International

A Russian drone struck in the early hours of this Friday on an apartment building in the Romanian city of Galati, near the Ukrainian border, and triggered a fire that caused two minor injuries and forced the evacuation of about 70 people, according to the Romanian Ministry of Defense. Romania, an EU country and a key NATO member due to its location on the alliance’s eastern flank, shares a 614-kilometer border with Ukraine.

Iranian state television reported on Thursday night – already early Friday morning in Tehran – that the Revolutionary Guard had shot down a US fighter jet.

Between attacks and counterattacks in southern Iran during the ceasefire, amid promising statements and threats of destruction or taking the war to other parts of the planet, negotiators from the United States and the Islamic Republic regime are said to have reached an agreement on a 60-day memorandum of understanding to extend the ceasefire and start negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program, according to Axios, as the Strait of Hormuz reopens to traffic.

No one suspected anything. On April 24, a patient succumbed to a lethal mix of high fever, diarrhea, and hemorrhages at a medical center in Bunia, the capital of the Ituri region, in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In an area affected by tropical diseases, with the recurrent presence of cholera or malaria, that death did not raise too many suspicions.

Shortly before getting bogged down in the Iran war, Donald Trump launched the Peace Board, the initiative with which the US president sought to consolidate the pacification and reconstruction of Gaza. The project was surrounded by doubts from the start, and the passage of time seems to be proving the skeptics right: four months after its establishment, the body lacks official funding and has not made any progress on the ground.

After Monday’s bombings of missile sites and vessels, the ceasefire, decreed a month and a half ago, was back on life support on Wednesday, very fragile. The United States directed attacks against an Iranian drone operation and a ground control base near the Strait of Hormuz, to which the Persian country claimed to have responded with an offensive against a U.S. airbase in Kuwait. All this occurred hours after President Donald Trump denied information that he was about to reach an agreement with Tehran.

The imminence of the agreement with Iran, which Donald Trump declared practically done last Saturday, has been fading due to his excessive haste in the face of the economic punishment the United States is suffering because of a war he declared. Furthermore, the president is being criticized by Republican officials for accepting a pact they dislike given the survival of the ayatollahs’ regime.

Russia has decided to allow its main financial institutions to arm themselves with anti-aircraft defenses so that they can shoot down Ukrainian drones that attack them. This measure, included in a new law approved by the Duma (Lower House), is one more of those previously taken to try to stop the incursions of unmanned aircraft into Russian territory, which are becoming increasingly frequent.

Israel momentarily looks away from Iran, stuck in an agreement that has not been reached with the United States, and refocuses on its two main nearby fronts: Gaza and Lebanon.

Last week’s alarms due to recent incursions into the airspace have further frightened the Baltic countries, on the front line against the Russian threat. The Kremlin is weakened on the Ukrainian battlefront, but the recent episodes in Latvia and Lithuania, which had to declare a country-wide alert following new drone appearances, have put the spotlight on these three small nations on the EU’s eastern flank, which are preparing for more buzzes of modern warfare in their airspace and are calling for Brussels’ involvement to put a stop to it. The message is that the Baltic border is also the EU’s border and, therefore, must be treated as a community matter.