Host: Russia's ceasefire is over and the bombs are falling again. A cruise ship quarantine stretches from Spain to Paris. Romania's judges go public about rot at the top. And a sunken Russian ship off the Spanish coast may have been carrying nuclear cargo to Pyongyang. This is Europa Daily.

Host: The three-day ceasefire in Ukraine ended on Monday, and Russia wasted no time. Ukrainian officials say more than two hundred drones were launched overnight, striking apartment buildings, energy infrastructure, a kindergarten, and a civilian locomotive across multiple regions. In Kryvyi Rih — President Zelenskyy's home city — a drone hit an apartment building, killing two people and injuring four, including the dead couple's nine-month-old granddaughter, whose leg was severed. North-east of there, an aerial bomb strike killed four more and injured three. In Kyiv, debris from a downed drone set fire to the roof of a sixteen-storey residential building. Blackouts hit the Mykolaiv region after drones struck energy infrastructure. Damage was also recorded in the Zhytomyr, Chernihiv, and Cherkasy regions, with injuries reported in Dnipro and Kherson. Zelenskyy said pressure on Russia must in no way be weakened, and noted that Ukraine had struck gas facilities in Russia's Orenburg region, more than fifteen hundred kilometres from the border. He described Ukraine's frontline position and long-range strike results as at their highest level in years. On the diplomatic side, Zelenskyy said Kyiv was working with European allies on ballistic-missile defence technology, with thirteen countries and NATO representatives participating in talks on Tuesday. And from Brussels, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas offered a pointed reading of Putin's weekend suggestion that the war was heading to an end. His statement, she said after meeting EU defence ministers, really shows he is not in a strong position. So I think there's an opportunity for ending this war.

Host: A hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius is now a live cross-border health emergency. The WHO's director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has urged all countries to prepare for more cases, while cautioning there is currently no sign of a larger outbreak — though he warned the situation could still change. A French woman who contracted the virus on board is now on a ventilator in intensive care in Paris, diagnosed with the most severe form of the disease. Spain took in the stricken ship, and Tedros publicly thanked Spanish authorities for their compassion and solidarity. The WHO is recommending a forty-two-day quarantine and constant monitoring of high-risk contacts. Passengers from multiple countries were aboard, meaning health authorities across Europe may need to track and monitor returnees. It is a real-time test of the disease surveillance networks built up since COVID.

Host: Romania's justice system is, in the words of those inside it, in deep crisis. Six months after a documentary alleged that the top of the country's judiciary was riddled with corruption — used, it claimed, to delay graft convictions — the president of the Bucharest court of appeal, Liana Arsenie, called an extraordinary press conference. She was flanked by her two vice-presidents, with about thirty judges standing behind them in support. The courtroom was packed with journalists. Romania only recently exited the EU's Cooperation and Verification Mechanism, the long-running oversight tool designed to ensure judicial independence and anti-corruption standards. Systemic allegations at this level go to the heart of whether those hard-won reforms are holding — and because EU member states rely on mutual recognition of each other's court rulings, the integrity of Romania's judiciary is not a purely domestic matter.

Host: And finally, a story that reads like a thriller but is sourced to new reports now surfacing seventeen months after the event. The Ursa Major, a hundred-and-forty-two-metre Russian-flagged cargo ship owned by the state-linked company Oboronlogistics, sank sixty-two nautical miles off the coast of Murcia in south-east Spain just before midnight on the twenty-third of December 2024. The ship had suffered a series of mysterious explosions. It was purportedly sailing from St Petersburg to Vladivostok. But according to reports, it may have been carrying nuclear submarine reactors destined for North Korea — and Western military forces may have targeted the vessel. If accurate, that means a sanctioned Russian state-linked ship transited European Atlantic waters carrying nuclear cargo, and may have been intercepted by allied forces in European maritime space. The full picture remains unclear, but the implications for maritime surveillance and sanctions policing in European waters are hard to overstate.

Host: That is your briefing for today. Europa Daily is back tomorrow morning. Until then, stay informed.

Sources

• The Guardian Europe: ‘It’s toxic’: Romania reeling over claims of high-level justice system corruption
• The Guardian Europe: Ukraine war briefing: Deadly Russian bombing spree marks end of ceasefire
• The Guardian Europe: WHO head tells countries to prepare for more hantavirus cases
• BBC Europe: No sign of larger hantavirus outbreak, says UN health agency
• The Guardian Europe: Russian ship that sank near Spain may have been carrying nuclear reactors to North Korea