The European Union aims to strengthen its presence in the Black Sea, a region of renewed geostrategic value, by setting up a security hub that would protect critical infrastructure, remove naval mines, combat hybrid threats, mitigate environmental risks and ensure freedom of navigation for commerce.

The hub is primarily designed to counter Russia's expansionism in Eastern Europe and could eventually be employed to monitor and sustain a peace settlement in Ukraine.

"The Black Sea region is of great strategic importance to the European Union because of the connection (between) Central Asia and Europe. It is important because of security, trade and energy," High Representative Kaja Kallas said on Wednesday as she unveiled a new strategy to bolster ties with the Black Sea.

"But the region's potential is marred by Russia's war. Recurring airspace violations and attacks on ports and shipping lanes highlight this reality."

Notably, the strategy, which also touches upon transport, energy, digital networks, trade, climate change and the blue economy, lacks a specific financial envelope to realise its ambitions and instead builds upon other programmes under the EU budget, such as SAFE, the new €150-billion initiative of low-interest loans to boost defence spending.

The funding, location and operational model of the security hub will depend on the negotiations of the bloc's next seven-year budget, Kallas said.

The European Commission is expected to present the much-anticipated proposal for the 2028-2032 budget before the end of the year. The draft will then kick-start a prolonged, complex and possibly explosive debate among governments.

Brussels hopes the magnified importance of the Black Sea, which encompasses 174 million people, two member states (Romania and Bulgaria) and four candidates to join the bloc (Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia), will convince capitals to bet on the strategy and provide the necessary funds. The plan may also benefit from the fiscal effort that most member states will have to make to meet NATO's likely future 5% of GDP target.

Chasing the 'shadow fleet'

One of the main threats that inspired the strategy is the "shadow fleet", the old-age tankers that Russia has deployed to circumvent the G7 price cap on seaborne oil.

The fleet, present in both the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, uses obscure insurance and ownership to escape the surveillance of Western allies and engages in illicit practices at sea, such as transmitting false data and becoming invisible to satellite systems. Its condition is so poor that it has stoked fears of an environmental disaster.

In recent months, "shadow fleet" vessels have been accused of engaging in sabotage and vandalism against the EU's critical infrastructure, fuelling calls for hard-hitting sanctions. Estonia has warned that Moscow is ready to provide military assistance to protect the decrepit tankers from inspections and seizures.

On Wednesday, Kallas admitted the "shadow fleet" was becoming a "bigger problem" for the EU. "We see our adversaries finding new ways to use it," she said.

Asked if Brussels should set up an EU-wide military mission to keep a closer eye on the "shadow fleet", Kallas appeared open to the idea but acknowledged the limitations imposed by international law, which provides for the right of innocent passage that compels all states to guarantee unimpeded, non-discriminatory transit.

The right entails a heavy burden of proof to justify the intervention of a foreign vessel.

"The discussions are ongoing," Kallas said. "We need to work also with our intentional partners to address these concerns (such as) when you can stop the ships. They need much broader attention than only the European Union."

CNN  — 

Elon Musk raised concerns about President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending cuts package, saying in a video released Tuesday that he believes it would raise the US budget deficit and undercut efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” the tech billionaire and Trump donor told “CBS Sunday Morning.” “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both.”

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts and a big boost to the US military and to national security spending – largely paid for by overhauls to federal health and nutrition programs and cuts to energy programs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill would pile another $3.8 trillion to the deficit. It narrowly passed the House last week, and now heads to the Senate, where it will likely face many changes.

Musk’s comments come amid a media tour ahead of a SpaceX test flight Tuesday evening. Musk is stepping away from full-time government work to focus on his companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, which have struggled in part as a result of Musk’s alliance with the Trump administration.

He noted the move in an interview with Ars Technica on Tuesday, hours before SpaceX’s Starship test flight.

“I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics, it’s less than people would think, because the media is going to over-represent any political stuff, because political bones of contention get a lot of traction in the media,” he said when asked whether he feels his focus on politics over the past year has “harmed” SpaceX. “It’s not like I left the companies. It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks.”

Musk also noted last week that he’ll spend “a lot less” money on politics in the future, but it’s still not clear whether the remarks signal any change in his pledge to commit $100 million into political groups controlled by the president. Musk previously spent more than $290 million to help get Trump and GOP congressional candidates elected in November. Musk-linked groups also shelled out more than $20 million on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this year that his preferred candidate ultimately lost.

Musk also continued to defend the work DOGE has been doing in Washington, telling the Washington Post on Tuesday that the team has become a “whipping boy.”

“DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” he said. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”

CNN has previously reported that DOGE is poised to continue its work even as Musk steps back, with staffers to remain in place, embedded across federal agencies, for months or years to come.

CNN’s Hadas Gold contributed to this report.

The White House has lost confidence in a Pentagon leak investigation that Pete Hegseth used to justify firing three top aides last month, after advisers were told that the aides had supposedly been outed by an illegal warrantless National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap.

The extraordinary explanation alarmed the advisers, who also raised it with people close to JD Vance, because such a wiretap would almost certainly be unconstitutional and an even bigger scandal than a number of leaks.

But the advisers found the claim to be untrue and complained that they were being fed dubious information by Hegseth’s personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who had been tasked with overseeing the investigation.

The episode, as recounted by four people familiar with the matter, marked the most extraordinary twist in the investigation examining the leak of an allegedly top secret document that outlined options for the US military to reclaim the Panama canal to a reporter.

The advisers were stunned again when Parlatore denied having told anyone about an illegal NSA wiretap himself and maintained that any information he had was passed on to him by others at the Pentagon.

The leak was first attributed internally to Hegseth’s senior adviser, Dan Caldwell, who was escorted out of the Pentagon and fired last month alongside two other aides, Hegseth’s former deputy chief of staff, Darin Selnick, and the deputy defense secretary’s chief of staff Colin Carroll.

But the illegal wiretap claim and Caldwell’s denials fueled a breakdown in trust between the Pentagon and the White House, where the Trump advisers tracking the investigation have privately suggested they no longer have any idea about who or what to believe.

In particular, one Trump adviser recently told Hegseth that he did not think Caldwell – or any of the fired aides – had leaked anything, and that he suspected the investigation had been used to get rid of aides involved in the infighting with his first chief of staff, Joe Kasper.

The fraught situation is sure to increase pressure on Hegseth ahead of a Senate hearing next month, and more broadly for his office, which has been roiled by the leak investigation that has now continued for nearly a month with no new evidence or referral to the FBI.

The fallout has left Hegseth with no chief or deputy chief of staff, as he relies on six senior advisers to run his front office, which is involved in setting the direction of the defense department that has a budget of nearly $1tn and oversees more than two million troops.

And while Hegseth’s former junior military aide Ricky Buria has effectively assumed the job of the chief of staff, the White House has blocked Hegseth from giving him the job permanently on account of his limited experience and role in internal office drama.

The Pentagon declined to comment on reporting for this story. A spokesperson for the White House said in a statement: “President Trump is confident in the secretary’s ability to ensure top leadership at the Department of Defense shares their focus on restoring a military that is focused on readiness, lethality, and excellence.”

White House spurred by rumors

The skepticism among the Trump advisers is widely seen as a product of several developments that started shortly after the suspensions of Caldwell and Selnick on 15 April, followed by the suspension of Carroll on 16 April, according to seven people familiar with the matter.

After the aides were fired on 18 April and issued a joint statement denying wrongdoing, the White House received its first briefing on the firings.

At that juncture, a handful of Trump advisers in the West Wing and elsewhere were told there was evidence that Caldwell had printed a document on US military plans for the Panama canal classified at the top secret level, took a photo, and sent it to an reporter using his personal phone.

But the advisers grew uneasy in the ensuing weeks after Caldwell appeared on former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s podcast, denouncing their firings as the product of internal office politics at the Pentagon and alleging that the investigation had become weaponized against them.

They also then learned of a rumor at the Pentagon that Air Force office of special investigations (OSI), which had been working the case for weeks beforehand, had possibly identified the leaked Panama canal document by virtue of the fact that it was a draft that lacked certain details that were in the final version of the document.

As the rumor went, the document had led Air Force OSI to focus its investigation on mid-level aides who worked in the US Southern or Central Command or for the joint chiefs of staff, and had not been told to focus on the activities of the three aides until the weekend after they had been fired.

It was not immediately clear whether the the rumor was correct or even from where it emerged. But it appears to have spurred the White House to press Parlatore to disclose the evidence against Caldwell, including how the Pentagon knew what was on his phone.

At first, Parlatore rebuffed the attempts to obtain the underlying evidence, noting it was inappropriate for the executive branch to insert itself into an ongoing criminal investigation that he said could still yield charges.

But towards the end of April, according to what the Trump advisers shared inside the White House, Parlatore suggested that there had been a warrantless wiretap on Caldwell’s phone.

Parlatore has denied making such a claim when confronted by associates, and has generally maintained during the investigation that he has only passed along information briefed to him by others. Reached by phone on Monday, Parlatore referred questions to the Pentagon press office.

Still, the Trump advisers who reeled from the claim also eventually told Hegseth they were concerned by the optics of Parlatore, who had been close to the former chief of staff Kasper, running an investigation that targeted Kasper’s perceived enemies in the office.

The warrantless wiretap episode was not formally resolved. The investigation was transferred to deputy defense secretary Stephen Feinberg’s office around the time that Parlatore had planned to step away to prepare for the trial of another client, Adm Robert Burke, on federal bribery charges.

Parlatore remains a close confidant of Hegseth and he retained his ability to make recommendations in the investigation, according to two people familiar with the situation. Commissioned by Hegseth as a commander in the navy reserve, he is subject to the uniform code of military justice and cannot be directly fired.