STOCKHOLM — Two military helicopters shattered the calm of suburban Stockholm on a late November morning, swooping over a private home in the sleepy locale of Kil in a high-profile raid on a Swedish couple accused of spying for Russia.
“I couldn’t believe it when I saw the police piling into their house,” a neighbor of the arrested Stockholm couple told POLITICO. “The noise of the helicopters woke up the whole street, and we just stood on our driveways watching the action.”
The rattle of helicopters in the darkness was the latest sign that European nations’ high-stakes games of espionage with Russia are increasingly being played in the open.
#Ukraine: A Russian Ka-52 attack helicopter (RF-91335, 43 Yellow, formerly 43 White) was reportedly shot down by a Russian Pantsir-S1 in a friendly fire incident in #Zaporizhzhia Oblast. pic.twitter.com/IWXeORBI0M
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) December 20, 2022
… The dark side of “Freedom Convoy” protests, and populism: Trudeau said what troubled him wasn’t protesters who were not vaccinated against COVID-19 — he said many people in many communities were vaccine-hesitant “for cultural reasons, for religious reasons, for philosophical reasons,” or because they spent too much time on the “wrong websites.” His bigger concern was the spread of misinformation or disinformation and those who “preyed on people’s fears.” Trudeau said it represented a risk to Canadians who were wrongly told vaccines were more harmful than COVID-19. “It’s more of a deliberate attempt to destabilize, to fundraise, to make money off of people’s fears, to shift the narrative, to undermine their trust in institutions … to just sow chaos in our democracy, in our society and (they) are using very, very powerful tools to do that, that social media and the online world have developed in a way that actively and deliberately harms 
