Category: Washington Post

Joseph Oduro had just wrapped up a study session for the final exam in an introductory economics course at Brown University when he heard screaming outside the room and several loud bangs.

Five seconds later, a door opened at the top of the auditorium-style classroom in the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building. A man dressed in black burst in, yelling something unintelligible. He was carrying “the longest gun I’ve ever seen in my life,” Oduro said in an interview Sunday.

Oduro, a senior from New Jersey, is a teaching assistant in the principles of economics course, one of the most popular classes on campus. On Saturday afternoon, he was reviewing the course material with 60-odd students ahead of Tuesday’s exam.

Oduro, 21, locked eyes with the shooter. A single thought went through his mind: Get down.

He crouched behind the podium where only moments earlier he had been offering students words of encouragement ahead of their final exam. He heard shots, dozens of them, and screams. Students began running down the aisles to get away. Some escaped through the side doors at the bottom of the classroom while others huddled with Oduro, all trying to stay as quiet as possible.

One of them was a first-year student from Massachusetts who had been shot twice in the leg. Oduro gave her his hand and told her to squeeze it. “I told her to put all the pain on me,” Oduro said. “I just kept telling her, ‘You’re going to be okay.’”

The attack at the Ivy League school left two students dead and nine others wounded, officials said. Early Sunday, a person of interest was taken into custody, according to Providence Mayor Brett Smiley (D).

Oduro doesn’t know how long it took for police to arrive. There were other victims in the classroom and Oduro got his first real look at the scene as he was escorted out by police. He didn’t want to describe what he saw.

Oduro stayed with his wounded first-year student in the back of a police car all the way to the hospital. He wanted to make sure she would be all right. It sounded corny, he knew, but he truly loved the students in the class, where he has been a teaching assistant since his sophomore year.

It hurt, he said, “to see them all in a state of panic and desperate pain.”

After hours at the hospital and questioning by the police, Oduro went to stay at a friend’s place who lives off campus. His voice was quiet and full of exhaustion. He had no idea what would come next.

On Sunday morning, Brown said that all remaining exams and classes for the semester were canceled.

The National Guard member who was ambushed while patrolling near the White House on Thanksgiving eve is now breathing on his own and can stand with assistance, his neurosurgeon said Friday.

Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, was hospitalized Nov. 26 after a gunman opened fire on him and his colleague, Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, who died of her injuries the following day. The attack left Wolfe with a “critical” gunshot wound to his head, and he was airlifted to MedStar Washington Hospital Center, Jeffrey Mai said in a statement.

Mai credited quick-acting first responders and the actions of trauma and neurosurgery teams for saving Wolfe’s life by controlling the serviceman’s bleeding and pressure on his brain. Mai called Wolfe’s recent recovery developments “important milestones that reflect his strength and determination.”

“Staff Sgt. Wolfe has made extraordinary progress,” the doctor said. “Based on these improvements, he is now ready to transition from acute care to inpatient rehabilitation as the next step in his recovery journey.”

Wolfe’s family, including his father, Jason, and mother, Melody, have chosen not to disclose the location of his rehabilitation, Mai added.

Wolfe, who joined the West Virginia National Guard in 2019, and Beckstrom were among more than 2,000 Guard members deployed to D.C. after President Donald Trump’s announcement of a “crime emergency” in the city in August. Following the attack, Trump ordered an additional 500 troops to the District.

The suspect in the attack, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who served in the CIA’s “Zero Units” that seized or killed suspected terrorists, has been charged with first-degree murder.

Prosecutors have not given a motive for the shooting. Charging documents say Lakanwal, who settled in Washington state after the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, drove across the country to carry out the attack and allegedly shouted “Allahu akbar!” as he shot Beckstrom and Wolfe in their heads with a .357-caliber revolver outside the Farragut West Metro station. The phrase is Arabic for “God is great.” A Washington Post investigation found that Lakanwal slipped deeper into isolation as he struggled to adapt with his wife and five children in the United States.

Lakanwal, who was also shot during the attack, pleaded not guilty through an attorney at the hearing Dec. 2. He spoke through an interpreter to give brief responses and appeared remotely by video from a hospital bed.

There had been earlier signs that Wolfe’s recovery was trending positively. On Dec. 5, West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (R) shared publicly that Wolfe’s “parents report that his head wound is slowly healing and that he’s beginning to ‘look more like himself.’”

Jordan Butler, a local pastor and friend of the Wolfe family, coled a vigil last week at the high school Wolfe attended in Inwood, a tight-knit West Virginia community where vigil attendees prayed and lit candles for Wolfe.

“It’s amazing watching what’s happening,” Butler told the Post on Wednesday. “It’s almost miraculous.”

On Friday, Wolfe’s parents said in a statement released by MedStar that they hope their son will be able to return to work in the West Virginia National Guard “and his new mission of being a light into this world.”

“Please continue to lift Andy up in prayer as he begins a long and tough rehabilitation,” Jason and Melody Wolfe said. “We know he will continue to improve at a rapid pace.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to abruptly eliminate as many as 35,000 healthcare positions this month, mostly unfilled jobs including doctors, nurses, and support staff, according to an internal memo, VA staffers, and congressional aides.

The cuts come after a massive reorganization effort already resulted in the loss of almost 30,000 employees this year.

Agency leaders have instructed managers across the Veterans Health Administration, the agency’s healthcare arm, to identify thousands of openings that can be canceled. Employees warn that the contraction will add pressure to an already stretched system, contributing to longer wait times for care.

The decision comes after Veterans Affairs Secretary Douglas A. Collins, under political pressure from Congress, backed away from a plan to slash 15% of the agency’s workforce through mass firings. Instead, VA lost almost 30,000 employees this year from buyout offers and attrition.

The agency hopes that the cuts will reduce the healthcare workforce to as little as 372,000 employees, a 10% reduction from last year, according to a memo shared with regional leaders last month and obtained by the Washington Post. Details of the cuts came into focus in recent days, according to 17 staffers at VA and congressional aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t have permission to share plans.

VA spokesperson Pete Kasperowicz confirmed the planned cuts for unfilled positions. He said the healthcare system is eliminating about 26,400 of its open jobs, which he described as “mostly COVID-era roles that are no longer necessary.”

“The vast majority of these positions have not been filled for more than a year, underscoring how they are no longer needed,” he wrote in response to questions. “This move will have no effect on VA operations or the way the department delivers care to Veterans, as we are simply eliminating open and unfilled positions that are no longer needed.”

The nation’s largest government-run healthcare system has struggled to fill vacancies amid a broader national shortage of healthcare workers and a strained federal workforce. Job applications to the agency have also fallen 57% from last year, according to the agency’s workforce report last month.

This reorganization comes in advance of an expected announcement next week that Collins plans to also shrink the network of 18 regional offices that administer the nation’s VA hospitals and medical centers, according to four people familiar with the plan. Staff at those regional offices help determine policies and manage staffing. Collins and others have been critical of the agency’s top-heavy administrative offices, arguing that staffing cuts there will free up more resources for healthcare.

The health system grew by tens of thousands of employees under the Biden administration as more veterans enrolled in VA healthcare after passage of the PACT Act, which expanded benefits for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. Then-secretary Denis McDonough urged veterans to be seen by VA doctors rather than request referrals to private practitioners outside the system.

But the Trump administration has said it wants more veterans to seek treatment outside the government system. Political appointees at VA and their allies have also said they favor a leaner healthcare workforce because they think physicians and other healthcare providers could be more productive, said one former appointee who is close to the Trump team.

Collins stood down from planned mass firings this year after a bipartisan mix of lawmakers expressed concerns about cuts affecting patient care. The agency said mission-critical positions were exempted from the buyouts and retirement offers.

Since then, lawmakers have sought greater oversight of the agency’s staffing plans. In the agreement to reopen the government last month, lawmakers allocated $133 billion in discretionary funding for the VA with conditions, including that the agency could not reduce staffing for suicide prevention programs, would provide updates on staffing counts, and would maintain the staff necessary to meet certain thresholds for processing benefits and providing healthcare.

The House also approved a measure Thursday overturning President Donald Trump’s executive order eliminating union rights at federal agencies, including VA, where the union had said it was harder to protect jobs without collective bargaining.

Thomas Dargon Jr., deputy general counsel of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 320,000 VA employees, said the union has not been consulted by the agency about the cuts but has heard about concerns from its members.

“The VA has been chronically understaffed for years, and employees are obviously going to be facing the brunt of any further job cuts or reorganization that results in employees having to do more work with less,” Dargon said.

Sharda Fornnarino, a VA nurse in Colorado and local head of her nurses’ union, said her facility continues to lack the necessary staff to keep up with demand, and she urged lawmakers to restore collective bargaining so nurses could advocate for safer working conditions. The measure is unlikely to pass the Republican-held Senate.

“We’re going to continue to do more with less,” Fornnarino said. “We’re going to continue to be overworked.”

Meanwhile, at the VA’s regional offices, leadership is determining which roles they would need to cancel, and several healthcare workers said they had been warned their hospitals would be affected. Regional leaders were told to ensure their organizational charts are updated by next week, according to the memo reviewed by the Post.

In Phoenix, 358 openings will be eliminated, including nurses and doctors, according to a nurse who said the losses will hit as they are already behind in scheduling doctors appointments.

“They specifically said no department would be spared,” she said.

In another Mountain West hospital, healthcare workers were told at a town hall last week that no current employees would lose their jobs, though if anyone leaves, they would need to determine whether they could keep those jobs, according to a recording of the meeting.

The bad news arrived last Friday for employees of the VA San Diego healthcare system, in an exclamation mark-filled email from director Frank Pearson.

He wrote that he’d been expecting this year to fill 734 job vacancies with new nurses, doctors, and other staff, to help care for the almost 90,000 veterans that the San Diego system regularly serves. But sometime this fall, he wrote, higher-ups decided to “do some housekeeping and cleanup of the books” — informing the San Diego system that it only had the budget to retain 4,429 employees going into fiscal year 2026.

That meant, Pearson wrote in bold, all-caps, underlined letters, that “322 VACANT POSITIONS need to be eliminated.”

One of the VA employees who received the email said that, in the mental health section alone, there were 78 open positions as of this month — about half of which will now go away. Currently, the employee noted, veterans in the San Diego area are waiting between 60 and 90 days to access VA mental health services.

Staff are already strained and exhausted after a difficult year, the employee said, and were counting on reinforcements.

“We are all doing the work of others to compensate,” she said. “The idea that relief isn’t coming is really, really disappointing.”

President Donald Trump’s U.S. attorney in Delaware abruptly resigned Friday amid a growing standoff over the administration’s authority to install loyalists in powerful prosecutorial roles while bypassing Senate confirmation and the courts.

Julianne Murray, a former chair of the Delaware Republican Party whom the Justice Department had appointed as interim U.S. attorney in the state this summer, announced her departure in a statement posted to social media. She said a recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit disqualifying Trump’s U.S. attorney in New Jersey, Alina Habba, had made it clear to her she could no longer stay in her role.

Habba resigned from her post on Monday after the court ruled she had been unlawfully appointed through a process that administration officials had also used to keep Murray in her role. The Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit handles appeals arising from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and its rulings extend throughout that jurisdiction.

“I naively believed that I would be judged on my performance and not politics,” Murray said in her statement. “Unfortunately that was not the case.”

Murray said she will continue to work for the Justice Department in a different capacity but did not indicate what her new job might be. Her former office will now be overseen by her first assistant U.S. attorney, Ben Wallace, who has worked as a prosecutor in the office since 2023.

Murray’s initial appointment in July drew controversy given her lack of prosecutorial experience and the fact that she was still serving as head of the Delaware Republican Party when she was named interim U.S. attorney. She resigned from that role shortly afterward.

Her statement Friday saying she would step down as U.S. attorney used many of the same turns of phrase as the resignation letter she submitted to the state party five months earlier. In both, she said she refused to allow her office “to be used as a political football.”

While the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys are appointed through a political process and are often affiliated with the president’s party, their jobs have traditionally been viewed as largely apolitical. Most come from traditional legal backgrounds, not openly partisan roles.

Since Trump’s return to the White House, his administration has made installing loyalists in these position a priority.

In addition to Murray and Habba, his former personal lawyer, the Justice Department has appointed other controversial allies to U.S. attorney roles on an interim basis. They included Bill Essayli, a former GOP state assemblyman named U.S. attorney in Los Angeles; Sigal Chattah, a former GOP committeewoman in Nevada; and Lindsey Halligan, another former Trump lawyer, in Eastern Virginia.

Federal law limited each of their interim appointments to a period of 120 days and empowered the federal courts to appoint a replacement if there was no Senate-confirmed nominee by that deadline. But when the terms of Murray, Habba and the others expired, the Justice Department sought to keep Trump’s picks in their roles through complex maneuvers that the 3rd Circuit has ruled were illegal.

In Murray’s case, Delaware’s chief U.S. district judge, Colm Connolly, a Trump appointee, began soliciting applications for her replacement weeks before her 120 days were up. The move drew a sharp rebuke from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, another former Trump attorney who now serves in the Justice Department’s No. 2 position.

When Murray’s interim term expired in November, Delaware’s judges declined to reappoint her but did not immediately name a replacement. The Justice Department responded by changing Murray’s title to “acting” U.S. attorney and maintained that the president had the authority to keep her in her job indefinitely.

Within hours of Murray’s resignation, the judges on Friday posted notice that they were appointing Wallace as acting U.S. attorney.

Unlike Habba, Chattah, Essayli, and Halligan, whose appointments federal courts have all ruled to be unlawful, Murray had not drawn a legal challenge questioning her legitimacy. In her statement Friday, she blamed Delaware’s U.S. senators — Chris Coons and Lisa Blunt Rochester, both Democrats — of sinking her prospects in the job.

Normally, the president must formally nominate his U.S. attorney picks, and they must be approved in a Senate vote. In the case of Murray and the others, their home-state senators — all Democrats — had said they would withhold their support should Trump formally nominate them to the role.

That decision effectively killed any chance of their nominations moving forward under a Senate custom known as the “blue slip,” which allows senators to veto judicial and U.S. attorney nominees for their states.

Trump has railed against the blue slip tradition, saying it interferes with his ability to install his chosen candidates. Sen. Chuck Grassley — the Iowa Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee — has resisted pressure from the president to abandon the custom, saying it gives senators of both parties an important voice in deciding who will fill powerful law enforcement roles in their states.

Coons and Blunt Rochester said they had concluded Murray “was not the right person” for the job after interviewing her and a number of other potential candidates.

“I look forward to working with the District Court’s appointed U.S. Attorney, Ben Wallace, and remain willing to work with the Trump administration to identify and confirm a mutually agreeable candidate,” Coons said in a statement.

Murray called the blue slip process “highly politicized” and “incredibly flawed,” saying it cost Delaware a U.S. attorney.

“The people that think they have chased me away will soon find out that they are mistaken,” she wrote. “I did not get here by being a shrinking violet.”

Only keen-eyed visitors will notice some of the subtle changes to George Washington’s Mount Vernon home, like a new finishing on the mantle in the former president’s study or the reworked underground framing of the house.

But curators say each minuscule change to the sprawling Virginia estate can help visitors better understand the nation’s past, and therefore their place in the world today.

Construction fences have lined the back of the mansion for the better part of two years as work continues on a $40 million project to restore the building to its 18th century integrity. Though work is ongoing, the first and second floor of the home are now open to the public for the first time since January 2024.

Heading into America’s 250th anniversary, Mount Vernon President and CEO Doug Bradburn said bolstering authenticity at the estate is more important than ever.

“You cannot understand the United States of America’s founding without the indispensable George Washington,” Bradburn said. “You can’t understand him without Mount Vernon.”

Washington lived at the estate along the Potomac River with his wife, Martha, for the last 45 years of his life. When he inherited the mansion, it stood at about 3,500 square feet. The serene view of the Potomac welcomed Washington home after he led American forces to victory in the Revolutionary War. He retired to Mount Vernon after serving as the nation’s first president.

By the time Washington died in 1799, he had expanded the dwelling to more than triple that size, with more than 20 rooms. Most of the work was performed by people enslaved on the estate, officials have said.

The estate passed down through family members after Washington’s death until the Mount Vernon Ladies Association secured it in 1860. Since then, the nonprofit has worked to restore the remaining 500 acres of property to how it appeared when Washington died. The association has never accepted any government funding, and it solely relies on earned income and donations.

Nearly 1 million people visit Washington’s home, located about 20 miles south of the nation’s capital, each year.

“We believe in the power of place,” said Anne Neal Petri, regent of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. “We want to engage the visitor in ways that the history books just can’t achieve.”

This bout of rehabilitation is the largest in Mount Vernon’s history. Born from necessity after centuries of termite damage detached the building from its foundation, there wasn’t a single piece of original 18th century woodwork left underground, said Thomas Reinhart, director of the estate’s preservation.

Only parts of Mount Vernon closed during the restoration. The extensive grounds, Washington’s tomb and the quarters for enslaved people remained open. The renovations focused only on Washington’s living quarters, called the mansion.

To rebuild the mansion’s wooden frame, workers harvested white oak from the property, similar to how Washington would have sourced wood for the original construction. Only now, every piece of wood that touches masonry has added termite shields.

“Termites are quite tenacious,” Reinhart said.

From preservation carpenters, engineers, archaeologists and collection curators, it’s estimated about 350 people have worked on the restoration so far. Besides the structural changes, specialists throughout the house restoration performed paint analysis on doorframes and trims to make them accurate.

The most noticeable visual differences are on the second floor, in the most intimate area of the house.

Step into Washington’s bedroom, and visitors will see walls newly enveloped by a soft blue wallpaper with a bright floral design featuring a birdbath and two bright orange lovebirds.

After referencing preserved documents, Amanda Isaac, a curator at the estate, said historians chose a replica 1790s French wallpaper based on a design that existed when Washington remodeled the home.

She said with the most recent changes — which also included tearing the walls down to the studs and replastering them with historically accurate techniques — is a room that most resembles how the home looked when the Washingtons lived at Mount Vernon. It has nine of the original furnishings of the room, including the exact bedframe Washington died on.

Perhaps the largest undertaking is still ongoing.

Underground, droves of people are still working to restore a cellar spanning the entire footprint of the house. That part of the home is being refinished to look like it did when it housed the enslaved Lee family, who served the Washingtons as valet, cook and butler. The estate is also adding an underground bunker to store an upgraded HVAC system created to better preserve and maintain the home.

Though it’s been centuries since Washington walked the property, signs of his life are still littered around the land. While excavating the cellar, archaeologists discovered 35 glass bottles of preserved berries, 20 of which are still intact and now on display at the Mount Vernon museum.

As the country looks to the future, Mount Vernon serves as a fixture of the past, forever reminding the nation how far it has come.

“You can’t go to Rome without seeing the Colosseum, and you can’t go to Washington, D.C., without seeing Mount Vernon,” Bradburn said.

Secret meetings between Ukraine’s top peace negotiator and FBI leaders have injected new uncertainty into the high-stakes talks to end the war there, according to diplomats and officials familiar with the matter.

Over the last several weeks, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s lead negotiator, Rustem Umerov, flew to Miami three times to meet with President Donald Trump’s top envoy, Steve Witkoff, and discuss a proposal to end the nearly four-year conflict with Russia.

But during his time in the United States, Umerov also held closed-door meetings with FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, according to four people, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential conversations.

The meetings have caused alarm among Western officials who remain in the dark about their intent and purpose. Some said they believe Umerov and other Ukrainian officials sought out Patel and Bongino in the hopes of obtaining amnesty from any corruption allegations the Ukrainians could face. Others worry the newly established channel could be used to exert pressure on Zelensky’s government to accept a peace deal, proposed by the Trump administration, containing steep concessions for Kyiv.

Ukrainian Ambassador to Washington Olha Stefanishyna confirmed Umerov’s meeting with the FBI and told the Washington Post he “only covered national security related issues” that could not be disclosed publicly.

An FBI official said the Umerov meetings included discussion of the two countries’ shared law enforcement and national security interests. The topic of white collar corruption in Ukraine came up in one of the meetings but was not the main focus, the official said. Any suggestion that Patel’s discussions were inappropriate is “complete nonsense,” the official added.

The two FBI leaders have criticized Ukraine in various public comments. Patel in March questioned the scale of U.S. aid to Ukraine and urged Congress to investigate whether any U.S. funds sent there were misused. Bongino has accused Zelensky of covering up the allegedly corrupt activities of President Joe Biden’s son, whose board seat on a Ukrainian energy company has faced intense scrutiny. Trump “is very suspicious of Zelensky, because of what he and some of the people in his government did to sweep under the rug the Joe Biden madness,” Bongino said in February.

A White House official said “U.S. officials regularly communicate with world leaders about national security issues of shared interest.” The official added that Trump’s national security team has been “speaking with both the Russians and the Ukrainians to facilitate a deal to end the war” and that anyone raising concerns about the FBI meetings “are not privy to these diplomatic conversations and have no idea what they are talking about.”

A representative of Zelensky’s office declined to comment on any specific meetings but insisted that “it is stupid to link everything to ‘corruption.’”

The New York Post noted Umerov’s meeting with Patel in an article published Nov. 28. Bongino’s meeting with Umerov has not been previously reported.

The discussions are happening at a critical moment for Ukraine. It is under pressure by the Trump administration to agree to an end-of-war proposal with huge implications for the country’s borders and territorial integrity.

It is also facing its most far-reaching corruption scandal since Zelensky took office in 2019. Ukrainian investigators alleged last month that $100 million had been stolen from the country’s energy sector through graft and kickbacks.

Eight people, including Zelensky’s former business partner, are accused of embezzlement, money laundering and illicit self-dealing. Zelensky’s top aide, Andriy Yermak, the second most powerful person in Ukraine, resigned in late November after his house was raided. Another close former ally of Zelensky, Oleksiy Chernyshov, who served as deputy prime minister, is accused by Ukrainian authorities of receiving $1.3 million in kickbacks.

“They do have a massive corruption situation going on there,” Trump told reporters this week, noting that the scandal was generating calls for elections in Ukraine. “People are asking this question: When do they have an election?”

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted Kyiv to enact martial law, including the postponement of presidential and parliamentary elections.

There is speculation inside and outside Kyiv over whether Umerov, who also serves as Ukraine’s national security adviser, may be implicated in the expanding embezzlement investigation, particularly as the country’s anti-corruption officials expand their probe into the defense sector. Umerov previously served as Ukraine’s defense minister.

“I was surprised they sent him to negotiate given what’s being said about his potential involvement in the scandal,” said Angela Stent, a former intelligence officer in the George W. Bush administration and scholar at Georgetown University.

Ukrainian opposition lawmaker Volodymyr Ariev told the Post that it was irresponsible to keep Umerov on as top negotiator while he’s under a cloud of suspicion. “A person who has grown a tail with corruption allegations shouldn’t chair fateful negotiations until they cut the tail,” Ariev said.

Umerov’s defenders say he is an asset to Kyiv: His easygoing demeanor and proficient English have created a better rapport with U.S. officials than they had with Yermak, whom Zelensky relied on heavily before he resigned.

But his FBI meetings have raised suspicion among Ukraine’s Western backers given the presence of Patel, who became a focal point of Trump’s first impeachment, which centered on the president’s threat to revoke U.S. aid to Ukraine to extract information on Hunter Biden’s activities in the country. Trump was acquitted by the Senate.

Fiona Hill, a former Trump administration official, testified before Congress that Patel had involved himself in Ukraine issues in a manner that went beyond the scope of his job as a White House adviser, according to what she was told by colleagues. The impeachment report released by House Democrats also highlighted Patel’s discussions with Rudy Giuliani before the Trump administration’s suspension of $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.

Hill told the Post for this report that Patel’s reemergence is “likely to be viewed with even more concern and consternation in Europe.”

Patel has always denied he had a back channel with Trump on Ukraine during his first term and said his discussions with Giuliani were unrelated to Ukraine.

FBI officials have worked for years with Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, or NABU, to help the government in Kyiv overcome endemic corruption stemming from its Soviet past. But high-level meetings between a top Ukrainian negotiator and the director of the FBI are not common.

“It is unusual for someone in that job to have a meeting with the leadership of the FBI,” said Sam Charap, a former State Department official and scholar at the Rand Corporation.

A common theme of Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy, particularly as he has expressed frustration about delays in getting to a deal, is expanding the number of aides assigned to work on the issue. Besides Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Witkoff, a real estate magnate and longtime friend, Trump has also enlisted his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, an ally of Vice President JD Vance.

The growing number officials involved in the talks has caused miscommunication and confusion surrounding the deal’s terms and what the United States supports.

Several U.S. officials support a proposal in which Ukraine withdraws from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine in exchange for other areas under Russian control, such as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

Earlier this week, Zelensky pushed back against the idea of Ukraine relinquishing any territory. “Under our laws, under international law — and under moral law — we have no right to give anything away,” Zelensky said after meeting with top European leaders. “That is what we are fighting for.”

But as negotiations have stalled, Russian forces have made advances in the East, exploiting Ukraine’s shortages in ammunition and fighters. It also continues to bomb Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure, triggering rolling blackouts and raising fears of widespread outages this winter.

Trump has made clear his patience is wearing thin, and that if Ukraine doesn’t negotiate for land it could end up losing even more on the battlefield.

“You’re losing thousands of people a week,” Trump said. “It’s time to get that war settled.”