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Moldova Inks Agreement for EU Help toward Independence from Russian Energy

The European Commission has signed a deal with Moldova to help the country decouple from Russian energy supply and fully integrate into the European Union energy market. The agreement includes a EUR 250 million ($240.78 million) support package from the EU for 2025. Part of the funding has already been disbursed. Part of the funding […]

The European Commission has signed a deal with Moldova to help the country decouple from Russian energy supply and fully integrate into the European Union energy market.

The agreement includes a EUR 250 million ($240.78 million) support package from the EU for 2025. Part of the funding has already been disbursed. Part of the funding meant for the Transnistrian region, or the Left Bank, is subject to the fulfilment of EU demands for fundamental freedoms and human rights, according to an online statement by the Commission.

In the Right Bank, the agreement, called the Comprehensive Strategy for Energy Independence and Resilience of Moldova, will compensate excess electricity costs for households for up to 110 kilowatt hours every month until December 2025.

The two-year strategy will also include a hardship fund to lighten the energy bills of the “most exposed households” and compensate for the entire increase in power costs for social institutions, including schools and hospitals.

The plan has also allotted EUR 15 million for agro-food and manufacturing businesses.

“Furthermore, through the mobilization of international financial institutions, additional funding of EUR 50 million will be available for sustainable investments in energy efficiency projects by local public authorities, households and SMEs [small and medium enterprises]”, the Commission said.

In the Left Bank, EUR 60 million is conditionally available for over 350,000 people affected by the discontinuation of supply by Russia’s Gazprom PJSC, the Commission said.

“This support is subject to steps being taken on fundamental freedoms and human rights in the Transnistrian region and excludes energy-intensive activities”, it said.

Currently Moldova’s energy system is delivering power and heat without blackouts, according to the Commission.

“In the longer term, the EU support will allow Moldova to improve its energy security through investments and reforms for the energy transition and ensure the full phase-out of Russian supply of energy resources”, the Commission added.

Moldova’s power system has been connected to the European continental network since 2022.

On October 29, 2024, the European Network of Transmission System Operators for electricity (ENTSOE) said it has increased the export capacity for Moldova and Ukraine by 400 megawatts (MW) to 2,100 MW for the winter.

“Since June 2024, following the destruction of numerous power plants in Ukraine and the anticipated large electricity deficit during the winter 2024-25, the Transmission System Operators (TSOs) of Continental Europe have evaluated the feasibility to increase the electricity export capacity from the neighboring EU countries to Ukraine and Moldova, while ensuring power system stability and operational security”, ENTSOE said in a statement.

The new limit lasts from December 2024 to the first quarter of 2025. From March 2025, ENTSOE will reassess the limit every month, according to the statement on the ENTSOE website.

According to the Commission, an agreement was reached December 2024 to allow unused capacities in Ukraine to be exported to Moldova.

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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