Jornal de Notícias
Vários cabos de comunicação foram danificados nos últimos meses no Báltico, motivando investigações na Suécia, Finlândia, Lituânia e Letónia.
As suspeitas são dirigidas à chamada "frota-sombra russa", composta por navios que a Rússia utiliza para contornar as sanções ocidentais às suas exportações de petróleo devido à invasão da Ucrânia.
O Ministério da Defesa australiano tem estado a acompanhar os navios da marinha chinesa - uma fragata, um cruzador e um navio-tanque de reabastecimento - desde que foram avistados em águas internacionais na semana passada.
[o estudo não incluiu o português entre as línguas testadas]
The Guardian
European Commissioner for tech, security and democracy Henna Virkkunen says the bloc ”will not accept” actions or other disruptions seeking to sow confusion.
“It is a great concern to see the number of incidents over recent months on our critical undersea infrastructure. These incidents have been have potential to disrupt vital services to our society, such as connectivity and electricity transmission and also carry a significant security risk,” she warns.
She says the EU’s Cable Security Action Plan, adopted today, is “not only for the Baltic Sea area, but a truly European level initiative.”
It focuses on preventing incidents with new, coordinated risk assessment framework and investment in new cables to “increase our resilience.,” as well as increased monitoring.
A new Baltic sea hub will be established to “detect incidents, ideally before they occur.”
The last time Trump was president he was relatively popular in Taiwan, seen as a strong foil to China’s threats of annexation.
During that first term, approvals of US weapons sales to Taiwan soared, US navy movements in the Taiwan Strait increased, and Trump broke with convention to accept a phone call from Taiwan’s then-president Tsai Ing-wen, lending legitimacy to her administration.
But Trump’s return has brought a global shake-up, from the shuttering of USAid and negotiating with Russia over Ukraine, to talk about annexing Greenland and Canada, and taking control of Gaza for “redevelopment”. His messaging about support for Taipei has been mixed at best, and the island is on edge. A withdrawal of American support here would spark an existential crisis.
“The Trump administration has already demonstrated that it is willing to suddenly and without warning break from decades of bipartisan US policy on China,” says Bethany Allen, head of China investigations and analysis at ASPI.
“[It] is signalling that it is excising liberal democratic values from its foreign policy calculations – opening up the possibility that US support for Taiwan may become divorced from any inherent value ascribed to Taiwan as a democracy worth preserving for its own sake.”
China has long threatened to invade and annex Taiwan if it refused to peacefully accept “reunification” with the mainland. A military modernisation campaign driven by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is bringing Beijing closer to being able to follow through.
Support from the US, Taiwan’s biggest backer, is considered crucial for the island’s survival. While the US officially refuses to say if it would militarily defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack, former president Joe Biden said repeatedly that under his leadership they probably would. The US sells Taiwan billions of dollars in weapons under legal obligations to provide it with defensive means and uses its military and foreign policy to support the peaceful “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait.
But Trump is now questioning the worth of the US’s support and floated the idea of charging Taiwan for protection. He’s accused Taiwan of “stealing” the US’s semiconductor business, and railed against trading partners – including Taiwan – having surpluses against the US. He has threatened or imposed steep and sweeping tariffs.
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Semiconductors power everything from phones to cars and large weapons systems, and many analysts believe a large part of Taiwan’s protection strategy comes from keeping production of its most advanced chips – which form 90% of the world’s supply – onshore.
This week Trump announced tariffs would start at 25% across the whole sector (without specifying Taiwan) and rise from there. It’s not clear exactly how they would be applied.
Trump’s team has also reportedly urged chip-making giant TSMC to enter into an unspecified partnership with Intel’s factories. It all appears linked to Trump’s belief that Taiwan “stole US” chip tech, and what Mark Williams, the chief Asia economist at Capital Economics, says is a “gradual shift under way to rebuild chip-making capacity in the US”.
Taiwan’s major semiconductor manufacturers, including TSMC, declined to comment.
