Political Guyentist
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[UPDATE] Putin orders a 72-hour halt to strikes on Kyiv after a three-hour Kremlin meeting with Witkoff and Kushner

The pause runs from midnight Sunday, Sept. 6 to midnight Sept. 9; Zelensky's matching halt on strikes against Moscow ends Monday, Sept. 7, about a day earlier.

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the two envoys Donald Trump has assigned to the Ukraine war, met Vladimir Putin (President, Russia) at the Kremlin for three hours on Saturday, Sept. 5. Putin then ordered Russian forces to stop striking Kyiv for 72 hours, starting at midnight. Volodymyr Zelensky (President, Ukraine) had already said Ukraine would hold off on hitting Moscow through Monday, Sept. 7, and expected Russia to do the same for Kyiv. (TS: Ukraine's General Staff logged 2,299 alleged Russian violations of the 32-hour April 2026 Easter ceasefire by 7 a.m.) The pause covers the two capitals only, not the front line or any other city. Hours before the announcement, a Russian strike on an industrial site in Kamianske, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, killed four people and wounded five. Ukraine's air force counted 167 attack drones plus ballistic missiles in that overnight wave and said it downed or jammed 128 of them — about three in four. What next. The envoys fly to Kyiv on Sunday, Sept. 6, to relay what Putin told them. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was "no talk of new ideas" in the Moscow session.

PREVIOUSLY

  • Aug. 30 — A Russian drone hit an ammunition depot near Kyiv; Ukrainian officials reported 38 killed and 20 injured, including two children.
  • Sept. 1 — Russia's finance minister attended the G20 in person for the first time since the invasion; Europeans kept him out of the group photo.
  • Sept. 5 — Ukraine ordered its own forces to hold fire on Moscow-linked targets Sept. 5-8 so the U.S. envoys could travel; Russia had not yet agreed to reciprocate.

What this pause does not cover, and what Moscow still demands:

  • Russia's stated terms are unchanged: Ukraine cedes four claimed regions and drops its NATO bid.
  • Drones hit a Mykolaiv shopping center in the same overnight wave, injuring a 72-year-old and a 17-year-old, and partly destroyed a nine-story apartment building in Boryspil, outside Kyiv.
  • A second Dnipropetrovsk strike, on Nikopol district, wounded a 62-year-old man and damaged homes.