Tamara Kaňuchová

The European Correspondent • 2nd June 2026

Less vroom more whoosh

What's in it for you? Electric trains are cheaper to operate and maintain compared to diesel trains. That doesn’t translate directly into lower ticket prices, but electrification does shield providers from volatile fossil fuel prices. An electrified rail network means fewer disruptions and cancelled journeys like we see in aviation.
Electric trains also accelerate faster and can be longer and heavier, increasing the number of trains that can operate per hour and the number of passengers they can...

The European Correspondent • 28th May 2026

Having a uterus in Europe still sucks

When people talk about period poverty, they often focus on access to free or cheaper period products.
But products are only half the story. A recent report by Slovak NGO Intymyta links the problem to broader sanitation issues. It found that 28% of respondents across Slovakia – disproportionately from low-income families and marginalised groups – don't have access to warm water, and 25% don’t have access to a shower or a flushing toilet.
Natália Blahová, the author of Intymyta's report, told us...

The European Correspondent • 20th May 2026

Mr. Robot at the power plant

There have been 23 recorded cyberattacks on Europe's energy sector since 2022. While attacks themselves are dangerous, these incidents also take a psychological toll: exposing vulnerabilities of our nuclear sites massively shakes public trust in our critical infrastructure.Cyberattacks and IT security are considered the biggest threats to Germany’s energy security, according to a survey of 150 local utilities. An ethical hacker uncovered vulnerabilities in the Dutch solar panel network, gaining...

The European Correspondent • 21st April 2026

Greetings from a village living in the future of solar power

If your roof has solar panels, you can use your homegrown renewable energy to cover your entire electricity supply, all year long. This future is being tested by the Green Village, a research field and “living lab” on the campus of TU Delft in the Netherlands.Strolling around the village, professor Miroslav Zeman, an expert in electrical engineering with a focus on solar photovoltaics (PVs), explained that the main purpose of this “living lab” is to test how to make the built environment sustain...

The European Correspondent • 26th March 2026

How tax fuels tank tourism

Diesel prices have surged by 25% in Europe over the past month, and are now above €2 a litre in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.Europeans pay some of the world’s highest prices for petrol or diesel. Up to half of that price is tax. Each EU member state sets its own rate above the minimum set by EU law of €0.359 per litre for petrol and €0.33 for diesel. While Malta and Bulgaria stick close to the lowest possible rate, the Neth...

Transitions • 25th March 2026

Tamara Kanuchova, Author at Transitions

As protests continue to shake Serbia, minority Hungarian and Slovak communities in the country’s northern Vojvodina region describe growing political pressure, shrinking autonomy, and a quiet exodus of youth. From Balkan Insight.

As protests continue to shake Serbia, minority Hungarian and Slovak communities in the country’s northern Vojvodina region describe growing political pressure, shrinking autonomy, and a quiet exodus of youth. From Balkan Insight.

The European Correspondent • 19th March 2026

Can we get off the UNESCO list?

Vlkolínec, a small village in central Slovakia, looks like a fairytale frozen in time. In 1993, its 45 traditional wooden houses earned it UNESCO World Heritage status. That's when the fairytale started to slowly fall apart.
Today, the 14 remaining residents no longer want to be on the list. UNESCO protection rules heavily restrict farming, keeping animals, or renovating their homes. Meanwhile, around 100,000 tourists come every year, looking into residents' windows and wandering through their c...

The European Correspondent • 18th March 2026

Meet the world’s wealthiest defence boss

While no Elon Musk, Strnad sits only behind the American billionaire as the individual who increased their net worth the most in the first few weeks of 2026. On 23 January, Strnad's Czechoslovak Group (CSG) was listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange as the largest initial public offering (IPO) ever in the history of the defence sector, raising €3.8 billion. The sales of stocks yielded €750 million for the company.CSG profited from Russia's war in Ukraine. The company is a key supplier of militar...

Balkan Insight • 6th March 2026

Caught Between Belgrade, Bratislava, Budapest: Vojvodina’s Fractured Minorities

Vojvodina, Serbia’s northern province, often feels like a mosaic, with over 25 ethnic groups speaking six official languages making up roughly 30 per cent of the province’s population. The two largest ethnic minorities – Hungarian and Slovak – make up 13 per cent and 2.3 per cent of the region’s population, respectively.
Serbia’s minority protection framework is often praised in legal terms. National minorities are guaranteed rights to preserve their language and identity through education at mi...

The European Correspondent • 17th February 2026

Your home is leaking money

In the EU, 75% of buildings are energy inefficient – they're poorly insulated or dependent on fossil fuels. For low and middle-income households, this means a stronger burden on monthly utility bills.One of the most prominent solutions to improve energy efficiency is the heat pump. The most common air-source (as opposed to water-source) heat pump runs on electricity and moves heat by capturing air, compressing it into gas to increase the temperature, and then releasing it indoors via an air-fan....

The European Correspondent • 17th February 2026

Turning crisis into clean energy: Ukraine's war-time transition

Winter in wartime is challenging, especially with recurring energy outages due to low temperatures, while trying to rebuild damaged infrastructure. While Ukraine struggles to keep the lights on, green transition doesn't really sound like a priority.”Over 18 gigawatt of generating capacity was lost (since 2022), including the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe's largest nuclear facility,” said Yuliia Rybak, programme manager of the UNDP Green Energy Recovery Programme in Ukraine, to The Eur...

The European Correspondent • 8th February 2026

How to share energy with your neighbour

Take Ukraine: as Russia's war against it wages on, power plants remain a strategic targets, proving the importance of innovative solutions.The destruction of the old energy infrastructure has presented an opportunity to rebuild the grid in a more decentralised way – powered by various smaller sources instead of a one large central power plant. That significantly boosts the grid's security.
Energy sharing goes hand in hand with decentralisation – it enables citizens to directly leverage small pow...

The European Correspondent • 8th February 2026

Domestic flights make a quiet comeback

When Ryanair, Europe's largest low-cost airline announced new routes to Bratislava last year, it came with a familiar punchline: “Not sure where Bratislava is? Perfect. Go find out for €16.99.” And many seem to listen.
A competing low-cost airline, Wizz Air, also stepped up operations in Slovakia, launching a new connection between Bratislava and Košice, the country's second biggest city, close to the border with Hungary. The flight covers 313 kilometres in around 40 minutes, while a train takes...

VSquare.org • 5th February 2026

Blackmail Allegations and a Million Signatures: Babiš’s Government Already Under Fire - VSquare.org

Not even two months into office, Andrej Babiš’s coalition government — made up of ANO, SPD, and the Motorists party — is already facing a wave of protests. Demonstrations are directed not only against the coalition’s decisions, but also in support of President Petr Pavel. Babiš is juggling his own scandals alongside growing tensions between the president and several ministers, all while the Czech Republic’s foreign policy appears increasingly inconsistent and improvised.
The protest movement Mil...

25th December 2025

Big oil’s retreat from renewables | The European Correspondent

For a moment there, it looked promising for the EU's sustainability goals to cut down our energy dependency on fossils. Even the big oil and gas companies were on board, setting their own targets to match the common green vision. But now, it's hard to miss the pattern – they've been quietly retreating from renewables and reverting back to fossil fuels.
Let's take Shell, Europe's biggest oil and gas company: first, the company lowered its emissions reduction target from 20% to 15-20% by the end...

25th December 2025

How to get kicked out of the European socialist party | The European Correspondent

Making headlines for its controversial stances on gender, adoption and NGOs, Slovakia's governing Smer party looks like your average right-wing populist party. Yet, to many people's surprise, its official political orientation is quite different, as the full name suggests: Smer – Social Democracy.
The designated centre-left party has now fully swerved from its label, as it has been permanently kicked out of the Party of European Socialists (PES), an EU-level umbrella alliance for socialist, soci...

25th December 2025

A fine for walking too fast? | The European Correspondent

“Slovakia adopts a speed limit for pedestrians” – this and similar headlines went viral on the internet just two weeks ago. So you can’t run to catch the bus anymore? How are they going to measure the walking speed?
My friends – and half the internet – were asking the same thing after Slovakia passed a law setting the sidewalk speed limit to 6 km/h.
But a closer look shows the rule isn't as bizarre as it first sounds. The “walking speed” is just a reference point of speed limit for all other veh...

25th December 2025

An unexpected place of refuge | The European Correspondent

Why libraries? They remain one of the few spaces in Latvia that are open to everyone, and are small enough to feel like a safe place to speak up, Ivanova told The European Correspondent.
”We hope [victims] find a safe space in our community, so they come to other events just because they have this feeling of safety, that people around them are ready to listen, are ready to help,” she explained.
In Latvia, parents can take up to 18 months of paid parental leave – one of the Europe's longest. But...

25th December 2025

Xmas cookies under X-rays | The European Correspondent

Instead of looking for baking advice from your neighbour, their aunt or the aunt's Facebook group, let's see what experts say about the factors that make cookies taste really good.To see what makes a pepernoot good, Bruker, an American company known for high-resolution 3D X-ray imaging, ran the cookie through X-ray microscopy (XRM). The point isn't to ruin the Christmas magic, but to quantify it: the measurements are used to sharpen the recipe and keep quality consistent from batch one to batch...

Pulse Z • 24th December 2025

Europe 1914 vs 2025: Christmas Truce vs Modern-Time War - PulseZ

In the film The Monuments Men, the silence of World War II on Christmas Eve, when the fighting has temporarily ceased and people are in the camps, some decide to play the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” over the loudspeakers, sung so softly that it seems to break the frostiness if anyone breathes too loudly. The promise of the song – “next year all our troubles will be out of sight” — is the kind of phrase that sounds almost illegal when history is in turmoil. This is the strange,...

VSquare.org • 24th October 2025

The Comeback of Andrej Babiš: How He Won Again and What Comes Next in Prague - VSquare.org

Andrej Babiš staged his comeback by focusing on welfare, pensions, and healthcare, appealing to his aging base while largely avoiding issues like defense or foreign policy. His ANO movement absorbed anti-establishment voters by mobilizing peripheral regions without embracing the far-left and the far-right’s extreme rhetoric.
The last two years have seen voters across Europe head to the polls at an unprecedented frequency. With the steady stream of elections there has been a consistent threat of...

VSquare.org • 6th October 2025

24/7 Russian Propaganda Blitz Hit Moldova Before the Elections - VSquare.org

On the night of Sunday, September 28, 2025, the Moldovan parliamentary election day, many people were holding their breath, waiting for the final results to roll in. Moldovans had faced months, if not years, of an information onslaught at levels beyond what just about any society has faced. In the end, the pro-European ruling Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) won 50.2% of the vote, while the pro-Russian Patriotic Bloc managed only 24.2%, despite well-documented foreign interference, mainly fr...

14th September 2025

The summer of discovering misused EU funding | The European Correspondent

But about a month ago, it came to light that some of this money had allegedly been spent on luxury yachts and tanning machines by restaurant owners, who defended their purchases as “diversifying their business”. However, the communication of the issue is as murky as the funding allocation. As a businessman told the Polish outlet Wyborcza, diversification was one of the goals of the funding, and he was not supposed to spend money on anything related to his business.
Poland qualified for almost €6...

14th September 2025

Lights, camera, learn! Movies teach more than meets the eye | The European Correspondent

In the pursuit of using culture for political purposes, politicians decide ”who is going to be producing art or not, who is going to be supported”, explained Pavesi.For proof of this statement, look to Slovakia: just a few months into office, the Slovak culture ministry, led by a nationalist politician, took control over the funding system and dismissed 50% of cultural workers not playing by the state rules, including directors of the biggest cultural institutions​​.
”We have reached a point of...