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In this edition, we hear how Putin is waging a shadow war to destabilise the West and attack our way of life, and discuss plans for investment into AI.
‘Brussels, my love?’ comes to you this week from the European Parliament in Strasbourg, where MEPs met for the second voting session of 2025.The Chair of the Ukrainian Parliament paid a surprise visit to remind them that nothing about Ukraine should be decided without Ukraine. Ruslan Stefanchuk stressed how much his embattled country needs defence systems, aircraft and much more investment in its military industry.Our panel comprised a trio of MEPs: Markéta Gregorova of the Czech Pirate Party, Estonian Riho Terras of the European People’s Party, and Stine Bosse, a Danish liberal with Renew Europe.They discussed a less talked about aspect of the Kremlin’s aggression – not Russian boots on the ground, but rather Putin’s shadow war. The EU lawmakers also reflected on the one year anniversary of the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.“In Russia there is a joke,” Riho Terras began, imagining Putin’s advent calendar. “You open the window and you fall out of it,” he said. “I mean, there are so many people who are losing their lives – Navalny is just one example.”Markéta Gregorova is very worried about the state of democracy today.“Fascism is on the rise,” she said. “If anybody ever wondered how [it was] in the ’30s in Germany – well, now we are living through it,” she warned.The panel also dived into both the challenges and threats posed by AI, but agreed in the end that the benefits outweigh the risks.“Even though we’re a bit late, sometimes it’s good in tech to be a bit late because you don’t need to have all the sort of illnesses from the beginning,” Stine Bosse said.Markéta Gregorova suggested we can learn from the example of China’s Deepseek.“Let’s also copy and modify our own models, and let’s jump on the bandwagon,” she said. “It did not depart yet, so we still have a chance.”Watch ‘Brussels, my love?’ in the player above.
