Germany's foreign minister said Russia is betting on an escalation in Ukraine and that Germany will impose new sanctions on the Russian economy.

US Treasury and euro-area government bond yields rose in early European trading on Thursday, with US borrowing costs hovering near multi-decade highs touched on Wednesday and approaching 24-year peaks. French government bonds continued to underperform other euro-area peers as investors question Paris’s ability to cut the fiscal deficit to 5% of GDP by 2027. MainSky Asset Management’s chairman said that, given the current mix of nominal growth and interest costs, France’s large debt stock is rising by about 8% a year, and warned that if the trend continues France’s debt-to-GDP ratio could reach roughly 130% by end-2027.

Agile Robots CEO Zhaopeng Chen said at the Wave by Vento tech event in Turin on Thursday the company is filming staff performing tasks to capture hand and finger movements to plug a training-data shortfall that is constraining industrial automation. Its "Robot Academy" records these human motions and integrates them with other datasets so robots can repeatedly rehearse actions in simulation. Start-ups across Europe and beyond are pushing humanoid and other robots into factories to lift productivity and cut costs, but adoption remains constrained by insufficient training data, leaving robots unable to complete some basic tasks.