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Ukraine Says It Won’t Give Up Land to Russia
Volodymyr Zelensky, in the next phase of talks to end the war in Ukraine, intends to draw a red line at the most contentious issue on the table: the Russian demand for Ukraine’s sovereign territory. As long as he remains the nation’s president, Zelensky will not agree to give up land in exchange for peace, Ukraine’s chief negotiator, Andriy Yermak, told me today in an exclusive interview.
“Not a single sane person today would sign a document to give up territory,” said Yermak, who has served as Zelensky’s chief of staff, lead negotiator, and closest aide throughout the full-scale war with Russia.
“As long as Zelensky is president, no one should count on us giving up territory. He will not sign away territory,” he told me by telephone from Kyiv. “The constitution prohibits this. Nobody can do that unless they want to go against the Ukrainian constitution and the Ukrainian people.”
On the question of land, Ukraine is prepared to discuss only where the line should be drawn to demarcate what the warring sides control. “All we can realistically talk about right now is really to define the line of contact,” Yermak said. “And that’s what we need to do.”
The Ukrainian position for the next round of talks, which Yermak laid out for the first time, will sharply constrain the space available for negotiators to reach a peace deal. Russia has shown no willingness to back away from its demand for Ukrainian territory, including parts of the country that Russian forces do not control. Even though negotiators have made progress toward an agreement in recent days, they remain far apart on the crucial question of territory, where the Russian and Ukrainian positions appear difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile.
Russia first seized parts of Ukraine in 2014, when it annexed Crimea in a swift and nearly bloodless land grab. In September 2022, during the first year of the full-scale invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that four additional regions of southern and eastern Ukraine—Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, comprising about 15 percent of the country’s territory—would “forever” be a part of Russia. The Kremlin then staged a referendum to approve the annexation of these regions and to define them as Russian territory under the Russian constitution, making it politically difficult for Putin to reverse his territorial claims.
The problem for Putin is that Ukraine still controls large parts of Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. The Russian military has been fighting for nearly four years to seize all of those regions by force, with the most intense battles centered around Donetsk, part of Ukraine’s industrial heartland. Ukrainian forces have dug in to defend the areas of Donetsk they still control, building fortifications and fielding weapons that have managed to hold back the invaders. Putin has tried to gain control of that territory through negotiations, offering to stop the Russian onslaught if Ukraine gives it up without a fight.
Yermak called me today during a holiday lull following an intense week of negotiations. Envoys from the United States and Ukraine gathered in Geneva on Sunday to rework an American peace proposal that was heavily weighted in Russia’s favor. The plan included a demand for Ukraine to cede territory in Donetsk, where the Russian military has made slow and plodding advances in recent months at an enormous cost in casualties.
At the conclusion of the talks in Geneva, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio represented the U.S. alongside President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, the negotiators stripped out the most onerous Russian demands on Ukraine.
They continued to work on the deal on Tuesday in Abu Dhabi, resulting in a proposal that “does not contradict our interests and takes into account our red lines,” Yermak said. Only a few questions were set aside in the negotiations for the presidents of Ukraine and the U.S. to decide, he added, including all points related to Ukrainian territory.
Zelensky’s team requested a meeting with Trump this weekend to discuss the proposal. But the president decided to first send Witkoff to Moscow to discuss the revised terms of the peace agreement with the Kremlin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov signaled at a press conference on Tuesday that Moscow would stick firmly to its core demands, which have long included its territorial claim on Donetsk and other regions of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Trump discussed the Kremlin’s conditions for peace in August during his summit in Alaska with Putin. The Russian and American leaders had planned in October to meet again in Budapest in hopes of advancing the peace process. But Trump scrapped those plans after Lavrov staked out an inflexible position during a preparatory call with Rubio, who then advised the White House not to proceed with another presidential summit.
The peace talks resumed in earnest only this month, just as a massive corruption scandal weakened Zelensky’s standing among the people of Ukraine and his allies in the West. A 15-month investigation, unveiled on November 10 by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, accused several senior government officials and one of Zelensky’s former business partners of extorting and laundering about $100 million in bribes.
Investigators have not directly implicated Zelensky or Yermak in the case. But calls for Yermak’s resignation have intensified amid the scandal. “Zelensky needs to clean house,” a senior European diplomat told me earlier this month. “And he should start with Yermak.”
In our interview, Yermak responded at length for the first time to the investigation and the resulting calls for him to step aside. “The pressure is enormous,” he told me. “The case is fairly loud, and there needs to be an objective and independent investigation without political influence.”
By appointing him to lead Ukraine’s negotiating team despite the scandal, Zelensky made clear to the people of Ukraine that Yermak continues to enjoy his trust, he said. The people of Ukraine “see that I have been beside the president all these years during all the most difficult, tragic, and dangerous moments,” Yermak said. “He trusted me with these negotiations that will decide the fate of our country. And if people support the president, that should answer all their questions.”
News
Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show
At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.
A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.
City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”
Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.
Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.
“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.
Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.
Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.
“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.
The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.
Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.
“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.
Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”
He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.
Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.
On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.
News
DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote
The Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.
The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”
“The Department sent these letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.
Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson are among those who said they received the letters from the Justice Department.
The letters say state election officers “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” noncitizen voting. They further specify that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a statewide voting registration list or who facilitates noncitizens’ receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.
“An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation” of federal law, the letters said.
Henderson wrote on social media that the threats constitute “truly bizarre behavior.”
“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts.”
The letters are the latest move in the Justice Department’s campaign to assert more federal control over state elections.
While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.
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Reigning champion Argentina escapes with remarkable World Cup victory over Egypt
Lionel Messi #10 of Argentina celebrates scoring his team’s second goal during their World Cup match against Egypt in Atlanta on Tuesday.
Elsa/Getty Images
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Elsa/Getty Images
They looked beaten. And out. Argentina, the defending World Cup champion and No. 1-ranked team, was down 2-0 late against Egypt.

Then, in a span of 13 remarkable minutes, Argentina scored not once, not twice, but three times, capping a comeback for the ages and leaving Egypt stunned and shellshocked.
For much of the game in Atlanta, Egypt was in control, hobbling Argentina early. The Egyptian attack began almost immediately with a stunning header goal delivered by Yasser Ibrahim in the 15th minute. After that, Egypt’s defense closed ranks, making it practically impossible for Argentina to equalize.
It was downhill from there for the Argentines: team captain Lionel Messi failed to convert a penalty kick, and in the 67th minute, Egypt got a second goal from Mostafa Ziko (after an earlier Egyptian goal had been disallowed after a video review). It looked like Argentina was finished. On the brink of elimination.
But no one told the Argentine players that.
In the 79th minute, Lionel Messi began doing his thing. He fired a cross near the Egyptian goal, and Cristian Romero headed it in. Messi was not done. Four minutes later, he powered a shot past the Egyptian keeper. It was his eighth goal of this tournament, the most of any player. The score was 2-2.
Then, in stoppage time, yet another Argentina header and another goal, this time from Enzo Fernandez.
“This is the World Cup for you,” said Messi after the game. “It wasn’t easy to come back from two goals down. But as I always say, this group never gives up. We always try to fight until the end.”
French referee François Letexier speaks with Egypt forward Mohamed Salah during the World Cup Round of 16 match between Argentina and Egypt in Atlanta.
Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images
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Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images
Afterward, Egypt coach Hossam Hassan complained about the French referee and the officiating. “I am not convinced. I am not convinced with this outcome. I’m not convinced with the way things unfolded during this match,” said Hassan in a post-match news conference. “We have been treated unfairly today. We have suffered injustice.”
“We would have deserved to earn this win, but we are leaving with honor, with pride, regardless of this defeat,” said Hossan.
African soccer teams have been the stars of this World Cup. Morocco has yet to lose a game. Cape Verde qualified for the first time in its history and stymied Spain, Uruguay and Saudi Arabia. Argentina barely beat them in a nail-biter of a match.
For Egypt, getting this far in the tournament is historic in itself: it’s the first time the team has made it this far. For Argentina, it was a terrifying yet relieving victory: several players, including Messi himself, cried after the game.
Next, they move to the quarterfinals and will play the winner of today’s Switzerland-Colombia match.
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