Reform voters largely supports Trumpian stances on immigration and diversity, and they love Trump’s personality. But beyond core Reform voters, the president does not enjoy broad support in the U.K. Recent polling shows only 16 percent of British people like the president. That’s a challenge for the Reform UK leader, whose party polls at just under 30 percent support in the U.K.; he needs to reach Trump-skeptical voters beyond his base in order to claim power. On top of those liabilities, avid Christian nationalism of the kind Truss encountered at the Liberty event presents a cultural problem for British politicians. Mixing ideology with religious fervor is awkward back home where church-going is largely regarded as a private matter, even if there are signs of more evangelical commitment among influential Christian Conservatives like Paul Marshall, a hedge-funder who recently acquired The Spectator, the house publication of well-heeled Tories, expanding its digital reach into America. Hardline evangelical stances could undermine support for campaigners like Farage, says Tim Bale, an expert on elections and political trends at Queen Mary College, University of London. Farage “probably needs to be careful of getting into things like anti-abortion arguments or even term limits on abortion. That does not play in the U.K.,” he told me. Duly, on their U.S. pilgrimages, both Truss and Johnson side-step direct engagement with the religiosity of their hosts. Johnson, who once joked that his own Anglican faith “comes and goes like Classic FM in the Chiltern hills,” basks in his reputation as a cheerful libertine with an array of past wives and mistresses. He fathered one child by an affair, and a scandal arising from allegations that he paid for an abortion during another affair got him sacked from his party’s front bench in 2004. (Johnson married his current wife, with whom he has four children, in 2021.) Religion isn’t the only subject that makes British MAGA-philes modulate their tone toward Trump. Johnson spoke of Trump’s “boisterous and irreverent” treatment of journalists, but dismissed it as minor compared to the attacks on the fourth estate in Moscow. Despite her previous support for Ukraine as Johnson’s foreign secretary, Truss awkwardly ducked questions on the Westminster Insider interview podcast when I pressed her about whether the administration should send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, which Trump opposes. “I’d have to know about the facts on the ground,” she said. But Farage, Johnson and Truss are betting that the benefits of being a transatlantic Trump acolyte well outweigh the risks. And there might be more to it than personal vanity tours and cushy earnings. The sense of grievances unheard or unaddressed that first elevated Trump to power have echoes across the Atlantic: worries about national decline, a feeling that traditional parties have lost touch with voters and a capacity for making Barnum-style entertainment out of the business of politics. It is a long way from being interrupted by the Speaker of the House of Commons shouting, “Order, order!”- Whether it is a flattering transatlantic afterlife for fallen leaders or a precursor to pitch for power at Westminster for Farage (who tells me that, like Trump, he is “building an unstoppable movement”) the MAGA circuit is the place to be — even if it’s not where everybody knows your name. It is also about embodying something these political pilgrims reckon their rivals fail to grasp: namely, the way one man’s MAGA movement has redefined Conservatism and opened up space for imitators in Europe to identify with more than their own election flops — and for newcomers to seek to remake their own political landscape. After all, if it happened to America, it might turn out to be a bankable export.

ATHENS — The Chinese embassy in Athens lashed out against U.S. Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle on Wednesday over her recent criticism of Beijing’s investments in Greece. Guilfoyle’s comments were a “malicious slander” against Sino-Greek trade relations and a “serious interference in Greek internal affairs,” an embassy spokesperson said in a written statement. Last week Guilfoyle said China’s state ownership of the Port of Piraeus, Greece’s largest such facility, was “unfortunate” and suggested it could be circumvented. “Something could be worked out, whether you pursue a path of enhancing output in other areas or perhaps that Piraeus could be for sale,” she opined. The Chinese embassy was unimpressed. “The port of Piraeus belongs to the Greek people; it is not a tool for undermining regional prosperity and stability, and under no circumstances should it fall victim to geopolitical confrontation,” the statement read. “At a time when the port of Piraeus is undergoing rapid development, the US with self-serving intentions, is encouraging Greece to terminate its contractual obligations and sell the port — this practice is a typical example of imposing its own thinking on others and reveals a mindset that attempts to undermine stability.” China invested heavily in debt-ridden Greece during the country’s lengthy economic crisis, a decade-long saga that started in 2009, with the goal of making it a hub for Chinese exports. At the time, companies from other Western countries were turning away from Athens, spooked by its financial woes and infamous bureaucracy. Cosco, China’s state-owned shipping company, secured a majority stake in the Port of Piraeus in 2016. Beijing intended that Piraeus become a key part — the so-called dragon’s head — of its Belt and Road global infrastructure project. “The port of Piraeus was handed over to the Chinese during the financial crisis in Greece, as they were the only ones who submitted a bid,” Greek Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lana Zochiou said during a Tuesday briefing in Athens. “Greece respects the agreements that have been conducted in the past.” Guilfoyle, a one-time conservative pundit on U.S.-based network Fox News, suggested Beijing’s current influence might be offset by increasing American investment in other infrastructure projects. Indeed, Athens is accelerating plans to develop a new port in Elefsina, a U.S.-backed project that officials say could serve as a counterweight to China’s presence in Piraeus. The idea was discussed on Tuesday at a meeting between Guilfoyle and Greek Development Minister Takis Theodorikakos, after which Athens moved to implement the plan. “We look forward to seeing Elefsina Port evolve into a logistics hub for the region,” Guilfoyle said after the meeting.