Signal No. 139 · Four sites, a signed name

On Thursday evening a pedestrian found a launch device at a substation in Dormagen, between Cologne and Düsseldorf; police say it strongly resembles the six found at Bergheim and that nothing was damaged; Bild's report of a timer and copper wire was not confirmed by them. On Friday morning forensic teams in protective suits searched the fields and hedges around the Weisweiler power plant and the adjoining substation at Eschweiler, near Aachen; a dpa reporter watched officers secure numerous thin wires and document several spots, the police gave no official account of the find, and there was no damage. An open switch cabinet was found at a substation in Ganderkesee, Lower Saxony, at about 03:00; it was checked with a helicopter and dogs, and whether it belongs to the series is open.

The confirmed count since Tuesday morning is four sites in two states: the Turnow-Preilack lines in Brandenburg, where Tuesday's reporting had two short-circuits and Jan Redmann, the interior minister, said on Wednesday that only one device produced one, and 50Hertz reported a brief interruption and no loss of supply; the Bergheim substation, where a short-circuit took five RWE lignite blocks of 4,200 megawatts off the grid; and the two Rhineland sites found before they did anything. On Friday evening Saxony's interior ministry said police had found "unknown explosive devices" north of Bautzen in the Görlitz district, at the Brandenburg border in the Lusatian lignite area; Bild reports explosive and incendiary devices at overhead lines by two substations, and the Görlitz police directorate confirmed an operation and gave no details. The letters name further acts the police have not confirmed.

Two handwritten confession letters, posted in North Rhine-Westphalia, reached newspapers, taz, the Frankfurter Allgemeine and the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger among them, and police in both states; they were mailed before the technical details were public, named Weisweiler before the authorities knew of it, which is why it was searched, and describe the rockets in detail. The writer says he must answer for the outage "and all the outages that must still come", that he acted alone and told no one, that "electricity generation from fossil fuels is a crime" causing "unspeakable suffering", that he acts "because the media do damn all to convey the urgency of the situation", and that the left "has nothing to do with this". The signatory is a trained physician in his late forties registered in Gevelsberg, in the Ennepe-Ruhr district; a relative recognised the handwriting and told taz he had not been seen for weeks.

In the morning the Cologne police opened a Europe-wide search for him and for a lorry with a tall box body, a spokesperson saying: "Whether he is actually a suspect or a copycat must first be examined." On Friday afternoon a police special unit, an SEK, stormed the lorry, a converted 2.8-tonne vehicle he had been living in, standing in woodland at Niederzier near Düren; he was not in it. Herbert Reul, North Rhine-Westphalia's interior minister, said he is probably on foot and would not get far, then: "Where he is roaming we do not know. It would not surprise me if he is still in Germany." The search of the Gevelsberg flat produced what Reul called clear explosives finds, potassium nitrate and potassium perchlorate; his caution stood: "If someone puts his name under it, he is not necessarily the one responsible."

Reul had told WDR at 14:10 that the letter "is interesting in that it is signed with a personal name and with the address", that "much suggests all of this was done from one hand or from one concept", and that "a fair amount points to a lone perpetrator. It could also be a group". On the state line: "at the moment less points to a foreign state power. But who says this person was not a low-level agent?" The details had checked out, "this was no fake". The Brandenburg case still runs under section 129a, formation of a terrorist organisation; the federal prosecutor general, who Tagesspiegel reported on Thursday was examining a takeover, had announced none by publication. Reul asked for wider powers to monitor energy sites, "we notice now what that means"; Brandenburg's interior ministry announced on Thursday a "360-degree security centre" pooling the Verfassungsschutz, police and disaster-management picture, and said it is preparing a law to let operators of critical infrastructure run camera surveillance and drone defence themselves. The German intraday price spiked above EUR 600 per megawatt-hour between 20:00 and 21:00 on Tuesday and fell back quickly.

Prime Minister Kristen Michal has offered the defence ministry to General Martin Herem, commander of the Defence Forces from December 2018 to June 2024 and since August 2025 military strategy adviser at Milrem Robotics. Herem told ERR on Friday: "Was I made an offer? Essentially, yes. But it was more an invitation to consider it, rather than, 'Hey, take the job.'" Asked whether he was ready to be a minister: "No. Does Estonia need saving? Yes, it does. Do I have to do that at that level? That I'm not sure about." He is abroad next week, when the Reform Party discusses candidates; the oath can follow when the Riigikogu reconvenes on 14 September. Herem defended the risk itself: "Estonia has helped Ukraine a great deal by taking risks."

The Centre for Defence Investments, RKIK, put the Ukraine book on the record on Friday and corrected it within hours: director Elmar Vaher told ERR's morning show 28 contracts, eight problematic; the agency later cited a human error in its tables and put the figures at 27 contracts worth about EUR 350 million, seven terminated. Four, with one company, are in international arbitration; one joint contract with two companies is before Harju District Court; together EUR 59.8 million. Two further contracts worth EUR 11.8 million are being prepared for court after an attempted resolution failed; the total in dispute is EUR 71.6 million. Vaher expects the court proceedings at the end of this year or the start of next; the National Audit Office finds RKIK's 2024 and 2025 decisions "not reproducible", and of the two further firms Vaher said: "RKIK as an institution and as a system simply was not prepared for a rise in the defence budget on this scale." The officials who signed the original contracts, including his predecessor Magnus-Valdemar Saar, have left the agency. On Tuesday the Prosecutor's Office opened criminal proceedings into the ministry's administrative area over both years' audit findings; no one is charged.

A day after Airbus closed its last table at the mediation service SIMA, Industry Minister Jordi Hereu convened the company and the unions at his ministry; by mid-afternoon a preliminary agreement was announced, with group chief executive Guillaume Faury present. ATP, CCOO, SIPA and UGT, together 88 per cent of union delegates, back it; UGT says it has signed nothing and will consult its members. CGT and ÚTIL, two of the three unions that called the strike, were kept in a waiting room and told by company lawyers that Friday "was not a negotiation"; CGT: "the most progressive government in history just betrayed Airbus workers". Infodefensa carries the terms: real CPI plus two per cent a year to 2028 and plus 1.95 per cent in 2029, the two-day telework model kept, two of four holiday weeks chosen by the employee, joint-venture staff on the Airbus collective agreement from day one. The text goes to a binding referendum at all Airbus sites in Spain in September; the indefinite strike, called from 25 August, stays called until then, and the Getafe conversion line for the Spain–Poland A330 MRTT framework stays stopped.

The Russian Defence Ministry counted 490 Ukrainian drones destroyed between 20:00 Thursday and 08:00 Friday, against 416 for the same window a day earlier; Sobyanin's tallies put 35 on approach to Moscow, and Rosaviatsia halted Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky overnight, Vnukovo until after 04:00. In Sochi a depot at Sirius and the Rosneft depot at Adler, beside the airport, burned; the Krasnodar operational headquarters reported broken windows and no casualties. Ukraine's navy published video of a sea-drone strike in the port on the Nefrit, which it describes as a support vessel for Russia's offshore oil and gas operations; a hit on an S-300 or S-400 battery near Sirius is an OSINT reading by the Russian outlet ASTRA that no Ukrainian authority has claimed. Belgorod's acting governor Alexander Shuvaev reported five civilians killed in the Shebekino district, ambulance staff among them.

Over Ukraine the air force logged one Kh-31P and 121 drones from 18:00 Thursday, 103 neutralised, hits at fifteen locations; the Kyiv Independent counts six killed and 56 injured for the day, two of the dead police officers in Dnipropetrovsk region, and Kyiv had 13 injured overnight. At about 15:30 a drone struck the headquarters of the SBU, Ukraine's security service, opposite St Sophia's Cathedral in central Kyiv, on the ninth consecutive day of strikes on the capital; the city military administration counted twelve injured, seven in hospital by 17:00, and Zelenskyy and the SBU said the drone was aimed at the office of the acting head, Oleksandr Poklad.

At the Kremlin's briefing, Dmitry Peskov said of reports that Germany, Britain and France plan long-range missile production on Ukrainian territory: "we have heard about this, we are tracking the information carefully, we are checking it", and "any such facilities on Ukrainian territory will become legitimate targets for our armed forces". He would not give dates for the Witkoff and Kushner visits, said Moscow would announce contacts after they happen, and said Russia does not intend, before the Americans arrive, to talk to Kyiv about halting what the Kremlin calls terrorist attacks; there are "no concrete preconditions" for a settlement. On Leipzig, he rejected the German accusations as unfounded.

In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump wrote that "the Biden Administration gave far more Munitions away to Ukraine, at no cost to them, whatsoever, than we have used in Iran", that "Hundreds of Billions of Dollars was given to Ukraine and NATO, free of charge, that Europe would have paid for — If they were only asked, but we will be asking for that money, though somewhat belatedly", and of munitions: "We are taking them for ourselves, the U.S.A., rather than selling them to others, but the sales to Allies will soon again, begin." Euronews puts US military assistance to Ukraine since the 2022 invasion at USD 66.9 billion on State Department figures. No mechanism, sum or addressee was named.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said on Friday there was "no further need to react" to Lavrov's announcement in Vladivostok on Thursday that the Goethe-Institut's three Russian sites will close as the mirror of the Russisches Haus: "of course they will be closed, after our cultural centre was driven out of there". In Sofia, Prime Minister Rumen Radev told parliament: "What can we expect when we attack … another country with our long-range weapons? Will it stand by or will it respond?" Estonia summoned Russia's chargé d'affaires on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna calling Leipzig "part of Russia's consistent and dangerous pattern of provocations targeting Europe"; at the Kremlin, Peskov called the German accusations "absolutely empty".