The St. Paul Port Authority is offering economic development grants of $50,000 to $150,000 to support businesses within about a mile radius of the Minnesota State Capitol complex.

Backed by an $870,000 allocation from the state, the Port Authority launched the Capitol Outreach for Revitalization and Expansion grant program in early January, with the goal of supporting reinvestment and economic growth around the Capitol building.

Eligible businesses

Eligible businesses are those that are situated between Marion Street and Jackson Street, and between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Minnesota History Center on West Kellogg Boulevard.

Grants are available for new, existing or relocating for-profit businesses in the Capitol area, and can be used for future capital improvement projects that strengthen the local economic and community. That includes facade improvements, energy upgrades, new equipment, accessibility improvements and safety upgrades.

Applications

Applications require at least two vendor bids for proposed work or purchases, a detailed budget showing all funding sources and uses, proof of insurance, and three years of financial statements or tax returns. New businesses must submit a pro forma with three-year cash flow projections.

Funding will be awarded through two competitive application rounds, with the first round application due March 31. Applicants not selected in the first round may reapply in the second round, which closes Aug. 31.

How to learn more

A virtual information session where businesses can learn more about the program and ask questions will be held at 9 a.m. on Feb 5.

Applications will be reviewed and awarded by the Port Authority through a point-based, competitive process, and priority will be given to projects that support job creation, tax base expansion and overall economic and community vitality.

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Mobile businesses, home-based businesses, nonprofits, schools and government entities are not eligible to apply.

For more information, visit sppa.com/portfinancing/coregrant.

By KAMILA HRABCHUK and KOSTYA MANENKOV

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the future of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region will be a key focus as negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the United States meet in Abu Dhabi on Friday for talks to end Russia’s nearly four-year full-scale invasion.

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The UAE’s foreign ministry said the talks commenced on Friday and are scheduled to continue over two days “as part of ongoing efforts to promote dialogue and identify political solutions to the crisis.”

The three-way talks come hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the settlement in Ukraine with U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoys during marathon overnight talks. The Kremlin insisted that to reach a peace deal, Kyiv must withdraw its troops from the areas in the east that Russia illegally annexed but never fully captured.

Zelenskyy, meanwhile, reiterated his openness to establishing a free trade zone under Ukraine’s control in the country’s east. He said he discussed the proposal with Trump in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, and told reporters: “I think it will be positive for our business.”

Friday is the first known time that officials from the Trump administration simultaneously meet with negotiators from both Ukraine and Russia. While it’s unclear how the talks will unfold and many obstacles to peace remain, some see it as a sign that the parties are making headway in closing a deal.

Zelenskyy said after meeting with Trump that while the future status of land in eastern Ukraine currently occupied by Russia remains unresolved, the peace proposals are “nearly ready.”

The Kremlin offered little detail beyond calling Friday’s meeting a “working group on security issues.”

Kremlin insists on ‘solving territorial issue’

“Today’s meeting will be in the format of Ukraine, Russia and the United States, and afterward the Europeans will certainly receive feedback from us,” Zelenskyy told journalists in a WhatsApp audio message.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Russian delegation, headed by Adm. Kostyukov, comprises of military officials

Separately, Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev will hold talks with Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff on economic issues, he confirmed.

Kremlin foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov, who participated in Putin’s meeting with Witkoff and Jared Kushner, said “it was reaffirmed that reaching a long-term settlement can’t be expected without solving the territorial issue.”

Those talks, which began just before midnight in Moscow, lasted nearly four hours past 3 a.m. Friday. They came hours after Zelenskyy sharply criticized his European allies Thursday for what he cast as their slow and fragmented response that he said has left Ukraine at the mercy of Putin amid an ongoing U.S. push for a peace settlement.

Ushakov noted that Trump’s envoys informed Putin about Trump’s meeting with Zelenskyy, as well as earlier discussions they had with Ukrainian and European officials. He described the talks with the U.S. as “frank, constructive” and “fruitful.”

Witkoff and Kushner were joined by Josh Gruenbaum, the head of the Federal Acquisition Service who serves as a senior adviser on Trump’s Board of Peace that Russia has been invited to join. While Russia is considering the invitation, Putin reaffirmed his offer to send $1 billion to the board from Russian assets frozen in the U.S. to help fund rebuilding Gaza.

Asked about Putin’s proposal to use Russia’s frozen assets for the contribution to the Board of Peace, Trump said he thought it was fine. “If he’s using his money, that’s great,” he said

Trump’s meeting with Zelenskyy

Zelenskyy met with Trump behind closed doors for about an hour at the World Economic Forum in Davos, describing the meeting as “productive and meaningful.”

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew back to Washington from Davos, Trump said his meeting with Zelenskyy went well, adding that both Putin and Zelenskyy want to reach a deal and that “everyone’s making concessions” to try to end the war.

He said the sticking points in talks remain the same as they’ve been during talks held during the past six or seven months, noting “boundaries” was a key issue. “The main hold-up is the same things that’s been holding it up for the last year,” he said.

Russia’s bigger army has managed to capture about 20% of Ukraine since hostilities began in 2014 and its full-scale invasion of 2022. But the battlefield gains along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line have been costly for Moscow, and the Russian economy is feeling the consequences of the war and international sanctions.

Ukraine is short of money and, despite significantly boosting its own arms manufacturing, still needs Western weaponry. It is also short-handed on the front line. Its defense minister last week reported some 200,000 troop desertions, and draft-dodging by about 2 million Ukrainians.

Zelenskyy blasts European allies

Addressing the World Economic Forum after meeting with Trump, Zelenskyy listed a litany of grievances and criticisms of Europe.

European countries, which see their own future defense at stake in the war on its eastern flank, have provided financial, military and humanitarian support for Kyiv. But not all members of the 27-nation European Union are helping. Ukraine also has been frustrated by political disagreements within Europe over how to deal with Russia, as well as the bloc’s at times slow-moving responses.

“Europe looks lost,” Zelenskyy said in his speech, urging the continent to become a global force. He contrasted Europe’s response with Washington’s bold steps in Venezuela and Iran.

The former comic actor referred to the movie “Groundhog Day,” in which the main character must relive the same day over and over again.

“Just last year, here in Davos, I ended my speech with the words: Europe needs to know how to defend itself. A year has passed. And nothing has changed. We are still in a situation where I must say the same words again,” Zelenskyy said.

He chided Europe for being slow to act on key decisions, spending too little on defense, failing to stop Russia’s ”shadow fleet” of oil tankers that are breaking international sanctions, and balking at using its frozen assets in Europe to finance Ukraine, among other things.

Hrabchuk reported from Kyiv, Ukraine and Manenkov from Davos, Switzerland. Josh Boak on Air Force One, Meg Kinnard in Houston and Ali Swenson from Washington contributed to this report.

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

By PATRICK WHITTLE, RODRIQUE NGOWI and LEAH WILLINGHAM, Associated Press

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine’s leading Republican and Democratic officials, now engaged in one of the nation’s highest profile Senate races, offered starkly different comments on Friday as a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents racked up their arrest totals.

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Democratic Gov. Janet Mills has challenged immigration officials to provide judicial warrants, real-time arrest numbers and basic information about who is being detained in Maine.

Mills also called on her Republican rival, Sen. Susan Collins, to act after the House’s GOP majority defeated efforts by Democrats to curtail ICE funding.

“Let me be clear: Maine will not be intimidated, and the reckless actions that we’ve seen ICE turn to will not be tolerated here in Maine,” Mills said Friday.

Collins avoided criticizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics, other than to say that people who are in the country legally should not be the target of ICE investigations. She also said that policies she has advocated for, including providing body cameras and de-escalation training for ICE personnel, could help improve accountability and trust.

And as protest organizers announced Friday demonstrations against ICE in Maine’s largest cities, she urged them to avoid interfering with ICE arrests.

“There are people in Maine and elsewhere who have entered this country illegally and who have engaged in criminal activity,” Collins said in a statement. “They could be subject to arrest and deportation pursuant to the laws of the United States, and people who are exercising the right to peacefully gather and protest their government should be careful not to interfere with law enforcement efforts while doing so.”

Mills’ run for Collins’ seat could ultimately help determine the balance of the Senate. Mills, who is termed out as governor, must first beat oyster farmer Graham Platner, whose outsider campaign is endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, in the Democratic primary. Platner has strongly condemned ICE’s surge in Maine, and posted a video on social media Friday offering step-by-step advice on how to resist.

“Over the past couple days, ICE’s operations are clearly rounding up people who are legally in the state of Maine,” Platner said in the Facebook reel. “I’m sick and tired of hearing that legally there is nothing that law enforcement in Maine can do to protect citizens from these thugs.”

ICE says ‘Operation Catch of the Day’ has about 1,400 targets

The enforcement action began Tuesday and has succeeded in removing dangerous criminals from the community, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to media on Thursday.

Some of the more than 100 arrests were of people “convicted of horrific crimes including aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and endangering the welfare of a child,” McLaughlin said.

The detentions in Maine, a mostly rural state where about 4% of the 1.4 million residents are foreign-born, have sparked anxiety in Portland and Lewiston, which are home to sizable immigrant and refugee populations, particularly from African nations.

Community leaders say that just like in other U.S. cities where the agency has surged forces, some families are staying indoors, avoiding work and keeping children home from school for fear of arrest.

Roofer says ICE agent threatened his family

Cristian Vaca, an immigrant from Ecuador who lives in Biddeford, said ICE agents repeatedly threatened him Wednesday outside his home, where the 28-year-old roofer lives with his wife and young son.

“I’m here legally. I came here in September 2023,” Vaca said, citing his family’s safety and economic opportunity as reasons for the move.

Speaking to The Associated Press in Spanish through a translator, Vaca said he was sitting on his couch when he noticed agents taking photos outside.

Vaca said he has a U.S. Social Security number, a work permit and pays income taxes. A video Vaca took shows an ICE agent speaking to him through his closed front door.

Before turning away, the agent says, “We’re going to come back for your whole family, okay?” A child’s voice can be heard in the background.

Protest organizers plan gathering in Portland’s Monument Square

Organizers announced more demonstrations, one planned for Friday evening in downtown Portland. A small group of demonstrators also gathered Thursday afternoon and again Friday morning outside an ICE field office in Scarborough.

“Maine is one of those places where you look out for your neighbors and everyone’s there,” said one of the Scarborough demonstrators, college student Ava Gleason. “We’re a community, and to see people come in and rip apart a community is freaking terrifying.”

Willingham reported from Boston.

By SAM McNEIL

BRUSSELS (AP) — The cold, hard reality facing any U.S., NATO or European plans for Greenland is the ice. It chokes harbors, entombs minerals, and freezes shorelines into minefields of white and blue shards that threaten ships all year.

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And the only way to break through all that is, well, with icebreakers: enormous ships with burly engines, reinforced hulls, and heavy bows that can crush and cleave ice.

But the United States has only three such vessels, one of which is so decrepit as to be barely usable. It has entered agreements to obtain 11 more, but can only source additional ships from adversaries — or allies it has recently rebuffed.

The key technology in the Arctic

Despite toning down his rhetoric, U.S. President Donald Trump seems set on the U.S. owning Greenland for security and economic reasons: to keep what he calls “the big, beautiful piece of ice” out of the hands of Moscow and Beijing, to secure a strategic Arctic location for U.S. assets, and to extract the island’s mineral wealth including rare earths.

Without specifying any plan, he told world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday that “to get to this rare earth you got to go through hundreds of feet of ice.”

Yet there is no meaningful way to do that — or anything else in the semiautonomous Danish territory — without icebreakers’ crucial ability to cut trails through frozen seas.

Even if they decided to surge U.S. material into Greenland tomorrow, “they would have two or three years gap in which they’re not really able to access the island most of the time,” said Alberto Rizzi, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“On a map, Greenland looks surrounded by sea, but the reality is that the sea is full of ice,” he said.

FILE – Pieces of ice move through the sea in Qoornoq Island, near Nuuk, Greenland, on Feb. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti, File)

If the U.S. wants more icebreakers, there are only four options: the shipyards of strategic adversaries China and Russia or longtime allies Canada and Finland, both of whom have recently weathered blistering criticism and threats of tariffs by Trump over Greenland.

Northern expertise in ice-capable ships

Icebreakers are expensive to design, build, operate and maintain and require a skilled workforce that can only be found in certain places like Finland, with expertise forged in the frigid Baltic Sea.

Finland has built roughly 60% of the world’s fleet of more than 240 icebreakers and designed half the remainder, Rizzi said.

“It’s very niche capabilities that they developed as a necessity first and then they have been able to turn it into geoeconomic leverage,” he said.

Russia has the world’s largest fleet with about 100 vessels, including colossal ships powered by nuclear reactors. Second comes Canada, which is set to double its fleet to around 50 icebreakers, according to a 2024 report by Aker Arctic, a Helsinki-based icebreaker design firm.

“Our design and engineering work order books are pretty full at the moment and the near future looks promising,” said Jari Hurttia, business manager at Aker Arctic, as he describes rising interest in the firm’s “unrivalled special competence which is not available anywhere else in the world.”

China currently has five compared to the U.S. three, and is rapidly building more as they expand their ambitions in the Arctic, said Marc Lanteigne, a professor at the University of Tromsø in Norway who teaches often at the University of Greenland in Nuuk.

“China is now in a position to develop indigenous icebreakers, and so the U.S. feels it must do the same,” he said.

Washington has to play catch up, and fast, said Sophie Arts, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund focused on Arctic security.

“President Trump has really bemoaned this lack of icebreakers, especially in comparison to Russia,” Arts said. The 2 of the 3 U.S. icebreakers are “basically past their life cycle already.”

So he turned to the undeniable expertise of the European Union’s northernmost nation and the U.S.’s neighbor to the north.

“Both Canada and Finland are really, really vital to this,” Arts said. “Cooperation is what makes this possible … the U.S. doesn’t really have a pathway to do this on its own at this time.”

During his first administration, Trump prioritized the U.S. military’s acquisition of ice-capable vessels, a strategy that the Biden administration followed up on by signing an agreement called the Ice PACT with Helsinki and Ottawa to deliver 11 icebreakers constructed by two corporate consortiums with Finnish designs.

Four would be built in Finland, while seven would be constructed in a Canadian-owned billion-dollar “American Icebreaker Factory” in Texas as well as a shipyard in Mississippi under joint U.S.-Canadian ownership.

Any mining of critical minerals would face high costs in the harsh conditions at sea and on land in Greenland. Investments there would take years if not decades to pay off, Lanteigne said.

Even with adequate icebreakers, the price to build and maintain mining or defensive facilities — like those envisioned in the yet-unfunded $175 billion Golden Dome missile defense network linking detectors and interceptors in space and on the ground — would be enormous.

That means U.S. allies in the Arctic might still welcome more investment by Washington in Greenland.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a statement that she would be open to strengthening Arctic security including the U.S. Golden Dome program “provided that this is done with respect for our territorial integrity.”

Market dominance and strategic leverage

While both the U.S. and the 27-nation European Union including Denmark and Finland have pledged to vastly increase investment in Greenland, it is clear who currently has the hard-power capability to actually reach the vast frozen territory roughly three times the size of Texas.

“It’s kind of absurd because I don’t think Finland would scrap the deal with the U.S. as a response to threatening to invade Greenland,” Rizzi said. “But if Europe wants to exercise significant leverage to the USA, they could say ‘We’re not going to give you any icebreakers and good luck reaching the Arctic, or projecting power there, with those two old ships that you have.’”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reminded world leaders Tuesday at Davos of the key EU-technology base for any Arctic endeavors.

“Finland — one of the newest NATO members — is selling its first icebreakers to the U.S.,” von der Leyen said at the World Economic Forum.

“This shows that we have the capability right here, in the ice so to speak, that our northern NATO members have Arctic-ready forces right now, and above all, that Arctic security can only be achieved together.”

She announced after an emergency summit of the 27 EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday that the EU would surge defense spending in Greenland including an icebreaker.