The publisher of children’s book series Franklin the Turtle hit out at “unauthorized” depictions of its main character after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a mock cover of Franklin shooting at drug traffickers. Hegseth shared Sunday an image of a children’s book, titled Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists, showing the eponymous turtle dressed in military gear, standing in a helicopter and firing a weapon at boats loaded with cargo and men with guns. “For your Christmas wish list,” Hegseth captioned the picture. His post was a reference to the Trump administration’s deadly strikes on suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific in recent months, which have killed more than 80 people, according to the Pentagon, and raised concerns among lawmakers and others about the limits of executive power and the strikes’ compliance with international law. “Franklin the Turtle is a beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy, and inclusivity,” the publisher Kids Can Press wrote in a statement on X. “We strongly condemn any denigrating, violent, or unauthorized use of Franklin’s name or image, which directly contradicts these values,” the publishing house added. The Washington Post reported last week that Hegseth directed the U.S. military to kill any survivors in a Sept. 2 strike on a boat off the Trinidad coast that initially left two people clinging to the smoking wreckage. POLITICO has not independently verified the Post’s reporting. The White House on Monday confirmed a second strike in September had killed injured civilians after the first effort failed — but top officials in the Trump administration have stated pointedly it was U.S. Special Operations Command head Adm. Frank Bradley’s call, not Hegseth’s. Bradley was “within his authority and the law” in conducting the second strike, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said. Hegseth himself called Bradley “an American hero” and pledged his “100% support” in a post on X that placed responsibility for the Sept. 2 strike on the admiral. “I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since,” Hegseth wrote. The Franklin books see the young turtle dealing with life’s everyday challenges, such as Franklin Goes to the Hospital and Franklin Rides a Bike, and teach about themes such as courage and empathy.

BRUSSELS — Russia’s drones and agents are unleashing attacks across NATO countries and Europe is now doing what would have seemed outlandish just a few years ago: planning how to hit back. Ideas range from joint offensive cyber operations against Russia, and faster and more coordinated attribution of hybrid attacks by quickly pointing the finger at Moscow, to surprise NATO-led military exercises, according to two senior European government officials and three EU diplomats. “The Russians are constantly testing the limits — what is the response, how far can we go?” Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braže noted in an interview. A more “proactive response is needed,” she told POLITICO. “And it’s not talking that sends a signal — it’s doing.” Russian drones have buzzed Poland and Romania in recent weeks and months, while mysterious drones have caused havoc at airports and military bases across the continent. Other incidents include GPS jamming, incursions by fighter aircraft and naval vessels, and an explosion on a key Polish rail link ferrying military aid to Ukraine. “Overall, Europe and the alliance must ask themselves how long we are willing to tolerate this type of hybrid warfare … [and] whether we should consider becoming more active ourselves in this area,” German State Secretary for Defense Florian Hahn told Welt TV last week. Hybrid attacks are nothing new. Russia has in recent years sent assassins to murder political enemies in the U.K., been accused of blowing up arms storage facilities in Central Europe, attempted to destabilize the EU by financing far-right political parties, engaged in social media warfare, and tried to upend elections in countries like Romania and Moldova. But the sheer scale and frequency of the current attacks are unprecedented. Globsec, a Prague-based think tank, calculated there were more than 110 acts of sabotage and attempted attacks carried out in Europe between January and July, mainly in Poland and France, by people with links to Moscow. “Today’s world offers a much more open — indeed, one might say creative — space for foreign policy,” Russian leader Vladimir Putin said during October’s Valdai conference, adding: “We are closely monitoring the growing militarization of Europe. Is it just rhetoric, or is it time for us to respond?” Russia may see the EU and NATO as rivals or even enemies — former Russian President and current deputy Kremlin Security Council head Dmitry Medvedev last month said: “The U.S. is our adversary.” However, Europe does not want war with a nuclear-armed Russia and so has to figure out how to respond in a way that deters Moscow but does not cross any Kremlin red lines that could lead to open warfare. That doesn’t mean cowering, according to Swedish Chief of Defense Gen. Michael Claesson. “We cannot allow ourselves to be fearful and have a lot of angst for escalation,” he said in an interview. “We need to be firm.” So far, the response has been to beef up defenses. After Russian war drones were shot down over Poland, NATO said it would boost the alliance’s drone and air defenses on its eastern flank — a call mirrored by the EU. Even that is enraging Moscow. Europeans “should be afraid and tremble like dumb animals in a herd being driven to the slaughter,” said Medvedev. “They should soil themselves with fear, sensing their near and agonizing end.” SWITCHING GEARS Frequent Russian provocations are changing the tone in European capitals. After deploying 10,000 troops to protect Poland’s critical infrastructure following the sabotage of a rail line linking Warsaw and Kyiv, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Friday accused Moscow of engaging in “state terrorism.” After the incident, the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said such threats posed an “extreme danger” to the bloc, arguing it must “have a strong response” to the attacks. Last week, Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto slammed the continent’s “inertia” in the face of growing hybrid attacks and unveiled a 125-page plan to retaliate. In it he suggested establishing a European Center for Countering Hybrid Warfare, a 1,500-strong cyber force, as well as military personnel specialized in artificial intelligence. “Everybody needs to revise their security procedures,” Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski added on Thursday. “Russia is clearly escalating its hybrid war against EU citizens.” WALK THE TALK Despite the increasingly fierce rhetoric, what a more muscular response means is still an open question. Part of that is down to the difference between Moscow and Brussels — the latter is more constrained by acting within the rules, according to Kevin Limonier, a professor and deputy director at the Paris-based GEODE think tank. “This raises an ethical and philosophical question: Can states governed by the rule of law afford to use the same tools … and the same strategies as the Russians?” he asked. So far, countries like Germany and Romania are strengthening rules that would allow authorities to shoot down drones flying over airports and militarily sensitive objects. National security services, meanwhile, can operate in a legal gray zone. Allies from Denmark to the Czech Republic already allow offensive cyber operations. The U.K. reportedly hacked into ISIS’s networks to obtain information on an early-stage drone program by the terrorist group in 2017. Allies must “be more proactive on the cyber offensive,” said Braže, and focus on “increasing situational awareness — getting security and intelligence services together and coordinated.” In practice, countries could use cyber methods to target systems critical to Russia’s war effort, like the Alabuga economic zone in Tatarstan in east-central Russia, where Moscow is producing Shahed drones, as well as energy facilities or trains carrying weapons, said Filip Bryjka, a political scientist and hybrid threat expert at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “We could attack the system and disrupt their functioning,” he said. Europe also has to figure out how to respond to Russia’s large-scale misinformation campaigns with its own efforts inside the country. “Russian public opinion … is somewhat inaccessible,” said one senior military official. “We need to work with allies who have a fairly detailed understanding of Russian thinking — this means that cooperation must also be established in the field of information warfare.” Still, any new measures “need to have plausible deniability,” said one EU diplomat. SHOW OF FORCE NATO, for its part, is a defensive organization and so is leery of offensive operations. “Asymmetric responses are an important part of the conversation,” said one NATO diplomat, but “we aren’t going to stoop to the same tactics as Russia.” Instead, the alliance should prioritize shows of force that illustrate strength and unity, said Oana Lungescu, a former NATO spokesperson and fellow with London’s Royal United Services Institute think tank. In practice, that means rapidly announcing whether Moscow is behind a hybrid attack and running ‘no-notice’ military exercises on the Russian border with Lithuania or Estonia. Meanwhile, the NATO-backed Centre of Excellence on Hybrid Threats in Helsinki, which brings together allied officials, is also “providing expertise and training” and drafting “policies to counter those threats,” said Maarten ten Wolde, a senior analyst at the organization.  “Undoubtedly, more should be done on hybrid,” said one senior NATO diplomat, including increasing collective attribution after attacks and making sure to “show through various means that we pay attention and can shift assets around in a flexible way.” Jacopo Barigazzi, Nicholas Vinocur, Nette Nöstlinger, Antoaneta Roussi and Seb Starvecic contributed reporting.

LONDON — Criminal networks are “weaponizing children” to commit torture and murder by recruiting them through multiplayer video games and smartphones — and parents often have no idea what’s happening, the boss of Europe’s law enforcement agency warns.  These groups now pose the greatest single criminal threat to the European Union because they destabilize society by targeting children and destroying families, said Catherine De Bolle, executive director of Europol.  “The weaponization of children for organized crime groups is what is going on at the moment on European soil,” she said in a joint interview with POLITICO and Welt. “They weaponize the children to torture or to kill. It’s not about petty theft anymore. It’s about big crimes.”  The “worst case” Europol has seen was of a young boy who was ordered “to kill his younger sister, which happened,” she said. “It’s cruel, we have never seen this before.”  She even suggested that children and young people are being used by hostile states and hybrid threat perpetrators as unwitting spies to eavesdrop on government buildings.  The Europol chief is in a unique position to describe the criminal landscape threatening European security, as head of the EU agency responsible for intelligence coordination and supporting national police. In a wide-ranging discussion, De Bolle also cautioned that the growth of artificial intelligence is having a dramatic impact, multiplying online crime, described how drug smugglers are now using submarines to ship cocaine from South America to Europe, and described an increasing threat to European society from Russia’s hybrid war.  De Bolle’s comments come amid an ongoing debate about how to police the internet and social media to prevent young and vulnerable people from coming to harm. The greatest threat facing the EU from organized crime right now comes from groups that have “industrialized” the recruitment of children, she said: “Because [they are] the future of the European Union. If you lose them, you lose everything.” FROM GAMING TO GROOMING Criminals often begin the process of grooming children by joining their multiplayer video games, which have a chat function, and gaining their trust by discussing seemingly harmless topics like pets and family life.  Then, they will switch to a closed chat where they will move on to discussing more sinister matters, and persuade the child to share personal details like their address. At that point, the criminals can bribe or blackmail the child into committing violence, including torture, self-harm, murder and even suicide.  Europol is aware of 105 instances in which minors were involved in violent crimes “performed as a service” — including 10 contract killings. Many attempted murders fail because children are inexperienced, the agency said. “We also have children who do not execute the order and then, for instance, [the criminals] kill the pet of the child, so that the child knows very well, ‘We know where you live, we know who you are, you will obey, and if you don’t, we will go even further to kill your mother or your father,’” De Bolle warned.  Criminals will also offer children money to commit a crime — as much as $20,000 for a killing, sometimes they pay and sometimes they don’t. While these networks often target children who are vulnerable because they have psychological problems or are bullied at school, healthy and happy children are also at risk, De Bolle said. “It’s also about others, youngsters who are not vulnerable but just want new shoes — shoes that are very expensive.”  Sometimes young people are even recruited for hybrid war by state actors, she said. “You also have it with hybrid threat actors that are looking for the crime as a service model — the young perpetrators to listen to the foreign state, to listen to the communication around buildings.” Once police catch a child, the criminals abandon them and move to groom a new child to turn into a remote-operated weapon.  “Parents blame themselves in a lot of cases. They do not understand how it is possible,” she said. “The problem is you don’t have access to everything your child does and you respect also the privacy of your children. But as a parent, you need to talk about the dangers of the internet.” DRUGS AND AI ARE ALSO A PROBLEM Among the new criminal methods crossing Europol’s desks, two stand out: The use of so-called narco-submarines to smuggle drugs like cocaine from South America into the EU and the growth in AI technology fueling an explosion in online fraud that enforcement agencies are virtually powerless to stop.  Instead of shipping cocaine into the ports of Hamburg, Rotterdam and Antwerp through containers, criminals have diversified their methods, De Bolle said. One key route is to sail semi-submersible vessels from South America to Europe’s North Atlantic coast, where speedboats meet them and offload the illegal cargo via Portugal, according to Europol’s information.  While Europe now is “overflooded with drugs,” criminal organizations may make more money, more easily through online fraud, she said. “Artificial intelligence is a multiplier for crime,” she said. “Everything is done a thousand times more and faster. The abuse of artificial intelligence lies in phishing emails — you do not recognize it very easily with phishing emails anymore because the language is correct.”  She said “romance fraud” is also “booming,” as “people look for love, also online.” “With deepfakes and with voice automation systems, it’s very difficult for a law enforcement authority to recognise that from a genuine picture. The technology is not there yet to [tell] the difference,” De Bolle added.  De Bolle said Europol needed to be able to access encrypted phone messages with a judge’s authorization to disrupt these criminal networks. “When a judge decides that we need to have access to data, the online providers should be forced to give us access to this encrypted communication,” she said. Otherwise, “we will be blind and then we cannot do our job.”

Unidentified drones affected Belgian airports from Thursday evening into Friday morning, amid an escalating crisis in the European skies. Liège Airport briefly suspended air traffic twice, around 10 p.m. on Thursday night and again Friday morning around 6 a.m., each time for about an hour, according to public broadcaster VRT. The airport handles mainly cargo, with only a few passenger flights each day. Brussels airport also had to divert one flight to Amsterdam Thursday night after a drone was detected nearby. Air traffic at Brussels Airport was disrupted by more drone sightings on Tuesday evening. As the continent’s issues become more widespread — and some European governments have pointed the finger of blame at Russia — drones were also spotted over Antwerp’s port area on Thursday night. For consecutive nights on Tuesday and Wednesday, drones were also observed above the Royal School for Non-Commissioned Officers in the Flemish city of Sint-Truiden. Belgium held a National Security Council meeting Thursday, after which Interior Minister Bernard Quintin said that authorities had the situation “under control.” Defense Minister Theo Francken vowed to strengthen Belgium’s National Air Security Center (NASC). “The NASC in Bevekom must be fully operational by January 1,” he wrote in a social media post. “This center will ensure better monitoring and protection of Belgian airspace and prepare Belgium for future challenges in air security,” he added.

Iran is set to face the renewal of United Nations sanctions over its nuclear program starting Sunday after a last-minute effort to delay the reimposition of the measures failed on Friday. Germany, France and the U.K. have led the push to restore the sanctions, which were lifted in a 2015 deal that collapsed three years later with the withdrawal of the U.S. Iran has recalled its ambassadors from Berlin, Paris and London in response, state news agency Mehr reported Saturday. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian condemned the renewal of the sweeping economic and military sanctions as “unfair, unjust and illegal,” the BBC reported. He accused foreign powers of seeking a pretext to destabilize the region. Efforts by China and Russia to postpone the reimposition of the sanctions failed to garner enough support in the U.N. Security Council on Friday.  That failure came after last-ditch talks between Iran and European officials, including the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas, ended without success earlier this week.  The sanctions include an arms embargo, a ban on uranium enrichment, a ban on activity related to some ballistic missiles, and potential inspections of Iran Air and Iran Shipping Lines cargo, as well as a freeze of assets and travel bans. Pezeshkian said Iran needed reassurances that Israel would not attack Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to normalize its uranium enrichment program. He reiterated that the country was not pursuing nuclear weapons. Iran barred international nuclear inspectors from visiting its facilities after Israel and the U.S. bombed several of its sites during the June conflict that Iranian authorities report killed more than 1,000 people. “The United States has betrayed diplomacy, but it is the E3 (Britain, Germany and France) which have buried it,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi told the United Nations on Friday.

ATHENS — At least two crew members of a Greek-owned vessel were wounded and two were missing on Monday in the Red Sea, according to Greek government officials and the vessel’s owner. In the second comparable attack in the Red Sea in 24 hours, the Liberian-flagged Eternity C cargo ship was targeted by sea drones and skiffs off Hodeidah, 50 nautical miles west of the Yemeni capital Sanaa, which is controlled by the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels. No one has claimed responsibility for the strikes. “The vessel was en route to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia when it was struck. Its crew includes 22 Filipinos and three Indian armed guards,” an official from Cosmoship, the Greek company that owns the vessel, told POLITICO. It was not clear whether the attack had ended, as the comms were impacted and the crew could not be contacted, the official added. Two senior Greek government officials confirmed the attack and the nationalities of the people on board. The attack came hours after Houthi militants claimed responsibility for a similar assault on another Greek-owned ship in the Red Sea, the Liberian-flagged bulk carrier Magic Seas, which they claimed to have sunk. The vessel was attacked on Sunday with drones, missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, forcing its crew to abandon ship. They were picked up by a passing vessel and transferred to Djibouti. POLITICO contacted a spokesperson for the Houthi rebels by email but didn’t immediately receive a reply. Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, the Houthis have fired at Israel and at shipping in the Red Sea, disrupting global trade in what the group has described as acts of solidarity with the Palestinians. The Israeli military said it struck Houthi-held Yemeni ports early Monday for the first time in nearly a month.