Evening Brief, Sunday 6 September

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Vladimir Putin in Moscow for three hours and ten minutes, then left with a limited prize: Russia and Ukraine agreed to suspend aerial strikes on each other's capitals from midnight Saturday through Monday. Dmitry Peskov said Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to stop attacks on Kyiv, while Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine would halt drone and missile strikes against Moscow for the same period. The pause followed Russian strikes that damaged facilities at Kyiv and Boryspil airports, and a separate Russian attack that killed four people in Kamianske.

The Moscow meeting gave Donald Trump's envoys a channel, not a settlement. Yuri Ushakov said the talks covered economic questions, battlefield assessments and Russia's claims about Russian speakers in Ukraine, while Sergei Ryabkov said any deal must reflect conditions at the front. The envoys are scheduled to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Sunday, which will force Washington to test whether a pause negotiated in the Kremlin can survive contact with Ukraine's terms.

This matters because a three-day halt over two capitals reduces risk, but it also shows how narrow the current diplomacy has become: the guns quiet where the envoys travel, while the war continues everywhere else.

The United States struck three Iranian oil tankers after American officials said Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired ballistic missiles at a United States aircraft carrier and a guided-missile destroyer in international waters. United States Central Command said the American warships evaded the missiles and suffered no casualties, then disabled tankers near Kharg Island and Jask and destroyed an unladen tanker in the Gulf of Oman after ordering its crew to leave. Iranian state media confirmed a strike off Kharg Island and said it caused no casualties.

Iran then said its forces attacked a United States unmanned surface vessel in the Strait of Hormuz and had targeted seven United States-linked vessels within 24 hours. Tehran described the drone as entering a protected zone; Washington framed the tanker strikes as pressure on a shadow fleet that funds the Revolutionary Guards and allied armed groups. Both sides now speak in the language of maritime cost, and neither side sounds inclined to leave the insurance market in peace.

The Strait of Hormuz has not closed, but every exchange makes the world's most important oil chokepoint look less like a route and more like a target list.

Polling stations opened across Saxony-Anhalt at 08:00 with nearly 1.7 million registered voters choosing a new Landtag. Pre-election surveys put the Alternative for Germany between 40% and 43%, with one ZDF poll giving Ulrich Siegmund's party 41% against 23% for Sven Schulze's Christian Democratic Union. The CDU has governed the eastern state since 2002, but the contest now threatens to hand a German state parliament's strongest mandate to a party domestic intelligence classified as right-wing extremist in 2025.

The AfD has published a 100-day plan that would accelerate deportations, organize state-backed removals to Afghanistan and Syria, and separate refugee and migrant children into dedicated classrooms. Other mainstream parties maintain the Brandmauer, the firewall against coalitions with the AfD, so anything short of an outright majority could produce a messy anti-AfD arrangement and possibly force the CDU to lean indirectly on Die Linke. On Saturday, roughly 6,000 people gathered around Magdeburg Cathedral for a pro-democracy festival, while the AfD held its final rally nearby.

The vote matters beyond Magdeburg because Germany's postwar party system has relied not only on winning elections, but on deciding which winners other parties will refuse to help.

Indonesian authorities halted operations at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport after ash from Anak Krakatoa entered the capital's airspace. The suspension began at 01:30 local time and was extended until 13:30 as the eruption intensified, disrupting 209 flights and more than 22,000 passengers. Bali also cancelled 16 domestic flights as the ash cloud widened, while routes to Singapore, Doha, Sydney and Kuala Lumpur absorbed heavy disruption.

The volcano, which sits in the Sunda Strait about 150 kilometres west of Jakarta, began erupting late Friday and produced lava fountains, seismic activity and explosions heard hundreds of kilometres away. BMKG readings put ash at 6,000 metres toward Java and as high as 15,000 metres over Sumatra and Banten. Officials told residents, tourists and mariners to keep at least 3 kilometres from the crater, while schools in parts of Lampung and Banten suspended classes after children and residents reported eye and breathing irritation.

No tsunami warning has been issued, but the name Krakatoa still carries the memory of 1883 and 2018, so even an aviation crisis arrives wrapped in older coastal fear.

Rhysida published 1.44 million stolen files from Berlin's state administration, totalling 5.8 terabytes, after the city refused a demand for 30 Bitcoin, about €2m. The attackers had entered state networks between August 7 and August 12 and reached departments responsible for urban development and transport before administrators detected the breach on August 14. The release exposed personnel records, salary lists, bank details, identity scans and disciplinary files, then added a second layer of danger with infrastructure plans for heating plants, fuel depots, substations, emergency power sites, waterworks and prisons.

Kai Wegner defended the refusal to pay, arguing that a state cannot let itself be blackmailed and that payment would not guarantee deletion. Federal and state agencies are reviewing the material through the National Cyber Response Centre, while the Federal Office for Information Security warned of phishing, social engineering and possible hack-and-leak operations before Berlin's September 20 state election. Preliminary federal assessments say national systems were not compromised, but the leaked files include more than 550 documents related to the Federal Chancellery expansion project.

The breach matters because ransomware usually sells embarrassment; this one also handed criminals and copycats a map of how a capital works.