Evening Brief, Sunday 21 June

US and Iranian negotiators opened talks at Bürgenstock with Pakistan and Qatar trying to turn a memorandum into a treaty within 60 days. The agenda runs through Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief, oil exports and the ceasefire in Lebanon, which both sides already treat as the first hard test of the paper deal. JD Vance put an optimistic face on the opening session.

The Strait of Hormuz quickly became leverage. Iran said the Revolutionary Guards had closed the waterway after Israeli strikes in Lebanon and what Tehran described as a US failure to enforce the ceasefire. US Central Command rejected that account, saying 55 merchant vessels carrying more than 17 million barrels of oil had moved through on Saturday. Tim Hawkins gave Washington’s line in blunt terms.

Lebanon clouded the table further. Lebanese state media said Israeli strikes killed at least 20 people, while Israel said it was responding to Hezbollah fire and would keep troops in what it calls a security zone. Hezbollah said it would not accept Israeli freedom of movement, and neither Israel nor Hezbollah signed the US-Iran framework. Donald Trump then threatened Iran directly if groups tied to Tehran caused trouble in Lebanon.

Castles rarely decide modern wars. This Swiss resort may still decide how much trust is left in a truce that had little to spare.

Russia struck Ukrainian cities as the drone war widened. Ukrainian officials said guided bombs hit an apartment block in Kharkiv, killing at least one person and injuring nine, while strikes in Zaporizhzhia killed five people and injured 11. Attacks also killed people near Sumy and in the Kherson region, according to local officials. Volodymyr Zelensky warned civilians that more was coming.

Ukraine also pushed its campaign against Russian oil infrastructure deeper. Zelensky said new Fire Point drones with a range above 3,000km had been used against the Tyumen oil refinery in western Siberia, more than 2,000km from Ukraine’s border. Ukrainian forces also struck an oil terminal at Kerch and an electrical substation at Bilohorsk in occupied Crimea, while Russia said it intercepted 187 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones. Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 92 of 99 Russian drones launched overnight.

The civilian effect became plain in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. Sergey Aksyonov, the Moscow-appointed head of the peninsula, halted petrol and diesel sales to private motorists and reserved supplies for state enterprises and public services. He said the suspension began at 9am local time.

Ukraine has turned refineries and depots into pressure points far from the front. The campaign’s point is no longer only to hurt Russian revenue, but to make the war visible at the pump.

A heat dome parked over western Europe and drove temperatures 15 to 25 degrees Celsius above average across France, Spain, Britain and Ireland. Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens hit 38.4C, Saint-Florent on Corsica reached 41.2C and France put 35 of its 96 departments under red heat alert, with another 45 under orange. Météo-France compared the episode with the dangerous heatwaves of 2003 and 2019.

France tried to keep music from turning into a medical emergency. The government banned public alcohol consumption in red-alert departments during the Fête de la Musique, while SNCF suspended 71 trains and some baccalaureate exams were postponed. Paris kept parks open overnight and deployed extra emergency services. Emmanuel Grégoire warned that the danger was practical, not puritanical.

The heat stretched beyond France. Ireland could reach 30C on Thursday, the UK Met Office issued amber warnings with temperatures near 35C, and Italy placed eight cities under red alert as the Cerberus anticyclone kept nights above 25C in some places. The World Health Organisation’s Europe office said more than 200,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes in the past four years, most of them preventable.

Summer in Europe increasingly arrives with a public-order manual. The political problem is no longer whether heatwaves are exceptional, but how fast ordinary cities can become heat shelters.

Keir Starmer spent the weekend under pressure after The Observer reported that he could announce his resignation on Monday. Downing Street dismissed the report as speculation, but the prime minister was said to be consulting at Chequers after Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election and gained the Commons seat needed to mount a leadership challenge. Starmer had still insisted on fighting only days earlier.

The problem is arithmetic as much as mood. More than 100 Labour MPs have called for Starmer to leave or set a timetable, while senior ministers, including Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband, Shabana Mahmood and Heidi Alexander, reportedly told him to prepare an exit plan. Peter Kyle, the business secretary and a close ally, did not confirm the resignation story but admitted the prime minister was reassessing the landscape.

Burnham’s victory nearly doubled Labour’s majority in Makerfield and turned a long-running leadership threat into an immediate one. Supporters of an orderly transition want Starmer to step down around the party conference rather than suffer a formal defeat. If he goes, Britain would be heading for its seventh prime minister in a decade.

A government with a large majority can still run out of usable authority. Starmer’s choice now is whether to manage the fall or make his party prove it in public.

Colombia voted in a polarised presidential runoff between Iván Cepeda, a leftist senator and human-rights activist, and Abelardo De La Espriella, a right-wing outsider and former defence lawyer for paramilitary figures. Cepeda wants to continue Gustavo Petro’s peace talks with armed groups and expand social spending. De La Espriella promises a military crackdown, tax cuts and a smaller state while preserving popular welfare measures. In the first round, De La Espriella won 43 to 44 percent against Cepeda’s 41 percent, while 17 million voters abstained.

Security shaped the vote as much as ideology. Colombia recorded 14,780 homicides last year, the highest number since at least 2015, and illegal armed groups have nearly doubled in size in five years. The campaign was scarred by the assassination of presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay and by bomb and drone attacks. John Manrique captured the anxiety at street level.

The election also carries a regional and American charge. Donald Trump endorsed De La Espriella twice, calling Cepeda a radical left Marxist, while Latin America has swung right in Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru. Petro added one last security headline on Saturday, saying the military had killed Marlon, a key aide to FARC dissident leader Iván Mordisco, in Cauca.

Colombia is not simply choosing a president. It is choosing whether fear makes peace talks look naïve, or whether another hardline turn makes violence easier to sell and harder to end.

A dispute over wartime memory erupted into a diplomatic crisis between Poland and Ukraine. In late May, Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave the name Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army to a Ukrainian special-operations unit, reviving Polish anger over the Volhynia massacres. On Friday, President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle awarded in 2023. Zelenskyy returned it, and former Ukrainian presidents Leonid Kuczma, Viktor Yushchenko and Petro Poroszenko then renounced their own Polish honours.

Kyiv pushed back hard. Foreign Minister Andrij Sybiha said Nawrocki had damaged recent gains in Polish-Ukrainian relations and suggested Zelenskyy had not decided whether to attend the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdańsk on 25 to 26 June. Sybiha framed the order not as a medal dispute but as an insult to Ukrainian soldiers and to Ukraine’s right to its own history.

Moscow seized the quarrel immediately. Russian officials portrayed the renunciations as proof of their claims about Ukrainian nationalism, while social-media data showed the row spreading fast: 120 million views in Polish discussion, with 74 percent of commenters backing Nawrocki, and 45.3 million views in Ukrainian discussion, where support for Zelenskyy’s return of the order reached 99.5 percent.

Alliances often fray at their symbolic seams before they break over budgets or weapons. This one shows how a shared enemy does not erase different memories of the same past.