Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has blasted the Trump administration for holding direct talks with Russia aimed at ending the war in Ukraine — without representatives of Ukraine or European nations at the table. Speaking to reporters in Kyiv earlier today, Zelensky said President Trump “unfortunately lives in this disinformation space.” Zelensky’s remarks came after Trump on Tuesday accused Ukraine of starting its war with Russia, even though it was the Russian army that invaded Ukraine in February of 2022.

President Donald Trump: “And I think I have the power to end this war. And I think it’s going very well. But today I heard, 'Oh, well, we weren't invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it — three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

Earlier today, the European Union’s foreign policy chief reiterated that the EU would reject any Russia-Ukraine peace deal without the participation of Ukraine and Europe.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has declined the request of 14 Democratic state attorneys general to immediately bar Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, from accessing federal data systems. In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan appeared skeptical about the Trump administration’s claims about Musk and DOGE’s powers to carry out mass firings at government agencies, but Chutkan said she would not issue a temporary restraining order since states had not shown they would suffer “imminent, irreparable harm.”

Among the latest government agencies targeted by DOGE is the National Science Foundation, which on Tuesday fired 168 employees, or about 10% of its workforce. The cuts came as the Trump administration seeks to fire nearly all probationary employees who haven’t yet gained civil service protection, including even longtime government employees who were recently hired or promoted into new positions. The Partnership for Public Service estimates about a quarter of a million federal employees are considered “probationary.” Today, unionized federal government workers will hold protests in Washington, D.C., and in cities across the U.S. in a coordinated “Save Our Services Day of Action.”

Meanwhile, the Houston Chronicle is reporting that probationary employees at NASA will be spared from the latest round of layoffs ordered by DOGE, after an 11th-hour reprieve Tuesday. NASA is the largest customer to SpaceX, awarding over $13 billion in contracts to Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company over the past decade. 

In a Tuesday evening broadcast, Elon Musk defended his work to gut whole agencies across the federal government. He was speaking in a joint interview with President Trump, hosted by Fox News far-right pundit Sean Hannity.

Elon Musk: “I think what we’re seeing here is the sort of — the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.”

A court filing from the White House Office of Administration lists Elon Musk as a senior adviser to the president who’s serving as an employee of the “White House Office” — and not the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, which the White House previously said he was leading. On Tuesday, Trump dismissed reporters’ questions over Musk’s role, saying he’s “a patriot.”

The Senate voted 51-45 on Tuesday to confirm billionaire Howard Lutnick as U.S. commerce secretary. Lutnick was the chief executive of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chaired Trump’s 2024 transition team. A financial disclosure form shows he has ties to more than 800 individual firms, many of which stand to benefit from Trump administration policies.

Also on Tuesday, the Senate advanced the nomination of Trump’s pick to head the FBI, Kash Patel. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin was among Democrats in opposition. 

Sen. Dick Durbin: “My Senate Republican colleagues, sadly, are willfully ignoring myriad red flags about Mr. Patel, especially his recurring instinct to threaten retribution against his political enemies and President Trump’s perceived enemies.”

A senior U.S. prosecutor resigned Tuesday to protest what she called a politically driven investigation into the Biden administration’s climate policies. Denise Cheung, the top criminal prosecutor in the Washington, D.C., office, wrote in her resignation letter that she had refused an unreasonable request made by Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal attorney who’s now acting U.S. deputy attorney general, to bring criminal charges over Biden-era grants by the EPA to nonprofit groups.

The head of the food division at the Food and Drug Administration, Jim Jones, stepped down Tuesday to protest what he called “indiscriminate” cuts across the agency. In his resignation letter, Jones wrote, “I was looking forward to working to pursue the department’s agenda of improving the health of Americans by reducing diet-related chronic disease and risks from chemicals in food.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave his first address to staffers at his sprawling federal agency on Tuesday, promising to scrutinize the childhood vaccine schedule that prevents deadly and debilitating diseases, including measles and polio. RFK Jr.’s announcement was a direct contradiction to sworn testimony he gave earlier this month to win the support of Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who spent decades working to vaccinate children.

In related news, a measles outbreak in a West Texas county that’s home to some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country has grown to at least 58 cases. Thirteen patients have been hospitalized.

On Tuesday evening, the Trump administration reversed a plan to shut down the government website that ships free coronavirus tests to households, after The Washington Post reported that Health and Human Services officials were preparing to end the program and were considering destroying 160 million tests valued at more than half a billion dollars.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday it was seeking to rehire “several” agency employees who’d been assigned to the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak, before their jobs were terminated as part of the Trump administration’s mass firings. In a statement, the USDA said the workers were fired in error since their jobs are considered “public safety positions.”

Longtime political prisoner and Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier walked out of a Florida prison Tuesday morning after spending nearly half a century behind bars. That afternoon, he arrived back home in North Dakota on the tribal homelands of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians to reunite with his family and community. Peltier spoke to supporters for the first time outside of prison.

Leonard Peltier: “We are not going to give up. We’re going to win. We’ve been winning. We’re going to continue to win. We’re going to stick together. We’re going to unite. As it is right now, we’ve been united all through Indigenous countries. And we’re going to fight back. We’re going to continue 'til we are a free nation. I gave 50 years for that. And I'm going to give the rest of my life. So, they haven’t broken — they have not broke me. I am not broken.”

We’ll have more on Leonard Peltier’s historic release later in the broadcast with Nick Tilsen of the NDN Collective, who accompanied Peltier yesterday.

In the Gaza Strip, Hamas has proposed exchanging all remaining Israeli hostages for hundreds of Palestinian captives “in one go” in order to cement a permanent ceasefire and a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. The offer came as Hamas said it would free six living Israeli hostages this weekend and return the bodies of four others, in an accelerated timeline. Israeli forces killed at least three Palestinians and injured 11 others across Gaza over the past 24 hours, despite the ongoing ceasefire.

Israeli far-right Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said Tuesday that Israel’s campaign to permanently expel Palestinians from Gaza will rely on force rather than so-called voluntary migration. His comments contradicted these claims made just two days earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Why not give Gazans a choice? Everybody said this is the largest open-air prison in the world. … Not forcible eviction, not ethnic cleansing. In a war zone, people leave.”

In southern Lebanon, civil defense workers say they have recovered the bodies of 23 people killed by Israel’s bombardment last year. The gruesome discoveries came amid Israel’s partial withdrawal from southern Lebanon and continued attacks in the region, where residents are returning to frontline villages to find their homes shattered and entire neighborhoods leveled. This is Suhaila Daher, who returned to her village of Kfar Kila on Tuesday.

Suhaila Daher: “Of course, our feeling is mixed with joy and sadness. There are still martyrs that haven’t been retrieved. All the destruction can be compensated, thank God, but the martyrs won’t return.”

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro has been formally charged with helping stage an attempted coup and masterminding a far-right conspiracy plot to cling to power after his 2022 reelection loss to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil’s attorney general said Tuesday the plot included a plan to assassinate Lula and a Supreme Court justice. The charges come three months after Brazilian federal authorities released a damning report accusing Bolsonaro of leading the election-denying conspiracy plot, which began in 2021 as an attempt to undermine public trust in Brazil’s electoral system. The plot culminated on January 8, 2023, when Bolsonaro encouraged his supporters to violently storm several government buildings in the capital Brasília. At least six of Bolsonaro’s key allies were also formally charged Tuesday. If convicted, Bolsonaro could face decades in prison.

The CIA has expanded its use of secret drone flights over Mexico as part of Trump’s aggressive campaign to target drug cartels and fentanyl labs. The undisclosed surveillance program had already begun under the Biden administration, and Trump’s expansion has raised more concerns over possible violations of Mexico’s sovereignty. Trump has manipulated the fentanyl scare to push his administration’s anti-immigrant policies and border crackdown, even though most fentanyl is smuggled by U.S. citizens through ports of entry.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is due in federal court today, where a judge is set to decide whether to grant a request by the Justice Department to drop corruption charges against him. On Tuesday, Adams refused to take questions from reporters about his deal with the Trump administration to suspend charges in exchange for Adams’s cooperation with Trump’s mass deportation and anti-immigrant policies.

Katie Honan: “Why don’t you take questions from the press?”

Mayor Eric Adams: “'Cause you're all liars.”

Reporter: “What are we lying about exactly?”

Katie Honan: “Yeah. What are we lying about exactly?”

Kansas has become the latest state to ban gender-affirming care for transgender children and youth after the Republican-controlled state Legislature overrode the Democratic governor’s veto of the measure. The new law is set to take effect this month and follows President Trump’s executive order gutting gender-affirming care nationwide for trans people under the age of 19; that order was temporarily blocked by a federal judge last week. At least 26 other states already ban or restrict the lifesaving care for trans children and youth.

In a victory for reproductive rights, abortion access has resumed in Missouri after a judge temporarily lifted strict regulations that blocked clinics from providing the procedure — even after voters approved enshrining abortion rights into the state’s constitution last year. Missouri was the first state to enact a near-total abortion ban after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The Kansas City Planned Parenthood clinic said Saturday it had provided the first abortion since 2022 after the judge’s ruling.