Signal No. 143 · A Dutch GlobalEye, in a Swedish pool

Pål Jonson, Sweden's defence minister, and Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, the Dutch deputy prime minister and defence minister, signed a letter of intent on Thursday. Under it the Netherlands acquires one Saab GlobalEye airborne early-warning and control aircraft, with Sweden's procurement agency FMV supporting the purchase. The Dutch ministry expects delivery in 2031. From 2028 Dutch crews get access to the Swedish aircraft, and on delivery the Dutch airframe is added, in the ministry's words, to a joint pool with three Swedish GlobalEye aircraft, Dutch and Swedish crews taking whichever aircraft are available. Saab said the parties have not entered into a contract and it has received no order. No price was published, and no parliamentary letter yet accompanies the announcement; Saab's chief executive put NATO's aircraft at USD 400–450 million each in July, the only public proxy.

The ministry's stated reason is availability. The aircraft is additional to the Dutch share in the NATO replacement, and with one of its own the Netherlands can decide more independently where and when it is deployed, and use it for operations and exercises. The two texts differ on 2028: The Hague says the Netherlands can already deploy the Swedish aircraft then; Stockholm says Dutch crews begin training on them. Both countries are among the allies that chose GlobalEye in July to replace the 14 E-3A aircraft at Geilenkirchen. That is up to ten aircraft at about USD 4.5 billion on Reuters' figure, with formal negotiations to run through the NATO Support and Procurement Agency. Saab said then that it had no contract and no order, and it has announced none since. Sweden's third aircraft was ordered in June 2024; France ordered two late last year and an unnamed Middle Eastern customer two in July, for delivery in 2030.

At the International Space Summit in Paris, co-hosted by Germany and France on Wednesday and Thursday, Boris Pistorius said Germany wants to advance a European Space Component Command. In hartpunkt's account of the speech, he said the German Space Command stands ready to host it. He announced a Space Safety and Security Academy in Germany open to partners from the European Union and beyond, and said Germany will open procurement to government-to-government partnerships where it can. He named work with France on IRIS² interoperability and next-generation space reconnaissance. The ministry's note restates EUR 35 billion for space security over four years and attaches no figure, date or partner to the command or the academy. He attended in place of Friedrich Merz, with Dorothee Bär, the space minister.

Ursula von der Leyen said the ability to access and act in space "increasingly determines our security and independence", and that IRIS² will grow beyond 350 satellites. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space and Starcloud withdrew after a White House official warned, on Politico's account, that attendance could look like tacit support for EU policy positions. In May, to Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg, Pistorius had said Germany was planning a European Space Component Command and a space academy; Thursday's version names a host.

At 18:02 on Thursday the federal prosecutor general in Karlsruhe announced it had taken over the investigations from the Dresden prosecutor general's office and the Cottbus and Cologne prosecutors. The suspicion is attempted and completed constitutional sabotage under section 88(1) no. 3 of the criminal code, and attempted and completed disruption of public utilities under section 316b(1) no. 2. The accused, named as Daniel V., 48, arrested on 8 September, is alleged to have placed consumer fireworks rockets or similar objects, fitted with fuses, timers and wires, beneath high-voltage lines near substations in Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony. They were set to fire at preset times and short-circuit the lines. On 1 September short circuits at Turnow-Preilack and Bergheim-Rheidt forced temporary emergency shutdowns of the lines; at Bergheim-Rheidt two lignite plants had to be switched off, and supply in an adjacent locality was temporarily impaired. No. 139 carried Amprion's account that no customer lost supply; the adjacent-locality effect is the prosecutor's addition to that record.

The Federal Criminal Police Office leads the police investigation. The grounds given are the case's special significance: acts across state borders, presumably aimed at causing large-scale outages, and suited to weaken the population's confidence in the protection of critical infrastructure. The release names no foreign direction and no motive.

t-online reports a notebook in the man's motorhome with handwritten notes on more than 160 potential targets, and more than 40 launchers recovered in North Rhine-Westphalia alone. It carries Alexander Dobrindt's description of the motive as likely climate terrorism by a lone actor, citing a confession letter: electricity generation from fossil fuels is a crime. The man remains in custody on the Cottbus court's warrant, to be brought before the investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice for the warrant to be adapted.

In Calgary on Thursday Mark Carney and Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a 100 Year Partnership Declaration. Carney announced a CAD 350 million package of air-defence interceptors, about EUR 218 million, delivered through the United States' Joint Ukraine Multinational Program for Services, Training and Articles on a Rapid Timeline. Interfax-Ukraine's rendering of his briefing calls it the Jumpstart mechanism. Carney named neither the interceptor nor a quantity nor a delivery date; the joint statement records Operation Unifier, Canada's training mission, as extended to 2029. Canada also offered more than CAD 430 million in loan guarantees for winter gas purchases and a defence-industrial partnership for joint production of uncrewed systems, counter-drone and electronic-disruption capabilities and ammunition. A joint venture between General Dynamics Mission Systems Canada and GreenTech covers uncrewed systems, and one third of domestically produced drones is to go to Ukraine through a new national marketplace. Canada's military assistance since February 2022 stands at CAD 8.5 billion.

The same day a strike on a shopping centre in Pavlohrad killed four and injured more than 60, the weapon unconfirmed; overnight the air force counted 149 drones with 128 downed or suppressed, about half of the Shaheds jet-powered. Yurii Ihnat, the air force's spokesman, said last Friday that jet-powered drones cannot be shot down with machine guns or conventional interceptor drones and are taken by electronic warfare, aircraft and surface-to-air missiles; he put the interception rate at slightly over 60 per cent against more than 90 for the propeller type.