Signal No. 138 · Seventy million, paid in advance

Hanno Pevkur, Estonia's defence minister since 2022, resigned on Wednesday after the National Audit Office reported on a EUR 70 million ammunition purchase for Ukraine. Between August and December 2024 the Centre for Defence Investments, RKIK, signed four contracts with Datasel S.R.L., a company registered in Italy and owned, according to ERR and Eesti Ekspress, by an Indian group with no identified record of selling artillery ammunition. RKIK paid advances of EUR 15 million on the first contract and EUR 10 million on the second; the total advanced across the four was about EUR 70 million. The first batch was due in November 2024 and Datasel reported delays; the third and fourth contracts were signed after that. The consignments that reached a European warehouse were incomplete and below standard; RKIK terminated the contracts in November 2025, demanded the advances back, and has taken the dispute to an Estonian court and to the European Court of Arbitration in Strasbourg.

Datasel told ERR it received EUR 59 million in advances, supplied "a significant quantity of goods", invoiced EUR 58 million, and that RKIK "was unable to accept the remaining goods"; it says it is the party that has suffered losses. Prosecutors have opened criminal proceedings; no suspect is named.

The audit also found what it called serious accounting confusion in the Defence Forces' and RKIK's asset records, which it said leaves damage, expiry or misappropriation of stock liable to go unnoticed, and wrote that there is "a risk that costs of around 70 million euros will have to be paid for from the Estonian state budget at the expense of other planned expenditures". The advances were paid with European Peace Facility money, not from Estonia's budget; Estonian World describes the funds as proceeds of immobilised Russian assets channelled through the Facility. Commission spokesman Christian Wigand said on Thursday that "it is not yet clear whether Estonia will have to repay the money", and that the Commission is examining the matter with the Estonian authorities.

Pevkur's defence was that the countries where the shells were available "weren't nice, friendly countries where you could just go and make an elegant purchase", that RKIK put the contracts before him but he did not read them, that the two permanent secretaries of the day were informed, and that "if due diligence has been carried out and the funds have been managed prudently, there should be no risk to the Estonian taxpayer". He resigned on political responsibility: "A leader must have both the courage and the stature to take responsibility as a matter of political responsibility, even when there is no personal responsibility." RKIK's new director, Elmar Vaher, said he would not have signed the contract with a supplier of that inexperience. His predecessor, Magnus-Valdemar Saar, told ERR that no major decision was made without the approval of the ministry's leadership.

Prime Minister Kristen Michal said that if someone in Pevkur's area "took risks that should not have been taken" in the course of helping Ukraine, political responsibility "does not mean he bears personal responsibility". The Reform Party discusses candidates next week and a successor can be sworn in when the Riigikogu reconvenes the week after; the party's secretary general, Kristo Enn Vaga, is ruled out as incompatible with his post. The ministry Pevkur leaves has a budget that has tripled since 2022 to about EUR 2.4 billion, five per cent of GDP, and a decision he had scheduled for this month's budget talks: the preliminary choice of a ballistic-missile-defence layer among Patriot, SAMP/T and David's Sling, at more than EUR 1 billion. ERR had reported the court action on Wednesday morning; Wednesday's edition carried neither it nor the evening resignation.

At about 20:00 on Tuesday, twelve hours after the launchers fired at 50Hertz's Turnow-Preilack lines in Brandenburg, a short-circuit at Amprion's Bergheim-Rheidt substation west of Cologne took five RWE lignite blocks off the grid: H, G and K at Niederaußem and G and F at Neurath, the five blocks have a capacity of about 4,200 megawatts and were feeding about 3,000 into the grid. Three of the five were back by Wednesday evening; RWE Power says block K at Niederaußem will not return before next Tuesday, pending inspections. Police found six launch devices in a maize field beside the substation, built to carry a conductive wire over the overhead lines on a pyrotechnic charge. Amprion said the general supply "was not affected at any time" and system stability "was always guaranteed". The Cologne prosecutor's office is investigating anti-constitutional sabotage and disruption of public operations; the Brandenburg case runs under section 129a of the criminal code, formation of a terrorist organisation, alongside the sabotage and explosives provisions.

North Rhine-Westphalia's interior minister, Herbert Reul, said on Wednesday that "this was not a broken switch, this was intent", and on Thursday that investigators are "now relatively certain there are many parallels" between the two sites; the lines of inquiry he named are "state-directed sabotage from abroad and left-wing extremism". Brandenburg's Jan Redmann said the devices at Turnow could have been installed days earlier, that the perpetrators must be assumed to have been on site more than once to place them and scout the ground, and that "we had damn good luck" that only one of them produced a short-circuit; he sees parallels but no proof yet of an identical method, and no evidence of a foreign service. No claim of responsibility has been made at either site, no suspect has been named, and no federal authority has taken over either investigation. Wednesday's edition carried Turnow and not Bergheim.

Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said in Ireland that Italy will make "all necessary checks" on the tourist visa which, according to reporting by NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung, an Italian mission in Minsk issued in late April to the Belarusian whose DNA is on the Leipzig device. Tajani said visas are issued when the requirements are met and no alert is on file.

Kaja Kallas said: "this is genuinely about our own security too." Der Spiegel reports two further threads investigators are examining: a July 2024 arson at a hardware store in Łódź, and the detention of two men at the Serbia–Hungary border on 11 June carrying drone components and explosive-filled cans. LTO's summary of the reporting has the federal prosecutor general investigating the two men since mid-August; the prosecutor's office has issued nothing since its 6 August takeover, and no warrant or arrest has been confirmed.

Britain summoned the Russian chargé d'affaires on Thursday, an FCDO spokesperson calling Leipzig "Russia's egregious and reckless attack" and "the latest in a clear pattern of attempts by the Russian State to undermine our collective security". Romania summoned Ambassador Vladimir Lipayev, who told TASS afterwards that Moscow rejected the accusations "as absurd, preposterous, unfounded and groundless". Der Spiegel, per the dts wire, also reports how the attribution was decided: at the Neuhardenberg cabinet retreat in the last week of August, Merz argued that a tip received from a foreign service in the first half of August, tying "several persons" to Russian intelligence was enough to name Russia; Dobrindt objected that a public accusation would endanger the investigation, Wadephul wanted time to warn German diplomats in Russia and secure documents and data against retaliation, and the chancellor's security adviser Günter Sautter settled the wording for Tuesday's statement. The government has not confirmed the account.

The Russian Defence Ministry counted 416 Ukrainian drones destroyed between 20:00 Wednesday and 08:00 Thursday over fourteen named regions, the Moscow region, Crimea and the Black Sea, and a further 426 between 08:00 and 20:00 on Thursday over thirteen; 842 in a day. Leningrad region appears on neither list. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin put the number shot down on approach to the capital since midnight at 116 by late afternoon, with a building damaged at Kubinka about five kilometres from the air base and a factory fire at Bolshoye Bunkovo; Vnukovo and Sheremetyevo suspended operations for a second consecutive night and Domodedovo and Zhukovsky halted movements on Thursday morning, Fontanka counting more than a hundred cancellations and delays. The head of Rosaviatsia, Dmitry Yadrov, said at the Vladivostok forum that none of the 37 countries with which Russia has air links has discontinued service, that ICAO can recommend but cannot prohibit overflight, and that Ukraine's letter "must be considered by the ICAO Council" before any notification to member states. ICAO's own statement on Wednesday warned of rising threats to civil aviation from long-range weapons, drones and navigation interference and did not name Russia.

Over Ukraine the air force logged 163 drones from 18:00 Wednesday, about half of the Shaheds jet-powered, no missiles, 135 neutralised and hits at fifteen locations; the Kyiv Independent's count for the day is five killed and 67 injured across thirteen regions, seventeen of them in Odesa where a drone struck a 21-storey block between the tenth and seventeenth floors, and drones reached Khmelnytskyi and Vinnytsia in the west. Ukrenergo's morning list named five regions with new outages, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Donetsk, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, from drone strikes on energy sites and front-line shelling, and reported Odesa region's supply restored to all consumers under network restrictions; no scheduled outages were planned for Thursday. Moscow's ministry named a logistics warehouse at Velyka Oleksandrivka in Kyiv region as its objective. At the forum, Putin said there is "no scenario today that would require mobilisation", that Russia "must be ready for everything", and that against refinery attacks there are two options, stronger air defence or return strikes "so that it becomes unwise to harm us".