What happened
A senior U.S. military delegation arrived in Kyiv yesterday as President Donald Trump’s administration was finalizing a 28-point proposal to end the war in Ukraine. The plan, “negotiated between the Trump administration and Russia” with no Ukrainian input “would require Kyiv to surrender territory, significantly reduce the size of its army and relinquish some types of weaponry,” The New York Times said, citing officials. It reflects the “maximalist demands the Kremlin has made throughout the war” and Kyiv has “long denounced as amounting to capitulation.”

Who said what
Trump’s revived push for a peace deal “began late last month” with a secret meeting in Miami between his peace envoy Steve Witkoff (pictured above) and Russian emissary Kirill Dmitriev, Politico said. It would “require Ukraine to surrender to Russia the entire eastern Donbas region, even lands that Russian forces have not captured,” the Times said, as well as other terms “unacceptable to Kyiv.” 

The administration is “attempting the same approach it used to achieve a U. S.-brokered cease-fire in Gaza last month — draft a multi-point outline and then push the warring parties to accept it,” The Wall Street Journal said. It is “likely to run into strong opposition in Kyiv and from European governments,” but proponents of the plan argue that “Russia’s steady but incremental gains on the battlefield” and a “corruption scandal involving associates” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will “add pressure on Kyiv to make a deal.”

What next?
As European officials “publicly voiced concern about the plan,” the Journal said, Secretary of State Marco Rubio “cast it as an ‘exchange of serious and realistic ideas’ and not a diktat that the U.S. is seeking to impose on the two sides.” 

What happened
U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff yesterday grilled federal prosecutors on irregularities in their indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, forcing acting U.S Attorney Lindsey Halligan to acknowledge she had not shown the full grand jury the final indictment it was supposed to have approved. Another prosecutor, Tyler Lemons, revealed under questioning that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s office had told him not to discuss a memo by his predecessors explaining why they declined to charge Comey. 

Who said what
Yesterday’s “extraordinary” revelations emerged during an “excruciatingly awkward hearing” that “drove home just how slapdash” the Comey prosecution “appeared to have been from its inception,” The New York Times said. Nachmanoff seemed “stunned” at how Halligan, an insurance lawyer with not former prosecutorial experience, appeared to have bungled the grand jury process. 

Lemons argued that the final indictment was just the two charges the grand jurors had already approved minus one they rejected, so “the new indictment wasn’t a new indictment.” If Halligan did not present the final version to the grand jury, “there is no indictment,” Comey lawyer Michael Dreeben countered. And since the statute of limitations on the alleged perjury ran out on Sept. 30, “that would be tantamount to a bar of further prosecution in this case.”

What next?
Nachmanoff declined to issue an immediate decision yesterday, saying the “issues are too weighty and too complex.” But his “intense focus” on the indictment’s validity “suggested he may view it as critical and, perhaps, fatal to the government’s case,” Politico said. The case also “appears to be on increasingly flimsy ground” in other courts, as another federal judge prepares to rule on whether Halligan was invalidly appointed and a magistrate judge has flagged possible “prosecutorial misconduct” in her grand jury presentation.