Signal No. 78 · Eight names, no engine
DINAIRDPL German industry answers the dead jet with an Airbus-led consortium — a position paper, not yet a programme
Reuters, 9 Jun · FT, 9 Jun · Augen geradeaus!, 9 Jun · Airbus, 9 Jun · Public Sénat, 14 Jan · La Tribune, 7 Jun · Aviation Week, 30 Apr
A day after Berlin and Paris abandoned the joint Future Combat Air System (FCAS) fighter (Signal No. 77), eight German aerospace and defence firms put their names to a successor. Airbus Defence and Space, MTU Aero Engines, MBDA, Hensoldt, Diehl Defence, Rohde & Schwarz, Liebherr and Autoflug submitted a joint position paper to Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s office and Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, proposing themselves as the core of a German-led sixth-generation jet. The group calls itself “Team Gen 6” and plans to sign and unveil the alliance midweek at the ILA Berlin air show, which opens on Wednesday. Each firm carries a slice: Airbus the prime, MTU the engine modules, MBDA and Diehl the weapons, Hensoldt the sensors, Rohde & Schwarz communications and electronic warfare, Liebherr actuation, Autoflug crew safety. Industry figures were careful to say it is not, yet, a launched programme — a draft says only that German industry “stands ready” to develop a sixth-generation fighter “in Europe.”
Pistorius said on Tuesday that the FCAS problems had been visible “for quite some time” and that Berlin had been talking to industry “for months” about its options, while declining to name either a partner or a leader. He has publicly weighed three routes: buy more F-35s, join the existing UK-Italy-Japan GCAP (Global Combat Air Programme), or back a German-led effort under Airbus. Team Gen 6 excludes Dassault by design — the dispute over leadership and intellectual property that killed FCAS. Airbus has always built its fighters in consortium — the Eurofighter among them — and the FT notes that analysts, and some of the eight firms themselves, expect that turning a concept into hardware without Dassault would still draw in a non-German partner: Spain, already an FCAS member, or Saab, or GCAP. The same morning, at ILA, Airbus also displayed the part of future airpower it already builds: a full uncrewed portfolio, detailed below.
Signal › Yesterday we judged Germany the party that left FCAS without a roadmap; a day later its industry wrote it — the initiative passing from a failed inter-state project to a named German consortium is the development. Airbus is the natural prime: the eight firms cover most of an airframe between them, and the momentum on the continental successor is German-led, not French. But removing Dassault settled the FCAS dispute without resolving it — the partner choice re-asks it, and each option’s price is set in another capital: Spain is still inside FCAS and would have to choose Berlin over Paris to follow; Saab is an airframe house like Dassault, a second design authority for a consortium whose defining act was removing one; and GCAP’s three capitals have spent two years keeping even cash-rich Saudi Arabia at the door — the standing quote for what a latecomer buys: workshare, not design authority. The fight is deferred to the next decision, not won. Where Airbus’s lead is already in the air rather than on paper is the uncrewed layer it showed the same morning — the Ravenstorm, a 2029 Valkyrie for the Luftwaffe, a flying drone-interceptor. The manned jet is still on paper; the uncrewed fleet is already in metal.
The engine makes the same point harder. “MTU the engine” is a consortium membership, not a capability: MTU is a module house — the compressors inside the Eurojet EJ200, the cold section inside EUMET, the 50/50 venture in which France’s Safran holds the hot section, the materials and overall design authority and Spain’s ITP the low-pressure turbine. Germany has no national fighter-engine integrator, and the point is pressed from Paris: the day before the cancellation, Safran chief executive Olivier Andriès told La Tribune there is no sovereignty without mastering combat aircraft, no mastery of the aircraft without the engine, and none of the engine without its hot section and the materials it takes — the slice Germany lacks. Only four Western firms build such engines: Safran, Rolls-Royce, GE and Pratt & Whitney. And the EUMET arrangement was never built to close that gap: Andriès told the French Senate in January the workshare runs on the “best athlete” principle, with no question of the weaker partner catching up to the stronger. So that “most of an airframe” has one exception — the engine — where the German claim is thinnest. Dassault could be removed by exclusion; Safran cannot — only replaced, by Rolls-Royce through GCAP or an American engine through more F-35s. Through the engine the partner menu re-ranks: Spain adds modules, Saab’s Gripen flies on a licensed American GE F414, GCAP is the one door that closes the gap without France. MTU’s Johannes Bussmann wants one consortium to outlast the divorce and feed both jets — possibly two related engines from one shop, cheaper than two separate developments — but that is settled by contract, not intent: EUMET’s Phase 1B ran out in April, no full engine has been demonstrated, and nothing has been ordered for the jet cancelled on 8 June. Großwald mapped this architecture in April: the part of FCAS that worked on the merits is now the part with nowhere to live.
INTENSDPL Brussels moves to freeze the oil price cap to deny Moscow the Iran-war windfall — inside a 21st sanctions package
Reuters, 9 Jun · FT, 9 Jun · European Commission, 9 Jun
The European Commission proposed its 21st sanctions package on Tuesday, with President Ursula von der Leyen presenting it and High Representative Kaja Kallas detailing the measures. Around 170 individuals and entities are listed. The headline weight falls on finance: asset freezes on close to 90 banks — the largest single tranche, taking the number of fully listed banks past 100, more than half of Russia’s 213 internationally connected lenders — plus transaction bans on more than 30 further banks in Russia and third countries and on 11 crypto platforms used to evade restrictions. On energy, the package lists another 30 shadow-fleet tankers and, for the first time, the bunkering vessels that refuel them; adds a third-country oil refiner and 20 oil traders; and tightens rules on Russian LNG. It bans Russian fish imports (cod among them) for the first time, restricts EUR 60 million of metals, ores and car parts, imposes import and export curbs on high-performance metal alloys “critical for defence and aerospace,” and restricts trade in drone-launch materials and jamming equipment. Any Russian who has served in the armed forces since the invasion would be barred from entering the EU; Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha called that “fair and timely.”
The package also freezes the oil price cap at its current USD 44.10 a barrel for six months, suspending the EU’s own dynamic-cap formula — which, because the Iran war has pushed Brent above USD 90, would otherwise have lifted the cap automatically toward USD 70 by 15 July. Brussels expects the UK and Canada to align; the United States is holding its own cap at USD 60. The package goes to EU ambassadors on Wednesday and, like every package before it, needs unanimity.
Signal › The eye goes to the 90 banks; the intelligence is in the price cap. The EU built a mechanism that indexes Russia’s permitted oil revenue to the market, and the Iran war turned that mechanism against its authors — set to hand Moscow a higher cap precisely as crude grew dear. Freezing it is the Commission refusing to let its own formula reward the adversary for a war in the Gulf. The metal-alloy and drone-component curbs reach one layer deeper, at Russian throughput rather than its revenue. What has not changed is the gate: a 21st package still needs every capital. What has changed is who guards it — with Viktor Orbán out and Budapest back inside the consensus under Péter Magyar, the veto that stalled the 20th package is gone; the holdout to watch now is Bratislava, where Robert Fico was the only EU leader at Moscow’s Victory Day.
DIPPLBC-UAS Ukraine signs a drone pact with Latvia — its sixth, and the eastern flank’s affordable answer to the spillover
Reuters, 9 Jun · LSM, 9 Jun · Reuters Breakingviews, 9 Jun · Al Jazeera, 16 May
At a Nordic-Baltic summit with Ukraine in Tallinn on Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv had signed a drone-cooperation deal with Latvia covering co-production and the transfer of Ukrainian expertise, though he disclosed no detail. Rustem Umerov, who chairs Ukraine’s defence and security council, said Latvia was the sixth country to join Kyiv’s drone-cooperation initiative — the latest bilateral under the export framework Kyiv codified at the end of April, after earlier deals with Germany, Norway and the Netherlands; Zelensky said last month that nearly 20 are interested. Latvian Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs put the logic plainly: “We need to protect our skies, and nobody knows how to do that better than Ukraine.” Kulbergs himself leads a caretaker coalition formed after Evika Siliņa’s government fell over the drone incursions, with strengthening the country’s airspace security its declared priority — which makes the pact the new cabinet’s signature move as much as Ukraine’s sixth signing. The deal lands as the Baltic states absorb the spillover of Ukraine’s long-range campaign — the drone a French NATO jet shot down over Latvia on 8 June (Signal No. 77) — and as Riga trials home-built interceptor drones from Origin Robotics and Eraser at the Baltic Zenith exercise, intended for its eastern border. Ukraine, which says it can build interceptor drones at 2,000 a day, expects to export around USD 2 billion of arms this year, ten times its 2021 figure (Breakingviews).
Signal › The expertise now flows outward from the front. Two problems close with one instrument: the eastern flank cannot keep killing stray drones with Rafale sorties, and Ukraine needs an export base to fund a defence sector running about a quarter below capacity. A Ukrainian-derived interceptor at a few thousand euros against an incursion is the cost-exchange the spillover demands. A deal “signed” with no disclosed detail is intent, not interceptors on the border. But the direction is set — the continent’s most combat-tested drone maker is becoming its arms supplier, even as Europe’s largest spender, on the Kiel Institute’s reading, still puts most of its procurement into yesterday’s platforms.
DIPINT Tusk calls the London plan non-binding on Poland; Moscow calls European mediation ‘unacceptable’
Reuters, 9 Jun · Reuters, 9 Jun
Two days after the E3 — Britain, France and Germany — and Zelensky set five conditions for a ceasefire in London (Signal No. 77), the format drew fire from both directions. In Warsaw, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Poland should sit at any table deciding the war and that “any arrangements in which Poland does not participate will not be binding on Poland.” He relayed Italian premier Giorgia Meloni’s displeasure at an E3 grouping that excludes them both, and said a wider meeting — Poland and Italy alongside the three — would follow “in the coming days.” In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there were no plans for a Putin-Trump call and that the US mediation track run by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner was “on hold”; European involvement, he said, was “unacceptable,” the Europeans “far more inclined to focus on continuing the war than on peace talks.” Zelensky had, on Monday, called his own contact with the US envoys “positive.”
Signal › A five-point plan is being squeezed from both ends. Inside the camp, the E3 format leaves out Europe’s largest defence spender and a front-line NATO state, and Warsaw has now declared it will not be bound by a text it did not write — a veto asserted before the document is even tested. Outside it, Moscow rejects the European role outright and keeps its channel open only to Washington. A plan that the biggest eastern-flank ally calls non-binding and the adversary calls unacceptable is a statement of European preference, not a negotiating position. The contest has moved past the five points to the prior question of who sits at the table — and Europe has not settled even that among its own.
DIPINT Bulgaria’s new government halts arms to Ukraine — the Radev cabinet’s first defence move
Bulgaria’s newly appointed defence minister, Dimitar Stoyanov, said on Tuesday that Sofia would no longer supply weapons to Ukraine and urged Kyiv and Moscow to negotiate, setting out his ministry’s priorities (BTA, via Reuters). “It is not planned for the Bulgarian side to provide more weapons to the Ukrainian army,” he said; “the war in Ukraine will not be resolved on the battlefield … it is time to seek a just peace that is determined by both sides.” Bulgaria — a NATO and EU member on the Black Sea — sent anti-tank missiles, armoured vehicles, mortars, anti-aircraft guns and howitzers in 2024-25 after an earlier shift in policy; in 2022-23 it exported instead through mostly European intermediaries. The government, led by former president Rumen Radev and sworn in last month, came in on a pro-Russian reputation but pledged to keep to pro-EU policy. In March, Sofia and Kyiv signed a 10-year security-cooperation pact covering joint defence production, intelligence-sharing and a gas corridor of up to 10 billion cubic metres a year to Ukraine.
Signal › Bulgaria was a quieter supplier than its neighbours but not a marginal one — Großwald flagged its “significant” ammunition exports when Radev won his absolute majority in April, much of it routed early through intermediaries Sofia said it could not control. This is the Radev government’s first defence decision, and it makes good the Council risk that win raised: a NATO and EU member on the Black Sea stepping out of the arms-supply coalition and calling for a settlement “determined by both sides,” the phrasing Moscow prefers. It also puts a question mark over the 10-year pact signed only in March — joint production and the gas corridor with it. The materiel hole is real; the precedent of a member peeling away, under a government elected on exactly that promise, is the larger event.
RUCENS Panic-buying in Krasnodar: Ukraine’s strike campaign reaches the Russian forecourt
Reuters, 9 Jun · UNIAN, 9 Jun · Ukrainska Pravda, 9 Jun · ISW, 8 Jun
Months of Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries, depots and pipelines are now producing visible dislocation inside Russia. On Tuesday the governor of Krasnodar, Veniamin Kondratyev, blamed “artificial panic buying” for fuel shortages at stations across the region’s southwest, after a drone-ignited fire at an oil depot in Ust-Labinsk; Russia’s Energy Ministry acknowledged that a surge in attacks had caused “temporary supply difficulties” across several southern regions and set up a national stabilisation task force (Reuters). Occupied Crimea, rationing fuel since late May, last Thursday suspended all cash sales of petrol and froze the issuance of new coupons; bookings for Sochi are down 20-30% on last year. The interdiction runs in parallel: Ukrainian forces struck the Chonhar bridge linking Crimea to the mainland for the second time in 48 hours, the Russian-installed Kherson governor confirming traffic was halted again (UNIAN), while the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reports Russian forces withdrawing from the Kinburn Spit under the same strike pressure. The exchange cuts both ways — overnight, of 166 drones and two Kh-59 missiles fired at Ukraine, air defence stopped 146, but a missile killed three civilians in Chuhuiv, among them a pregnant woman (Ukrainska Pravda).
Signal › The deep-strike campaign is shifting from demonstration to effect. For most of the year it read as attrition theatre — a refinery alight, a tit-for-tat headline — and the Krasnodar queues and the Crimean coupon freeze are the point at which it becomes a logistics and revenue problem the Russian state has to manage by task force. The strategic logic is the one Kyiv has argued since the first refinery strike: degrade the fuel and the money that run the war, not only the army at the front. What the campaign cannot do is the reciprocal: a single Kh-59 through a 166-drone night that air defence almost entirely stopped is the missile-interception gap pressure on the Russian rear does not close.
Procurement & Industry
DINAI ICEYE raises over EUR 1 billion — one of Europe’s biggest defence-tech rounds
The Finnish-Polish radar-satellite maker ICEYE raised EUR 450 million in a primary Series F led by General Atlantic, plus more than EUR 550 million in a secondary placement — over EUR 1 billion in all — at a valuation above EUR 10 billion, four times its December mark. New backers include Nokia and the Qatar Investment Authority, alongside Finnish state funds. ICEYE operates 72 synthetic-aperture-radar satellites, is doubling output from 50 to 100 a year by 2028, and turned profitable in 2025 on EUR 250 million of revenue and a EUR 1.5 billion backlog. Seven European governments now buy sovereign systems from it; it delivered Poland’s EUR 200 million POLSARIS constellation within twelve months of contract. Großwald logged the firm at roughly EUR 5 billion in early May, when it embedded a SAR cell inside a French brigade at the ORION 2026 exercise; today’s mark doubles that, and ICEYE now anchors Germany’s EUR 1.7 billion Rheinmetall-ICEYE SPOCK constellation as well. Chief executive Rafał Modrzewski calls Europe a “distant third” to the United States and China in space imagery and frames the raise as an attempt to match their cadence — sovereign reconnaissance being the layer Ukraine and the Iran war showed to be indispensable, and one where the production-rate logic now governs satellites as much as shells. (ICEYE · FT, 9 Jun)
AIRAIDIN Airbus shows the uncrewed layer at ILA — Ravenstorm, a 2029 Valkyrie, a flying interceptor
A day after the manned FCAS jet was cancelled, Airbus Defence and Space used ILA to display its full uncrewed range: the U760 Ravenstorm collaborative combat aircraft (a 1:1 model, 10 m wingspan, with air-to-air, air-to-ground and electronic-warfare roles, available early 2030s); the Kratos-built U740 Valkyrie, aimed at delivering a sovereign uncrewed fighter to the German Air Force by 2029 and teaming with the Eurofighter; the Bird of Prey drone-interceptor, which first flew in March; and the Eurodrone, due to fly in 2029. Where the manned fighter is a position paper, this is hardware and flight test. (Airbus · Hartpunkt, 9 Jun)
IAMDC-UASDIN Diehl unveils a fire-on-the-move IRIS-T SLS MK4 for convoy and counter-drone defence
Ahead of ILA, Diehl Defence presented the fourth generation of its short-range IRIS-T SLS — an “all-in-one” air-defence system carrying radar, command-and-control and launcher on a single vehicle, with an effective range of 12 km and altitude coverage to 6 km. The MK4 adds a fire-on-the-move capability from 2028, an eight-round IRIS-T load plus Diehl’s CICADA counter-drone effectors, and a Saab Giraffe 1X radar. It is built to protect troops in motion and critical infrastructure — the convoy-protection and counter-drone gap the Ukraine war has pushed to the front of European air defence. No new customer was named. (Diehl · Hartpunkt, 9 Jun)
C-UASDINAI French counter-drone startup Alta Ares raises EUR 50 million
Paris-based Alta Ares raised EUR 50 million in its second round — after EUR 2 million in May 2025 — to expand production of AI-guided munitions that intercept drones, missiles and glide bombs. The firm says its interceptors are already fielded in Ukraine, the Middle East and Asia, and it plans to grow in Poland, Germany and the United States. One more European bet on cheap, mass-produced counter-drone effectors, the same cost-exchange logic driving the Baltic and Ukrainian programmes above. (Reuters, 9 Jun)
DINAI Hensoldt signs an agentic-AI deal with SE3 Labs at ILA
Hensoldt signed a memorandum of understanding with SE3 Labs, a Munich spatial-AI startup, to fold SE3’s agentic AI — large-language-model and computer-vision agents that turn sensor data into proposed courses of action in real time — into Hensoldt’s MDOcore multi-domain platform. Hensoldt’s software chief Sven Heursch framed it as moving “from pure data aggregation and visualisation towards systems that allow users to interact directly with military situational awareness and control operations via voice commands.” SE3 was co-founded by Daniel Cremers, who holds the image-processing and AI chair at the Technical University of Munich; the MoU covers specific programmes and live tenders. It marks the German sensor house’s push from hardware into software-defined defence — and Hensoldt is also one of the eight Team Gen 6 firms named in the lead. (Hensoldt, 9 Jun)
NAVDIN Bundestag committee to fund an ASW upgrade for the F123 frigates, with fleet commonality in view
A EUR 25 million funding proposal before the Bundestag defence committee (Verteidigungsausschuss, the parliamentary defence committee) this week would restore anti-submarine-warfare capability to the German Navy’s four Brandenburg-class (F123) frigates. Per Hartpunkt, the modernisation — run by Saab since 2021 around its 9LV combat system and Sea Giraffe radars — will add a towed sonar from GeoSpectrum, the Canadian subsidiary of Israel’s Elbit, chosen over Atlas Elektronik on space grounds; delivery is expected in 2029. Much of the F123’s sensor and combat-system fit is meant to carry across to the future F128 (MEKO A-200) frigates, giving the navy up to eight near-identical hulls — simpler to sustain and train on, if the crews can be found. (Hartpunkt, 9 Jun)
Forward Look · Week Ahead
10 June, Berlin: The federal cabinet adopts the national aviation strategy — now the FCAS sequel — and ILA Berlin opens (10-14 June), with Merz speaking. EU ambassadors take up the 21st sanctions package the same day; it needs unanimity.
ILA, this week: the eight Team Gen 6 chief executives are due to sign and unveil their consortium midweek — the first concrete shape of a post-FCAS German fighter, and the test of whether a partner (Spain, Saab or GCAP) and an engine path (EUMET, or something else) are named or left open. Pistorius hinted at a fourth, undiscussed option; watch whether it surfaces, and whether Safran says anything from Paris — silence is data too.
Coming days: Tusk’s wider Ukraine meeting — Poland and Italy alongside the E3 — and whether it supersedes or merely supplements the London format.
Baltic, to 20 June: BALTOPS 26 (about 20 vessels, 15 nations, 6,000 personnel) runs on, with Russia staging parallel air and missile-ship drills off Kaliningrad on 8-9 June (Reuters, 9 Jun).
15-19 June, Paris: Eurosatory — Rheinmetall’s uncrewed MV-8 Komodo breaching vehicle and FFG’s air-defence concepts among the reveals, and which Polish and Baltic orders under the EU’s SAFE defence-loan instrument get timed to the show.
18-19 June, Brussels: European Council, its Russia-diplomacy gate and the EUR 210 billion in frozen Russian assets on the agenda; NATO defence ministers meet on the 18th, before the 7-8 July Ankara summit where the UK Defence Investment Plan and the German Patriot decision remain open.
17 July: the Franco-German ministerial council takes the narrowed FCAS work plan — the test of whether the surviving combat cloud is joined by a contracted future for the EUMET engine, or whether the one pillar that worked on the merits is left to lapse; the MGCS tank is on the same agenda.
Gulf, the live variable: the Iran war re-escalated on 9 June — President Trump said Iran had downed a US Apache over the Strait of Hormuz and vowed to respond, even as a Monday Israel-Iran pause frayed and the strait stayed mostly closed (Reuters, 9 Jun). It is a US-Israeli-Iranian fight, not Europe’s — but it is the variable behind the price-cap freeze above, and behind Europe’s jet-fuel and energy exposure.
