By KAMILA HRABCHUK, Associated Press

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The U.S. and Russia agreed on Thursday to reestablish high level military-to-military dialogue following a meeting between senior Russian and American military officials in Abu Dhabi, the United States European Command said in a statement.

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The agreement was reached following meetings between Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the Commander of U.S. European Command — who is also NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe — and senior Russian and Ukrainian military officials, the statement said.

The channel “will provide a consistent military-to-military contact as the parties continue to work towards a lasting peace,” the statement said. High level military communication was suspended in 2021, just before Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine.

Grynkewich was in the capital of the United Arab Emirates where talks between American, Russian and Ukrainian officials on ending the war in Ukraine entered a second day and as Moscow escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s power grid.

Russia continues to target Ukraine’s electricity network, aiming to deny civilians power and weaken their appetite for the fight, while fighting continues along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line snaking along eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy revealed that 55,000 Ukrainian troops have died since Russia’s invasion almost four years ago. “And there is a large number of people whom Ukraine considers missing,” he added in an interview broadcast by French TV channel France 2 late Wednesday.

The last time Zelenskyy gave a figure for battlefield deaths, in early 2025, he said 46,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed.

The delegations from Moscow and Kyiv were joined Thursday in the capital of the United Arab Emirates by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, according to Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council chief, who was present at the meeting.

They were also at last month’s talks in the same place as the Trump administration tries to steer the two countries toward a settlement. At the time, Zelenskyy described the issue of who would control the Donbas industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine as “key.”

Officials have provided no information about any progress in the discussions.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly said his country needs security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe to deter any postwar Russian attacks.

Ukrainians must feel that there is genuine progress toward peace and “not toward a scenario in which the Russians exploit everything to their advantage and continue their strikes,” Zelenskyy said on social media late Wednesday.

Last year saw a 31% increase in Ukrainian civilian casualties compared with 2024, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said in a report published Wednesday.

Almost 15,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and just over 40,000 injured since the start of the war through last December, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk arrived in Kyiv on an official visit Thursday.

Two people were injured in the Ukrainian capital as a result of overnight Russian drone strikes, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. In the wider Kyiv region, a man suffered a shrapnel chest wound, authorities said.

Russia fired 183 drones and two ballistic missiles at Ukraine overnight, according to the Ukrainian air force.

Russian air defenses downed 95 Ukrainian drones overnight over several regions, the Azov Sea and Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2016, Russia’s Defense Ministry said.

Emma Burrows in London contributed to this report.

By JOEY CAPPELLETTI, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan is refusing to voluntarily comply with a Justice Department investigation into a video she organized urging U.S. military members to resist “illegal orders” — escalating a dispute that President Donald Trump has publicly pushed.

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In letters first obtained by The Associated Press, Slotkin’s lawyer informed U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro that the senator would not agree to a voluntary interview about the video. Slotkin’s legal team also requested that Pirro preserve all documents related to the matter for “anticipated litigation.”

Slotkin’s lawyer separately wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi, declining to sit for an FBI interview about the video and urging her to immediately terminate any inquiry.

The refusal marks a potential turning point in the standoff, shifting the burden onto the Justice Department to decide whether it will escalate an investigation into sitting members of Congress or retreat from an inquiry now being openly challenged.

“I did this to go on offense,” Slotkin said in an interview Wednesday. “And to put them in a position where they’re tap dancing. To put them in a position where they have to own their choices of using a U.S. attorney’s office to come after a senator.”

‘It’s not gonna stop unless I fight back’

Last November, Slotkin joined five other Democratic lawmakers — all of whom previously served in the military or at intelligence agencies — in posting a 90-second video urging U.S. service members to follow established military protocols and reject orders they believe to be unlawful.

The lawmakers said Trump’s Republican administration was “pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens” and called on troops to “stand up for our laws.”

The video sparked a firestorm in Republican circles and soon drew the attention of Trump, who accused the lawmakers of sedition and said their actions were “punishable by death.”

The Pentagon later announced it had opened an investigation into Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot who appeared in the video. The FBI then contacted the lawmakers seeking interviews, signaling a broader Justice Department inquiry.

Slotkin said multiple legal advisers initially urged caution.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., talks during a breakout session during the 94th Winter Meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

“Maybe if you keep quiet, this will all go away over Christmas,” Slotkin said she was told.

But in January, the matter flared again, with the lawmakers saying they were contacted by the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia.

Meanwhile, security threats mounted. Slotkin said her farm in Michigan received a bomb threat, her brother was assigned a police detail due to threats and her parents were swatted in the middle of the night.

Her father, who died in January after a long battle with cancer, “could barely walk and he’s dealing with the cops in his home,” she said.

Slotkin said a “switch went off” in her and she became angry: “And I said, ‘It’s not gonna stop unless I fight back.’”

Democratic senators draw a line

The requests from the FBI and the Justice Department have been voluntary. Slotkin said that her legal team had communicated with prosecutors but that officials “keep asking for a personal interview.”

Slotkin’s lawyer, Preet Bharara, in the letter to Pirro declined the interview request and asked that she “immediately terminate any open investigation and cease any further inquiry concerning the video.” In the other letter, Bharara urged Bondi to use her authority to direct Pirro to close the inquiry.

Bharara wrote that Slotkin’s constitutional rights had been infringed and said litigation is being considered.

“All options are most definitely on the table,” Slotkin said. Asked whether she would comply with a subpoena, she paused before responding: “I’d take a hard look at it.”

Kelly has similarly pushed back, suing the Pentagon last month over attempts to punish him for the video. On Tuesday, a federal judge said that he knows of no U.S. Supreme Court precedent to justify the Pentagon’s censuring of Kelly as he weighed whether to intervene.

Slotkin said she’s in contact with the other lawmakers who appeared in the video, but she wouldn’t say what their plans were in the investigations.

A rising profile

Trump has frequently and consistently targeted his political opponents. In some cases, those attacks have had the unintended consequence of elevating their national standing.

In Kelly’s case, he raised more than $12.5 million in the final months of 2025 following the “illegal orders” video controversy, according to campaign finance filings.

Slotkin, like Kelly, has been mentioned among Democrats who could emerge as presidential contenders in 2028.

She previously represented one of the nation’s most competitive House districts before winning a Senate seat in Michigan in 2024, even as Trump carried the state.

Slotkin delivered the Democratic response to Trump’s address to Congress last year and has since urged her party to confront him more aggressively, saying Democrats had lost their “alpha energy” and calling on them to “go nuclear” against Trump’s redistricting push.

“If I’m encouraging other people to take risk, how can I not then accept risk myself?” Slotkin said. “I think you’ve got to show people that we’re not going to lay down and take it.”

In the latest stop in Donald Trump’s war on liberal democracy, federal agents in Minnesota have shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. It was difficult to avoid the videos of what I can only think of as their executions. The images captured by bystanders and immigrantion agents were reminiscent of the lynching postcards that white spectators once bought and traded — reproductions of retributive violence, tailor-made to titillate and intimidate.

Pretti’s killing, in particular, struck a chord of dismay with a cross section of Americans. There is some small measure of comfort that our public conscience can still be shocked. One may wish that it had happened sooner — when other people died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody this past year or immigrants were rounded up into camps. But whichever abuse convinced you, whichever needless death shocked you, you are here now. You need to pay attention to the guns ICE agents are pointing at all of us. You also need to pay attention to everything happening around the guns.

Just before Jonathan Ross, an ICE agent, pulled the gun that he discharged into Good’s minivan, he was shooting video of the incident on his cellphone.

Pay attention to the phone

The gun and the phone are both weapons — one a tool for violence, and the other a tool of control.

We understand what the gun is intended to do. That’s why, finally, opposition to the Trump administration seems to be coalescing around a rallying cry: “Abolish ICE!” It’s another way of saying, control the hand that holds the gun. It is the gun that produces the spectacle of violence from which we cannot, in good conscience, look away. Yes, we must pay attention to the gun.

But we must also pay attention to the phone.

That phone represents a greater power, one that could outlast Trumpism. ICE knows that it cannot shoot us all. But the Department of Homeland Security is close to being able to track us all.

Trump’s signature domestic policy bill gave ICE $75 billion in new funding and four years to spend it, making ICE the highest funded federal law enforcement agency. The agency is spending big on signing bonuses — 12,000 new officers and agents have been hired with One Big Beautiful Bill money — and cutting-edge military weaponry to use on U.S. streets. The Department of Homeland Security also has been, reportedly, spending some of its budget to collect data on people like you.

The federal government, whether Democratic- or Republican-controlled, has repeatedly failed to institute meaningful, urgently needed regulation of or legislation about data privacy that matches the scale of our risk. For decades, Americans have treated their data like a cheap externality. We trade crumbs of ourselves — our name, phone number, location data — for discounts, convenience and the illusion of safety. Democratic administrations, in particular, thought Silicon Valley CEOs were the good guys. So they enabled their sci-fi aspirations, invited them into the White House inner circle and consulted them on best practices for consumer data. Then, many chiefs turned heel, helping this administration aggressively scale a data dragnet that will eat our civil liberties for lunch, if we let it.

En route to a surveillance state

Many of us have come to believe that our data is something outside of ourselves, when, in fact, data is our self. Through our purchasing patterns and our digital habits, we have produced reams of details about how we live, think, vote and spend. And there is an entire industry of data brokers that collects and packages our data to be bought. Consequently, we live in a world where our data is valuable and our power to protect it is negligible.

The companies that already use our data — to target us with advertisements, to assess our eligibility for loans or insurance — are limited largely by the concerns of business: for the most part, a company wants your wallet, not your liberty. The same cannot be said of this administration.

Imagine what our country would look like if a federal agency compiled everything it could find about you on the open market and then paired it with your most sensitive personal data and the full weight of the federal surveillance apparatus. The result would be a system that could not only track you but pretty accurately predict your choices, behaviors and vulnerabilities. The agency might decline to tell you how the database would be used — or, worse, deny that such a database exists at all. In these times, we ought to assume the worst-case scenario: that every technological layer added to our democratic institutions has the potential to be hostile to civil liberties.

Already, there are signs that this future may come to pass.

In a citizen video from Maine that has been widely shared online, an ICE agent told a legal observer that he was taking a picture of her license plate to add her to a “nice little database” that will label her a “domestic terrorist.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, later told CNN that “there is no database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS.”) In any case, the Department of Homeland Security has issued broad internal guidance for ICE agents in Minneapolis to collect “images, license plates, identifications and general information on hotels, agitators, protesters.” And then on Friday, The New York Times reported that ICE was exploring ways to integrate advertising technologies and the data associated with them into its operations, specifically asking potential vendors the extent to which data could be collected on “people, businesses, devices, locations, transactions, public records.” There’s no word on ICE having a special decoder ring that tracks only the criminals.

‘Seeking data about every aspect of the lives of everyone’

Emily Tucker, the director of Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, suggested the agency could be constructing a surveillance system that, in my estimation, would make “Minority Report” look like child’s play. Homeland Security, she said, “is increasingly emphasizing ‘interoperability’ in its contracting.” That is a strong sign that the agency wants to connect a range of databases, which could include those with your biometric data, employment data, driving records, credit reports, tax data, social media data, cellphone location data and automated license plate reader data. “They are seeking data about every aspect of the lives of everyone,” she said.

If combined with the facial recognition and social media monitoring commonly deployed by the Department of Homeland Security, those reams of data would turbocharge ICE’s terror campaign in the short term and destroy American civil liberties in the long term. Should this surveillance infrastructure live up to its technical potential, it would be a leviathan that our 250-year-old Constitution almost certainly cannot restrain.

I spoke on the phone last week to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has been trying, futilely, for years to pass legislation to protect Americans’ data from federal overreach. One such bill passed in the House in 2024 but languished in the Senate. He said that the federal government is “weaponizing private data” against citizens and noncitizens. Of particular concern, he said, was not simply the data about all of us that is available for purchase, but how states are allowing for the federal government’s data smash-and-grab. What this administration cannot buy, it will simply take.

Your state and federal data is the stuff you are compelled to provide, the data whose accuracy you worry about because a mistake can disrupt your Social Security benefits or put you at odds with the IRS. The Trump administration has been taking advantage of state-level data that has been aggregated by a third-party nonprofit data clearinghouse called Nlets. It was established to help local, national and international agencies share data, including DMV data, about known criminal activity. In practice, there are far too few restrictions on who can use that data and how they can use it. A handful of states has enacted restrictions on ICE’s access to the DMV data stored with Nlets, but the vast majority effectively give federal agencies self-service, direct access to it. So a tool meant to make DMV data sharing frictionless for law enforcement agencies also acts like a privacy Trojan horse, because agencies don’t need just cause or a warrant to look at it.

You don’t need to understand how digital tracking works or have a degree in constitutional law to grasp what is happening to your privacy. You need only know this: Whatever is happening with your data, it is important enough to the most egregiously lawless administration in American history that it be collected and consolidated. It is important enough that a federal cowboy kept one hand on his phone even as his other hand reached for his gun.

Tip of the iceberg

A militarized federal police force that acts out of loyalty on the whim of a political leader who relishes retribution and adulation is the tip of an iceberg. You don’t build a nuclear bomb for peace any more than you build a national surveillance apparatus just to manage a border wall. This kind of weaponry could effectively nullify our Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable search and seizure. It also could more easily enable the government to trample on your free speech. And it could do all of this without meaningful transparency or oversight.

The federal government may have abdicated its responsibility to protect our civil liberties by regulating who can use our data and to what ends. Some states are stepping in, creating their own data privacy laws. But there is still much more to be done, in state legislatures and in Congress. And it all starts with the American people understanding that our freedoms are now bound up in who controls our data.

Tressie McMillan Cottom writes for the New York Times.

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