Eurotopics.net

With Russian troops concentrated on the border with Ukraine, the leading Russian opposition figure imprisoned and his health rapidly deteriorating, and the Czech leadership now accusing Moscow of being behind a terrorist attack in the Czech Republic, commentators look at how the West should react to the mounting tensions in its relations with Russia.

Angela Merkel has been German Chancellor since November 2005 - the only chancellor to hold office longer was Helmut Kohl. But in the elections to the Bundestag this autumn, she won't stand for office, and the CDU has been unable to agree on who should step into the ring instead. The Greens have chosen Annalena Baerbock as their candidate. Commentators are full of anticipation.

Details keep emerging in the UK about a lobbying affair involving ex-prime minister David Cameron, sparking a debate about the relations between politics and business. Cameron brought entrepreneur Lex Greensill into the government as an advisor in 2012. After resigning as prime minister Cameron became an advisor to financial services company Greensill, which went bankrupt in March.

The decision of Germany's Constitutional Court on Berlin's rent cap is a big topic in Europe's press beyond the country's borders. The Berlin law entered into force in February 2020 and froze existing rents. Now the court in Karlsruhe has ruled that the legislative powers to adopt such a law were not in the hands of individual German states, but at the federal level, which had already established a 'brake on rents' in 2015.

Latvia's anti-corruption agency Knab this week said it had found no evidence of money laundering at ABLV, Latvia's third-largest bank - two years after US financial authorities accused it of corrupt dealings. ABLV denied the allegations at the time, but Latvia's Financial and Capital Market Commission nevertheless put the bank's operations on hold at the European Central Bank's request.