🇺🇸📊🔫 — 🇺🇸 NATOpoRusski channel on Telegram:

"👩‍🔬NATO Sustainment and Procurement Agency (NSPA) will support NATO allies with integrated air and missile defense during Exercise RALY 24 in 🇷🇴 and 🇧🇬.

📊 At this event, NSPA will be collecting telemetry and conducting live fire analysis for the PATRIOT and HAWK systems.‌‌"

🔗 Source

🏹 🌐 🇷🇺 Nato has just 5% of air defences needed to protect eastern flank

🔶️ Russia’s war against Ukraine has underscored the importance of air defence, as Kyiv begs the west for additional systems and rockets to protect its cities, troops and energy grid against daily bombing raids.

🔶️ The failure of European Nato states in recent months to provide additional air defence equipment to Ukraine has underscored the continent’s limited stocks of the expensive and slow-to-manufacture systems.

📎 Financial Times

🇷🇴👕⚡️ A pretty big "scandal" going around on Romanian social medias recently, French luxury fashion house, Louis Vuitton Malletier was caught, again, ripping off traditional folk costumes from Sibiu County, Romania, and branding them as their fashion designers' own creations.

Louis Vuitton isn't the only fashion house that copies folk costumes to reuse partially or sometimes entirely, fashion collections. Dior was caught in 2017 ripping off a number of folk attires from Bihor county, with various coats, blouses and vests being sold for as much as 30k USD when traditional, handmade clothing items could be bought for a lot less from local tailors in the Bihor region (more in this thread)

For its part, the Romanian government through the minister of culture demanded that the fashion house, Louis Vuitton, at least mention from where they took their inspiration from on their ads and website.

🔗 https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/louis-vuitton-ie-romaneasca-raluca-turcan-spune-ca-va-contacta-casa-de-moda-4911166

🇷🇴🗳⚡️ This Sunday will mark two rounds of elections in Romania: for European Parliament and for village, town and city mayors across the country.

These two, combined are the most important rounds of elections as, the MEPs Romania sends to Brussels can affect the laws which the EU wants to enact, laws which override the national laws of Romania and in the case of mayors, picking the best candidate that can develop the community in which one lives.

These two being the first rounds of the 4 rounds of elections scheduled for this year mean that they "test the waters" for the popular support needed by parties for the later parliamentary elections (in September) and the presidential elections (December) and its not going too well for the governing 🌹🟦 coalition and are doing everything in their power to discredit the political opposition.

A few days ago, incumbent mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan, was ”revealed” to have been an informant of the communist secret police in 1988 according to a leaked document. The document itself was soon proven to be false by the National Council for the Study of the Archives of the Securitate (CNSAS) who were not able to find the document in their archives and noted several ”mistakes” which led their historians to the conclusion that it was faked. The leak conveniently came from a 🌹 branch, intending to act as an attack of the image of Nicușor Dan. Dan filed a complaint with the public prosecutor demanding that the person who came with the leak be identified by name and be punished.

Prosecutors launched an investigation into possible electoral fraud regarding an independent candidate for the EU Parliament elections, Silvestru Șoșoacă, who was placed under judicial control in the meantime. Other people close to AUR president, George Simion, are also investigated for the same crime which, if found to be true, could lead to the elimination of the AUR candidates from the official ballot.

Cristian Popescu Piedone of the Humanist-Social-Liberal Party (PUSL) revealed that there is a lot of pressure put on him and his party to have him withdrew from the race for mayor of Bucharest. Piedone is a socialist and is appealing to voters in the poorer areas of Bucharest in direct competition with the candidate backed by 🌹, Gabriela Firea. If one of them withdraws, they can very well capture the other candidate's voters and it would be enough to achieve victory. Piedone however said that he will stand his ground and remain in the race.

Important to note that in the mayoral elections, the candidate with the most votes wins. There is no 2nd round in place, one does not need 51% of the votes to win, one can win with 35% of the votes, for example.