Good Evening,

It’s Monday, September 11th.

At the United Nations

The Trump administration has backed away from some of the most stringent penalties it had sought to impose on North Korea in an apparent effort to draw Russian and Chinese backing for a new raft of sanctions over the country’s nuclear weapons advances, as the New York Times’ Somini Sengupta reports.  And as Bloomberg’s Kanga Kong reports, North Korea has warned of retaliation if the UN Security Council approves a U.S. proposal for harsher sanctions after Pyongyang conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test.

Myanmar

The United Nations said today that “ethnic cleansing” is unfolding in Myanmar, as NPR’s Colin Dwyer reports.  Dive Deeper: See CFR’s Joshya Kurlantzick on “Is the United States Really Going to Expand Military Cooperation With Myanmar Now?”

Ukraine/Russia

Ukraine on Monday launched joint military exercises with the United States and a host of other NATO countries as its bitter rival Russia gears up for its own war games on the EU border, as the AFP reports. Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s David Filipov and Michael Birnbaum report that Russia is readying this week for war games that Western security officials see as a muscular display of firepower along NATO’s most vulnerable region.  Dive Deeper: See “The Russia-NATO A2AD Environment,” an interactive posting from CSIS’s Missile Threat micro-website.