More than a dozen people were killed by Ukrainian strikes on the Russian provincial capital of Belgorod, Russia’s emergencies ministry said Saturday, with the Russian defence ministry vowing the strike “will not go unpunished”. 

A celebrity-studded “Almost Naked” party in Moscow’s famed Mutabor nightclub has drawn outrage from Russia’s political establishment, which has become increasingly po-faced since the assault on Ukraine.

While wars are fought between armies or militant groups, conflicts have their keyboard warriors too. It is estimated that more than half of the world uses social media, and many people do not go to traditional media as a source of information at all. As social media use increases, unease has grown among EU decision-makers about the power of these platforms to potentially distort people’s view of the world. The EU has tried to regulate on disinformation through the Digital Services Act (DSA), but how successful has that effort been? Our panellists assess the impact of the DSA and raise other issues that are connected to disinformation, such as spyware and election interference.

Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, currently serving a 19-year prison sentence, has been transferred to a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle. The IK-3 penal colony, located in Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 km (1200 miles) northeast of Moscow, is considered to be one of the toughest prisons in Russia. Penal colonies are descendants of Soviet-era Gulags, the notorious Stalin-era labour camps where thousands of Russians lost their lives.

Tributes from across Europe poured in for Jacques Delors, a former EU Commission chief who played an instrumental role in European integration, following his death on Wednesday (December 27) at 98.

Lawyers representing Dutch lorry firms claim fines have been issued unlawfully.