Kiev will send reinforcements to key Ukrainian cities to prevent potential attacks from Russia-backed separatists, President Petro Poroshenko said on Monday. He also called on Ukraine’s parliament to rescind a law giving special status to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east of the country, much of which is under the control of separatists. Kiev essentially has no control over rebel authorities in the east, who held their own elections over the weekend and have suggested they may attempt to capture other cities in the region, such as the port city of Mariupol. At a meeting of the country’s security council, Poroshenko said the reinforcements would be for the ‘construction of fortifications’ against a ‘possible offensive in the direction of Mariupol, Berdyansk, Kharkiv and Luhansk north’. Speaking earlier he said he would ask the council and parliament to end the ‘special status’ law for rebellious eastern regions, agreed as part of a ceasefire deal in September.

A 14-year-old boy suspected of planning a series of bombings in Vienna was reported on Thursday to have been offered $25,000 (£16,000) by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to carry out the attacks amid claims that two other youths recruited in the same way remain at large. The arrested youth has not been named by authorities, but has been identified by the Austrian media as Mertkan G, the son of Turkish immigrants who has lived in the country for eight years. He was arrested on Tuesday but details are only now emerging about his case. Among the sites in which he has admitted planning to plant explosives is Vienna's Westbahnhof station, used by 40,000 travellers each day. He had confessed to planning to plant a series of bombs in crowded areas around Vienna, said Michaela Obenaus, a spokesman for the prosecutors' office in the boy's home city of St Pölten

A trade union representing police officers in Germany voiced shock on Monday after thousands of anti-Islam football hooligans had fought running battles with police in the western city of Cologne the previous day. The self-styled ‘Hooligans Against Salafists’ rally marked the worst rioting yet by a new alliance where Germany‘s far-right groups have recruited violence-prone football fans to their anti-foreigner cause. Police, who detained 17 of the 4,000-strong crowd for acts of violence, had to employ water cannon, baton charges and tear gas on Sunday afternoon to regain control of the crowd, which at one point overturned a police van outside Cologne‘s main railway station. ‘If this grouping consolidates and grows further, then I would say we face a new type of violence,’ warned Arnold Plickert, head of the North Rhine Westphalia state chapter of the GdP police union.

European Union leaders have reached what they described as the world's most ambitious climate change targets for 2030, paving the way for a new UN-backed global treaty next year. The 28 leaders on Friday finally overcame divisions at an EU summit in Brussels to reach a deal including a commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% compared to 1990 levels. They also agreed on 27% targets for renewable energy supply and efficiency gains, in spite of reservations from some member states about the cost of the measures. The EU wanted to agree on the targets ahead of a summit in Paris in November and December 2015, where it is hoped the world will agree to a new phase of the Kyoto climate accords which run until 2020. The agreement puts the EU ‘in the driving seat’ ahead of the Paris conference, European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso said