Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he is ready to give up on demands for Nato membership in exchange for security guarantees from the US and Europe, in a move aimed at advancing peace talks in Berlin on Sunday. 

US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner have pushed Ukraine to accept painful concessions, including ceding frontline territory to Russia, ahead of talks with Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s European allies on the White House plan to end Russia’s invasion.

Ukraine has admitted that it was unlikely to join Nato in the foreseeable future due to strong opposition from Russia, which has long demanded that the transatlantic alliance pledge to halt its eastward expansion as a condition for ending the war.

But Zelenskyy told reporters on Sunday that Ukraine still requires security guarantees from the US and Europe, similar to Nato’s Article 5 clause of mutual protection for any member under attack.

Ukraine would join the EU next year under a proposal backed by Brussels in negotiations to end Russia’s war, a move that would transform the bloc’s approach to admitting new members.

EU accession by January 1 2027 is specified in the latest draft of a peace proposal that Ukrainian and European officials have presented to Washington, people briefed on the document’s contents told the Financial Times.

The plan is a revised version of proposals the Trump administration has made to end the war, a plan that Kyiv and its European allies had seen as tilted towards Russia.

The latest version comes as Donald Trump steps up pressure on Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree a peace deal by Christmas.

Officials supportive of Ukraine’s EU ambitions said the European Commission now understands it should not derail the peace process by opposing the rapid timeline for Kyiv’s membership.

For most people, the tax cuts that President Trump signed into law this summer have yet to materialize. Only after Americans file their taxes next year will the savings become apparent, launching what Republicans hope will be a “refund boom” that lifts the public’s view of the economy.

Many of America’s largest companies have not had to wait. In the months since the law’s passage in July, corporations like Walmart, Amazon, Verizon and Eli Lilly have all disclosed in securities filings that the law would reduce their cash tax payments in the near term. AT&T Inc. projected that it would save as much as $2 billion in taxes just this year.

Those corporate tax savings have already started to have an effect on the federal budget. Between July and November, the last full month of data, revenue from the corporate income tax has dropped by roughly a third, or $52 billion, compared to the same period the year before, according to Treasury data.

Driving the cash savings is not a change in the corporate tax rate, which Republicans kept at 21 percent. Instead, a constellation of tax breaks has given companies a better ability to reduce the amount of income subject to tax. Rather than writing off the costs of new investments and research projects bit by bit over several years, companies are now able to deduct the full cost of these expenses in one year.

The next signs of the nation’s political divide might be jingling in your pocket next year.

The administration plans to issue a $1 coin with President Donald Trump’s likeness on it next year, despite a century-old precedent of not honoring sitting, or even living former, presidents on coins.

Instead of quarters honoring the abolition of slavery, granting women the right to vote and the Civil Rights movement, the Treasury will instead issue historical quarters featuring white men from the 18th and 19th centuries who were already well represented on currency and in historical tributes.

The new coins, coming after the administration stopped issuing new pennies earlier this year, underscore Trump’s drive to put his own stamp on the presidency far beyond the confines of the White House – whether it’s by putting his own face and name on US institutions or by pulling back on diversity efforts to reframe the story of America itself.

The US Mint on Thursday released the final coin designs for historical quarters celebrating the country’s 250th birthday next year. Rather than the fight against slavery or giving women the vote, the designs primarily honored a more homogeneous view of US history: George Washington for the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, James Madison and the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, as well as pilgrims to celebrate the Mayflower Compact.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and his wife Erin Hawley are launching a new dark money group to shine a spotlight on anti-abortion ballot measures and pro-family policies.

Why it matters: After Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, the Republican establishment quietly moved on from abortion politics. The Hawleys want to revive the issue.

"We think that there needs to be a voice, strong voice, advocating for life, and not just in the narrow political sense," Sen. Hawley said in a phone interview, "but also advocating culturally."

Driving the news: The Hawleys, who started dating when they were Supreme Court clerks, are launching the Love Life Initiative this week.

Ever since the Trump administration wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a torture prison in El Salvador last spring, the president and anti-immigrant henchman Stephen Miller have plainly understood this saga as a crucial test case for the larger MAGA project. How far could they go in snatching people off the streets and placing them outside of U.S. law entirely? To what degree could they get away with wielding armed state terror against undesirables, with minimal to no constraints?

That’s why the latest turn in the Abrego Garcia story—in which a federal judge ordered him released from immigration detention in Pennsylvania—is so momentous. It suggests that at least for now, this test isn’t going how Trump and especially Miller evidently hoped.

The topline news in Judge Paula Xinis’s ruling—the one getting media coverage—is her surprising ruling that no order of removal for Abrego Garcia exists. She ruled his continued detention unlawful, and he’s now been released, though he still faces separate Justice Department prosecution for allegedly trafficking migrants.

But buried in this ruling is even bigger news. It concludes that Abrego Garcia’s treatment throughout has violated due process. Again and again, it scorches the Trump administration’s “extraordinary” and “troubling” handling of this whole case, suggesting it’s been utterly lawless and rife with malicious abuses of power.

The ruling neatly encapsulates the madness of the Trump era.

On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed.

Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California.

He landed on the front lines of one of the most confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration.

The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration’s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and “woke” indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher education.

In the months since Milliken’s aborted golf game, much has been written about the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on UCLA, part of the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. But an investigation by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education, based on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved, reveals the extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its case against the school. It also surfaced something equally alarming: How the UC system’s deep dependence on federal money inhibited its willingness to resist the legally shaky onslaught, a vulnerability the Trump administration’s tactics brought into sharp focus.