One release, one barrel, one hill

The day closes with a concrete development after hours of diplomatic talks: in St. Petersburg Vladimir Putin announced the release of U.S. citizen Stephen Hubbard, in response to a request from Donald Trump, during the meeting with envoy Steve Witkoff. It is the first tangible result to emerge from talks that, in the same hours, also saw Witkoff in Oslo with Volodymyr Zelensky. The substance on the ground does not change, however: overnight Russian attacks on energy infrastructure in four Ukrainian regions caused four deaths, two of them in Kyiv. Diplomacy produces a name returned to freedom; the war continues to produce victims. The two things coexist in the same dispatch, and they should not be presented as if one softened the other.

On the security decree, today’s analysis corrects yesterday’s reading: the Quirinale stepped in to have removed the provision that would have granted judicial police functions to military personnel of the Strade sicure operation, including the power of arrest. The rest of the measure remains in place — the new offense of organized violence at demonstrations, preventive detention extended to minors — but the most controversial point, the one that would have marked a change in nature for the deployment of the military in public order duties, is not in the final text. An announced measure is not an applied measure: it is worth keeping this in mind whenever a decree is read on the day of its presentation.

We also update three fronts not yet covered this morning: the European Union’s new Arctic strategy, which moves security ahead of climate in the hierarchy of priorities; the price of oil, which rose above $110 a barrel on Brent after new attacks near the Strait of Hormuz; and Google Cloud’s opening to OpenAI’s models on the Model Garden platform, alongside Gemini and Claude.

For the rest, the 6:30 a.m. edition remains the reference: Cinema & Entertainment, News, Culture, Economy and Markets, Foreign Affairs and Geopolitics, Europe, Italy, Health, Sport and Tech & AI are covered by the pieces published this morning, which remain available. The AIFA report on Carvykti for multiple myeloma and the opening of the Archeodromo of Poggibonsi complete today’s edition. Tomorrow morning at 6:30 the newspaper returns with a new full edition.