Eurotopics.net

US emissaries Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spent five hours on Monday trying to negotiate a peace deal with Vladimir Putin on Ukraine. According to Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, agreement was reached only 'on a few points', and Washington and Moscow 'still have a lot of work to do'. Both sides agreed to keep quiet about the results of the negotiations. Europe's media see this as treading water.

The presidents of the four Visegrad states – Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland – met in Esztergom, Hungary, on Wednesday. But Poland's right-wing conservative head of state Karol Nawrocki cancelled a planned meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán after Orbán visited Putin in Moscow last week.

France's President Emmanuel Macron has launched a campaign against fake news. He plans to build on the idea of Reporters Without Borders and label media as reliable or unreliable in order to stem the spread of disinformation. His critics accuse him of wanting to control the media and of curbing the freedom of the press. Macron insists that independent experts would award the certificate, not the state.

The EU Commission looks likely to backtrack on its plans to ban the combustion engine in 2035: in an interview with Handelsblatt newspaper, Sustainable Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas has declared himself "open to all technologies". Previously German Chancellor Friedrich Merz wrote a letter to Brussels asking it to continue to allow "highly efficient" combustion vehicles in addition to hybrid cars.

A breakthrough in the negotiations on the war in Ukraine seems a long way off. In the Black Sea, for the first time, Ukraine attacked oil tankers heading for Russia. Military and security issues are high on the agenda in every country – and Putin is making insinuations about a war with Europe. Is the continent on the verge of an even bigger conflict? The media assess the situation.