Denmark’s military intelligence service has for the first time classified the U.S. as a security risk, a striking shift in how one of Washington’s closest European allies assesses the transatlantic relationship. In its 2025 intelligence outlook published Wednesday, the Danish Defense Intelligence Service warned that the U.S. is increasingly prioritizing its own interests and “using its economic and technological strength as a tool of power,” including toward allies and partners. “The United States uses economic power, including in the form of threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will and no longer excludes the use of military force, even against allies,” it said, in a pointed reference to Washington trying to wrest control of Greenland from Denmark. The assessment is one of the strongest warnings about the U.S. to come from a European intelligence service. In October, the Dutch spies said they had stopped sharing some intelligence with their U.S. counterparts, citing political interference and human rights concerns. The Danish warning underscores European unease as Washington leverages industrial policy more aggressively on the global stage, and highlights the widening divide between the allies, with the U.S. National Security Strategy stating that Europe will face the “prospect of civilizational erasure” within the next 20 years. The Danish report also said that “there is uncertainty about how China-U.S. relations will develop in the coming years” as Beijing’s rapid rise has eroded the U.S.’s long-held position as the undisputed global power. Washington and Beijing are now locked in a contest for influence, alliances and critical resources, which has meant the U.S. has “significantly prioritized” the geographical area around it — including the Arctic — to reduce China’s influence. “The USA’s increasingly strong focus on the Pacific Ocean is also creating uncertainty about the country’s role as the primary guarantor of security in Europe,” the report said. “The USA’s changed policy places great demands on armaments and cooperation between European countries to strengthen deterrence against Russia.” In the worst-case scenario, the Danish intelligence services predict that Western countries could find themselves in a situation in a few years where both Russia and China are ready to fight their own regional wars in the Baltic Sea region and the Taiwan Strait, respectively.

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO. Russia’s shadow fleet just won’t go away. Countries in the Baltic Sea region have tried virtually every legal means of stopping this gnawing headache for every country whose waters have been traversed by these mostly dilapidated vessels — and yes, sinking them would be illegal. Now, these rust buckets are starting to cause an additional headache. Because they’re usually past retirement age, these vessels don’t last long before they need to be scrapped. This has opened a whole shadow trade that’s bound to cause serious harm to both humans and the environment. Earlier this month, the globally infamous Eagle S ship met its end in the Turkish port of Aliağa. The bow of the 229-meter oil tanker was on shore, its stern afloat, with cranes disassembling and moving its parts into a sealed area. The negative environmental impact of this landing method “is no doubt higher than recycling in a fully contained area,” noted the NGO Shipbreaking Platform on its website. But in the grand scheme of things, the Eagle S’s end was a relatively clean one. The 19-year-old Cook Islands-flagged oil tanker is a shadow vessel that had been transporting sanctioned Russian oil since early 2023. It then savaged an astonishing five undersea cables in the Gulf of Finland on Christmas Day last year, before being detained by the Finnish authorities. People are willing to own shadow vessels because they can make a lot of money transporting sanctioned cargo. However, as the tiny, elusive outfits that own them would struggle to buy shiny new vessels even if they wanted to, these ships are often on their last legs — different surveys estimate that shadow vessels have an average age of 20 years or more. Over the last few years, Russia’s embrace of the shadow fleet for its oil export has caused the fleet to grow dramatically, as tanker owners concluded they can make good money by selling their aging ships into the fleet. (They’d make less selling the vessels to shipbreakers.) Today, the shadow fleet encompasses the vast majority of retirement-age oil tankers. But after a few years, these tankers and ships are simply too old to sail, especially since shadow vessels undergo only the most cursory maintenance. To get around safely rules, less-than-scrupulous owners often sell their nearly dead ships to “final journey” firms, which have the sole purpose of disposing of them. | Ole Berg-Rusten/EPA For aged ships, the world of official shipping has what one might call a funeral process: a scrapping market. In 2024, 409 ships were scrapped through this official market, though calling it “official” makes it sound clean and safe, which, for the most part, it isn’t. A few of the ships scrapped last year were disassembled in countries like Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands, which follow strict rules regarding human and environmental safety. A handful of others were scrapped in Turkey, which has an OK record. But two-thirds were scrapped in Southeast Asia, where the shipbreaking industry is notoriously unsafe. To get around safely rules, less-than-scrupulous owners often sell their nearly dead ships to “final journey” firms, which have the sole purpose of disposing of them. These companies and their middlemen then make money by selling the ships’ considerable amount of steel to metal companies. But in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — the latter is the world’s most popular shipbreaking country — vessels are disassembled on beaches rather than sealed facilities, and by workers using little more than their hands. Of course, this makes the process cheap, but it also makes it dangerous. According to the NGO Shipbreaking Platform, last year, 15 South Asian shipbreaking workers lost their lives on the job and 45 were injured. Just one accident involving an oil tanker claimed the lives of six workers and injured another six. This brings us to the shadow fleet and its old vessels, as they, too, need to be scrapped. But many of them are under Western sanctions, which presents a challenge to their owners since international financial transactions are typically conducted in U.S. dollars. Initially, I had suspected that coastal nations would start finding all manner of shadow vessels abandoned in their waters and would be left having to arrange the scrapping. But as owners want to make money from the ships’ metal, this frightening scenario hasn’t come to pass. Instead, a shadow shipbreaking market is emerging. Open-source intelligence research shows that shadow vessel owners are now selling their sanctioned vessels to final-journey firms or middlemen in a process that mirror the official one. Given that these are mostly sanctioned vessels, the buyers naturally get a discount, which the sellers are more than willing to provide. After all, selling a larger shadow tanker for scrap value and making something to the tune of $10 to $15 million is more profitable than abandoning it. And how are the payments made? We don’t know for sure, but they’re likely in crypto or a non-U.S. dollar currency. These shady processes make the situation even more perilous for the workers doing the scrapping, not to mention for the environment. “Thanks to a string of new rules and regulations over the past five decades, shipping has become much safer, and that has reduced the number of accidents significantly in recent decades,” explained Mats Saether, a lawyer at the Nordisk legal services association in Oslo. “It’s regrettable that the shadow fleet is reversing this trend.” It certainly is. Indeed, the scrapping of shadow vessels is a practice that demands serious scrutiny. Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs could do a good deed for the environment and unfortunate shipbreaking workers by conducting investigations. And surely the Bangladeshi government wouldn’t want to see Bangladeshi lives lost because Russia needs oil for war? Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs could do a good deed for the environment and unfortunate shipbreaking workers by conducting investigations. | Ole Berg-Rusten/EPA There’s an opportunity here for Western governments to help too. They could offer shadow vessel owners legal leniency and a way to sell their ships back into the official fleet — if the owners provide the authorities with details about the fleet’s inner workings and vow to leave the business. Does that sound unlikely to succeed? Possibly. But that’s what people said about Italy’s pentiti system, and they were proven wrong. Besides, the shadow fleet is such a tumor on the shipping industry and the world’s waterways that almost any measure is worth a try.

Listen on * Spotify * Apple Music * Amazon Music In dieser Spezialfolge des Berlin Playbook Updates berichtet Rixa Fürsen von der Berliner Sicherheitskonferenz – wo Generäle, Verteidigungsminister und sicherheitspolitische Entscheider Europas über Abschreckung, Aufrüstung und die Zukunft der NATO sprechen. Partnerland in diesem Jahr: Schweden. Rixa trifft Pål Jonson, den schwedischen Verteidigungsminister und spricht mit ihm über die historische Kehrtwende seines Landes, die neue Rolle als NATO-Mitglied und die strategische Bedeutung des Nordens. Es geht um die Lage in der Ostsee, russische Provokationen, klare Regeln für den Einsatz von Drohnen und darum, wie eng Deutschland und Schweden inzwischen sicherheitspolitisch verzahnt sind. Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es morgens um 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team bringen euch jeden Morgen auf den neuesten Stand in Sachen Politik — kompakt, europäisch, hintergründig. Und für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Unser Berlin Playbook-Newsletter liefert jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Hier gibt es alle Informationen und das kostenlose Playbook-Abo. Mehr von Berlin Playbook-Host und Executive Editor von POLITICO in Deutschland, Gordon Repinski, gibt es auch hier:   Instagram: @gordon.repinski | X: @GordonRepinski.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned that the end of Russia’s war in Ukraine might lead to efforts to rekindle economic ties with Russia — including the restarting of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. As Europe faces the possibility of peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, Tusk described calls by European politicians to rebuild ties to Moscow at the eventual end of the war as “an alarm bell.” “[I know] it means that someone in Europe wants to restore Nord Stream 2, to have good business with oil and gas from Russia, and so on,” he said. “For me, it’s always like an alarm bell,” Tusk said in an interview with the Sunday Times. A major pipeline transporting gas from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea, Nord Stream 2 is described by critics as a strategic mistake and a symbol of Europe’s appeasement to Moscow. The pipeline was blown up in 2022 after the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A Ukrainian professional diver was later arrested over his suspected involvement in the sabotage. “The problem with North Stream 2 is not that it was blown up. The problem is that it was built,” Tusk wrote on X social media earlier this month. In the Sunday Times interview, Tusk said that a Polish court ruling blocking a German extradition request for one of the suspects in the Nord Stream sabotage means that Ukraine has a right to attack Russia-linked targets anywhere in Europe. The Polish leader also berated Europe’s complacency and its constant underrating of Putin’s expansionist threats. “We are talking about the end of the era of illusions in Europe — too late, I’m afraid. Too late to be well prepared for all the threats, but not too late to survive,” Tusk said. Also in the interview, Tusk described Britain’s exit from the EU as “one of the biggest mistakes in our [shared European] history”— 10 years after U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s ill-fated attempt to use the Brexit referendum as leverage to extract concessions from the EU. “And today I think it’s much more visible,” said Tusk, who was well-steeped in the first phase of the Brexit negotiations as president of the European Council at the time.  “Especially after Brexit, Poles realized that the objective situation in the U.K. is not much better than in Poland. I also know that Brits are starting to leave the U.K. and begin a life here in Poland,” he said.

A Helsinki court ruled Friday that it didn’t have jurisdiction over damage to undersea power and data cables in the Gulf of Finland allegedly caused by the captain and two officers of the Russia-linked oil tanker Eagle S. “The District Court has today issued a judgment dismissing the charge in the case … along with the claims for damages arising from the charge, as it was not possible to apply Finnish criminal law to the case,” the court said in a statement. Finland had filed criminal charges in August against Captain Davit Vadatchkoria and officers Robert Egizaryan and Santosh Kumar Chaurasia of the suspected shadow fleet ship Eagle S sailing under the flag of the Cook Islands, accusing them of damaging five telecom cables in the Gulf of Finland last December with the vessel’s anchor. Prosecutors sought prison terms of more than two years, warning the incident could have sparked blackouts and power price spikes. The incident fueled calls to crack down on Russia’s “shadow fleet” and prompted NATO to step up seabed patrols following a string of cable disruptions in the region. The trial was also seen as a test case for holding actors accountable for attacks on critical seabed infrastructure. But it collapsed over maritime law provisions and doubts about intent. The court sided with the defense, ruling the damage occurred outside Finnish jurisdiction and ordering the state to reimburse the legal fees of the defendants. Judges acknowledged the cable breaks caused economic damage to Finnish firms, but said the risk of widespread blackouts was unlikely as it required “other serious disturbances” alongside extreme weather. The three defendants, who denied any wrongdoing, were barred from leaving Finland for nine months but departed in September after their travel ban was lifted.

PARIS — The French military on Wednesday arrested two crew members on a tanker suspected of belonging to Russia’s shadow fleet and of having been involved in drone disturbances in Denmark last week, according to the French prosecutor’s office. French military personal boarded the Boracay, a Benin-flagged tanker that is suspected of being used by Russia to bypass EU sanctions, according to pictures taken by the AFP news agency. The tanker is also suspected of having served as a launchpad for the drones seen in Denmark last week ahead of an EU leaders’ summit in Copenhagen. The Boracay was positioned more than 50 kilometers outside the Port of Saint-Nazaire on Wednesday after travelling from the Russian Port of Primorsk in the Baltic Sea, according to shipping data checked by POLITICO. The two crew members, the captain and his deputy, were arrested on charges of refusing to obey a summons and failing to justify the ship’s nationality, according to the prosecutor’s office. Discussions between EU leaders in Copenhagen Oct. 1 were dominated by Russia drone incursions against EU countries and a proposal by the European Commission to create a “drone wall” on its eastern frontier in response to the sightings. Speaking after the arrests, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she couldn’t comment on “specific investigations” but noted that countries were “facing lots of problems with the shadow fleet in the Baltic Sea.” On Wednesday morning, French President Emmanuel Macron said “a very important operation” was ongoing in relation to the Boracay. “There were very important offenses committed by the crew which justify the legal proceedings,” he said on arrival at the summit. Macron refrained, however, from linking the ship to the drone sightings. According to the Guardian, the Kremlin said on Wednesday it had no information about a ship suspected of belonging to the Russian shadow fleet off the coast of France. Gabriel Gavin contributed reporting.

NATO will send more warplanes and air defense systems to the eastern flank in response to Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace, the alliance’s top officials announced Friday. “Today, NATO is launching Eastern Sentry to bolster our posture along eastern flank,” Secretary-General Mark Rutte told reporters. On Wednesday, Polish and Dutch fighter jets scrambled to shoot down Russian drones in Poland’s airspace, in one of most serious violations of a NATO country’s sovereignty. Eastern Sentry, which starts Friday, will be modeled after Baltic Sentry, where frigates, aircraft and drones monitor the Baltic Sea. NATO allies will also experiment with new technologies such as counter-drones, sensors and weapons in Eastern Sentry, said Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen. Alexus Grynkewich. The mission — described as an “entire new defense design” — will also integrate current “individual air policing actions and individual ground based air defenses.” Denmark, France, the U.K. and Germany have already offered contributions including fighter jets, ships and ground-based air defense systems. Grynkewich hailed Wednesday’s operation in Polish airspace as a success, but said NATO is working to get “lower cost weapons that we can use to defend ourselves to make this a sustainable operation over time.” Rutte — echoing U.S. President Donald Trump but going against Poland and Germany’s assessment — refused to explicitly say that the Russian incursion was intentional. “We are still assessing,” he said. “Whether or not Russia’s actions were deliberate, they violated NATO air space. The question is relevant but not that relevant — in both cases, it’s reckless, unacceptable.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants the EU to help front-line countries monitor and defend their borders against potential Russian aggression — backing a long-standing request from Poland and Baltic nations. “There is no doubt: Europe’s eastern flank keeps all of Europe safe. From the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. This is why we must invest in supporting it through an Eastern Flank Watch,” she told European lawmakers in her State of the Union address Wednesday morning. “This means giving Europe independent strategic capabilities. We must invest in real-time space surveillance so that no movement of forces goes unseen. We must heed the call of our Baltic friends and build a drone wall,” the German politician added. Von der Leyen’s comments came only a few hours after Poland scrambled fighter jets to shoot down Russian drones that entered its airspace. Back in June, Romania also sent warplanes to monitor Russian drones approaching its border. Wednesday’s incident over Poland has been perceived by Western allies as a way for Russian President Vladimir Putin to test NATO’s defenses. Front-line countries — especially Poland, Estonia and Lithuania — have long called for the EU to contribute financially to the defense of their borders. They argue their efforts will protect the bloc as a whole against any attack from Russia, as military and intelligence top brass have warned in the past that Putin could target Baltic nations or Poland to test NATO’s mettle. They have successfully pushed for money from the EU’s loans-for-weapons SAFE scheme to be easily available for items including drones and anti-drone systems. Warsaw launched a project last year dubbed East Shield that aims to strengthen the Polish border with Russia and Belarus, while Baltic nations are starting to teach children to build and fly drones. Countries such as Lithuania are also behind the idea of a “drone wall,” which they see as a permanent presence of unmanned aerial vehicles on their borders to monitor threats. A few days before giving her State of the Union address, von der Leyen went on a front-line state tour that took her to countries including Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. “Last week, I saw this for myself when I visited front-line member states. They know best the threat Russia poses,” she told European lawmakers on Wednesday. Von der Leyen also announced the EU will enter into a so-called Drone Alliance with Ukraine and front-load €6 billion from the G7-led Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration (ERA). Russia’s war in Ukraine has highlighted the importance of drones in warfare — they can be used for surveillance purposes and as lethal weapons to reach remote or dangerous areas. Ukraine is widely perceived as being innovative with the technology, namely through the use of AI and automation. Von der Leyen gave few details about the defense road map she has to present to EU leaders in October, but did say she wants to launch a so-called European Semester of Defence to monitor capitals’ progress in military buildup.

WARSAW — Karol Nawrocki, a historian and amateur boxer aligned with U.S. President Donald Trump, will be inaugurated as Polish president on Wednesday amid a hubbub over his football hooligan past and a property deal that triggered a criminal probe. While the presidency will grant the nationalist politician immunity from prosecution, that has hardly quelled the noise surrounding a series of sometimes surreal scandals that bubbled to the surface in the run-up to the June 1 election, which Nawrocki won with 50.98 percent of the vote. The controversies range from his bizarre use of a crime writer alter ego to lavish praise upon himself to far more serious allegations of involvement with gangsters and prostitution at a luxury hotel on the Baltic Sea. Former President Lech Wałęsa, a Nobel-laureate dissident who led the Solidarity movement that toppled Communist rule, said he was refusing to attend the “disgraceful spectacle” of Nawrocki’s inauguration. Here’s a recap of the most contentious past activities that are likely to dog the new president of Poland, a NATO heavyweight and the EU’s fifth most populous country. APARTMENT INVESTIGATION Prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into whether an elderly man — identified only as Jerzy Ż — was swindled between 2012 and 2017 into transferring ownership of his apartment in the northern city of Gdańsk. The prosecutors do not directly name Nawrocki but are probing the circumstances of his acquisition of the property. The apartment probe follows three formal complaints, including one from Gdańsk Mayor Aleksandra Dulkiewicz, who hails from the liberal and pro-EU Civic Coalition party of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The probe centers on whether Jerzy Ż was deceived into “unfavorably” transferring ownership of property worth €28,000 in exchange for promises of “care and assistance in everyday life.” Fraud carries a penalty of six months to eight years in prison but Nawrocki is in no immediate danger. As head of state, he is answerable only to the State Tribunal, a special court for top officials, putting him beyond the reach of ordinary criminal courts during his five-year term. After that, he could once again face legal action, though much will depend on whether he stands for a second term. Nawrocki insists he did nothing wrong and acted only out of good intentions toward Jerzy Ż. “I have numerous witnesses who can attest that I offered assistance to Mr. Jerzy—providing him with financial support and running errands on his behalf. During my foreign trips, it was my colleagues and associates who ensured he continued to receive my support,” Nawrocki said in an interview with Wirtualna Polska, a major news website. “Looking you squarely in the eye as president-elect, I can say: ‘I have nothing to be ashamed of,’” Nawrocki added. The case has only been made more turbid by a report in the Gazeta Wyborcza daily citing Mariusz Duszyński, spokesperson for Gdańsk’s prosecutor’s office, that the same Jerzy Ż was jailed in 2011 for sexual assault. PIMPING DENIALS The most egregious accusation — even leveled against Nawrocki by Prime Minister Tusk — is that the incoming president was involved in pimping at a luxury hotel at Sopot, a beach resort on the Baltic Sea. It is an assertion Nawrocki strenuously denies. Tusk accused the leadership of the conservative nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, which supported Nawrocki’s presidential bid, of knowing “about the connections with the gangsters, about ‘arranging for girls’ … about the apartment fraud and other matters still hidden.” The most egregious accusation — even leveled against Karol Nawrocki by Prime Minister Donald Tusk — is that the incoming president was involved in pimping at a luxury hotel at Sopot, a beach resort on the Baltic Sea. | Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images The story first appeared in May on Onet, another major news website, which gathered testimony that Nawrocki had arranged prostitutes for guests of the hotel where he was working for security — in return for a cut of the cash for himself. Following the Onet report, a member of parliament for Civic Coalition appeared on television to vouch for it. “I have knowledge that all the information presented … in the Onet article is simply true,” Agnieszka Pomaska, a member of parliament for the region where the alleged offenses took place, told TVN24. Nawrocki sued Onet over the story. Still, his critics point out that he, significantly, did not do so under the special fast-track “election mode” of court proceedings that would have required a final decision within 48 hours for allegations made during a campaign. Now, the case will likely take months, if not years, to resolve. Asked by Wirtualna Polska whether the allegations were false, Nawrocki said: “Absolutely. I was slandered.” “The hotel hosted everyone from [Russian President] Vladimir Putin to political elites and music stars performing at the Sopot Festival. What guests do for entertainment is their business — I had nothing to do with it. My job was to ensure their safety and security,” he added. FOOTBALL HOOLIGANISM Nawrocki admitted he took part in a brawl between hooligans from rival football clubs from Gdańsk and Poznań in 2009 when he was 26 and had just begun work in the Institute for National Remembrance, a state agency tracking Nazi and Communist crimes against Poles. The fight, which the keen pugilist Nawrocki called “sparring,” had been investigated at the time, with Wirtualna Polska reporting that some of the participants had serious criminal records. During the election campaign, Nawrocki embraced his on-brand heritage as a fighter, saying he took part in “sporting, noble fights.” “When I sparred with someone — let me stress, always with willing participants — I never ran a background check or asked for their criminal record. It’s entirely possible that some of them had done bad things. But that doesn’t mean their actions reflect on me in any way,” Nawrocki said in the interview for Wirtualna Polska. The president-elect conceded, however, that he overstepped by calling the brawls “noble” during the campaign. MORE APARTMENTS IN GDAŃSK Another allegation concerns Nawrocki’s personal use of apartments at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, a national institution, when he was its director of the between 2017 and 2021. The case was first reported by Gazeta Wyborcza in early 2025. “As director of the Museum of the Second World War, Nawrocki stayed in a deluxe apartment within the museum’s hotel complex for half a year—despite living just 5 kilometers away. The PiS-backed presidential candidate did not pay for the accommodation and now denies any wrongdoing,” the newspaper wrote. Following the report, the prosecutor’s office in Gdańsk opened an investigation in February into allegations that Nawrocki stayed in the apartments free of charge for a total of 201 days. The probe is ongoing. If the apartments had been rented out commercially, Gazeta Wyborcza claimed, the museum would have made 120,000 złoty (€28,000). Nawrocki denies he made the museum apartments his second home, insisting he stayed there during the coronavirus quarantine and also used the apartments for official meetings with domestic and foreign guests. Another investigation — though not formally targeting Nawrocki—concerns the disappearance of 8,000 albums of historical materials from the main exhibition of the museum. The albums went missing from museum storage between April and June 2020, during Nawrocki’s tenure as director. The current museum leadership believes the items were destroyed, resulting in financial damage of no less than 200,000 złoty. The investigation is ongoing. ALTER EGO Within the realm of the odd rather than potentially criminal, a 2018 interview given to a Gdańsk branch of TVP, Poland’s public broadcaster, resurfaced during the election campaign. The interview was with a Tadeusz Batyr, a writer exploring the Polish underworld of the 1990s. He heaped praise on a book by Nawrocki. The twist? Batyr turned out to be Nawrocki himself, his face blurred and voice distorted to protect his identity from mobsters. Nawrocki defended himself by saying:  “Literary pseudonyms are nothing new in Polish journalism, literature and academia.”