Friday 13 February 2026 In February 1949, when negotiations were underway that would culminate in the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Washington, the Atlantic community imagined itself as something more than a military pact. The North Atlantic Treaty, signed in April of that year, was framed as a compact of shared civilisation — an alliance of liberal democracies determined to prevent the return of continental war and to contain the expansion of Soviet po

Friday 13 February 2026 On 10 February 2026 Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (Välisluureamet) published its annual public assessment, International Security and Estonia 2026. The report is written in a deliberately steady tone—Russia remains dangerous, it argues, but she is not about to launch a direct military attack on Estonia or another NATO ally in 2026 and, very likely, not in 2027 either. That combination of reassurance and warning is not a rhetorical flourish. It

Friday 13 February 2026 I fly drones for Ukraine. Not always the same drone, not always the same task, and never with the same feelings. People who imagine drone warfare as clean or distant misunderstand it. The machine may be far from the hand, but the consequences are close, immediate and personal. Some days begin quietly. I arrive before dawn, when the air is still and the light is uncertain, and I unpack equipment with the care of a watchmaker. Batteries are checked, prop

Friday 13 February 2026 Cryptography is the quiet engineering discipline that makes modern trust possible. It underwrites everything from a WhatsApp message to a bank transfer, from a software update to a battlefield drone’s telemetry link. Yet it is not, in the popular imagination, an art of secret writing, nor even simply “encryption”. Contemporary cryptography is a set of mathematical tools for building systems in which parties can compute, communicate and authenticate und

Friday 13 February 2026 When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks of making the European Union a ‘global giant’, she does not mean that Europe should suddenly acquire the habits of an empire. Rather she is invoking something more technocratic and yet more ambitious: that the European Union, long a regulatory superpower and an economic colossus, should learn to act with the strategic coherence of a great power. The phrase has emerged against the background