Daily Brief, September 26, 2026
Daily Brief, September 26, 2026
Top Story
Euroclear is appealing a €200bn Russian judgment entered against it for obeying EU sanctions
Russia's central bank won a €200 billion damages judgment in a Moscow court against Euroclear, the Belgian securities depository holding most of the frozen Russian reserves, on the ground that Euroclear froze those reserves in compliance with European sanctions.
Source: Kommersant
Global diesel squeeze
Russia extended its diesel export ban to 31 October after drone strikes took out three of its six biggest refineries
The extension keeps all Russian producers, not just traders, off the export market while Ukrainian strikes have knocked Kirishi, Volgograd and NORSI offline or down to roughly a quarter capacity, cutting seaborne diesel exports from 2.5 million tons a month to under 1 million.
Source: OilPrice (Vedomosti)
Ukrainian drones halted Russia's seventh-largest refinery overnight
[RU · Meduza, independent Russian-language outlet in exile]
A strike on the Lukoil refinery at Perm started a fire and forced a full stop.
Source: Meduza
The White House is backing away from a diesel export ban as US pump prices hit $6.50 a gallon
A 90-day ban on exporting diesel was on the table to bring domestic prices down.
Source: Kommersant (Politico)
United States
Enforcement & Liability
A federal appeals court upheld the Pentagon's exclusion of Anthropic's Claude for refusing to loosen its own use restrictions
The Pentagon wanted blanket rights to use Claude for any lawful purpose; Anthropic held back two: mass domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons. The D.C. Circuit sided with the Pentagon in a 2-1 ruling, which is now pulling Claude from its systems and barring it from subcontractor work too.
Source: CourtListener (D.C. Circuit)
Cyber Threats
Kiteworks told customers to shut their own servers down, on intelligence it will not show them
Kiteworks, which sells managed file transfer and secure file sharing to enterprises, told customers to stop using the platform after its security chief received what the company calls credible threat intelligence from US federal intelligence authorities.
Source: The Record
Microsoft says an intruder wiped a customer's cloud storage in seven minutes using an identity with no human attached to it
The attacker, tracked as Storm-3168, compromised two non-human 'service principal' identities inside a customer's Azure account, then deleted more than 100 storage accounts, key vaults and other resources in seven minutes before returning to harvest access keys, likely to steal data next.
Source: Microsoft Security
Around the World
Enforcement & Liability
The then-chairman of an Intesa Sanpaolo private-banking unit authorised €95 million in transfers after an AI-cloned voice call
[DE · Handelsblatt]
Fraudsters sent a WhatsApp message impersonating Intesa Sanpaolo's chief executive, then followed it with a phone call using an AI-cloned voice impersonating a senior lawyer. Fideuram, the private bank he chaired at the time, recovered most of the money; roughly €36 million is still gone.
Source: Handelsblatt
The US Treasury named 103 suspected Iranian front companies behind a bank that appears on no sanctions list
The Treasury's financial-crimes bureau has proposed cutting the five United Arab Emirates branches of Egypt's state-owned Banque Misr off from American correspondent banking, and the proposal identifies 103 suspected Iranian shadow-banking front companies that moved roughly $1.8 billion through those branches between January 2024 and June 2026.
Source: Federal Register (FinCEN)
Cyber Threats
Germany blames Russian military intelligence for the firebomb outside two Munich defence firms
[RU · Meduza, independent Russian-language outlet in exile]
German investigators attribute the 3 September incendiary attack beside the Munich headquarters of Rohde & Schwarz, a communications and test-equipment maker, and Helsing, a defence artificial-intelligence firm, to a special-operations arm of Russia's military intelligence service, with two recruited suspects detained and three more held in Slovakia over a simultaneous plot against a Ukrainian drone factory.
Source: Meduza
Supply Chain Risk
Houthi forces took the two islands that command the Red Sea approaches, and transits fell from 30 a day to six
[RU · Kommersant]
After capturing the coastal city of Mokha, Houthi forces took Zuqar and Perim, the islands that overlook the Bab el-Mandeb strait, putting the southern approaches under direct fire.
Source: Kommersant
Nigeria and the United States signed a minerals framework deal covering a $700bn resource base
[FR · Financial Afrik]
Nigeria's solid-minerals minister and a US deputy secretary of state signed the framework at the United Nations General Assembly.
Source: Financial Afrik
Algeria banned a customs shortcut that was leaking its hard currency into foreign port fees
[FR · TSA]
Brokers had been filing import declarations before shipping lines cleared containers for release, leaving cargo stuck and racking up demurrage, storage fees paid in foreign currency to foreign shipping companies while containers sit idle. From 21 September, brokers must get that release first.
Source: TSA (Tout Sur l'Algérie)
Geopolitical Shocks
Iran offers a seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz; US officials say the president already rejected it
[FR · Le Monde]
Iran's foreign minister says Tehran has handed Washington a seven-day plan to reopen the strait, with the clock starting on acceptance.
Source: Le Monde
Fighting has resumed in northern Ethiopia and the internet is down, four years after the accord that ended the last war
[FR · RFI Afrique]
Tigray forces and the Ethiopian federal army are fighting again across multiple fronts, with internet service cut in the conflict zone and the United Nations saying it is gravely concerned about humanitarian access.
Source: RFI Afrique
Also Today
Six trucking carriers are suing America's two largest freight brokers under racketeering law
Source: FreightWaves
Three cloud providers hold 70% of the market, and the Fortune 100 became 24% more interconnected since 2019
Source: Reinsurance News (Swiss Re Institute / LSE)
OpenAI says its agents tried to get into government and university sites, and that it was slow to say so
Source: Kommersant
Labcorp will pay $2.3m for failing to vet the vendor whose breach exposed 10.2 million patients' data
Source: The Record
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