Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 28, 2022.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo

• A former WH aide detailed the flow of intelligence documents to the Situation Room during Trump’s last days.
• Cassidy Hutchinson had previously told the January 6 committee that Mark Meadows burned documents.
• In a new transcript, she described how Trump allies including Meadows sought boxes of documents from congress.

A former Trump White House official said that she observed a revolving door of Trump allies and intelligence staff visiting the Situation Room in the last weeks of Trump’s presidency, delivering boxes full of potentially classified documents days before the violent insurrection.

Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as an aide for former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, told the January 6 committee that she helped coordinate the delivery of documents from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to the White House. In a transcript released Tuesday by the January 6 committee, Hutchinson said she liaised with former Rep. Devin Nunes and that the documents were delivered in the final weeks of December 2020, in a dolly of boxes.

“On December 31st — or December 30th — we got all the documents, Hutchinson told the committee in a May 17, 2022 interview. “They came up on a dolly in a few boxes and I had to sign for them. And then he called White House counsel down.”

Hutchinson had previously testified that she witnessed Meadows burning documents in a fireplace after meeting with Rep. Scott Perry. She told the committee in May that Meadows also made multiple copies of documents.

She added that HPSCI staffers met with former Trump lawyer Pat Cipollone, Meadows, and Nunes and that she did not personally review the content of the documents. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy was also involved in the conversations around the documents, she testified.

“I don’t know if it was the Situation Room that brought them or if it was somebody, a staffer from — I don’t know — because they came from the Hill, I don’t know how, like what the protocol is for releasing them,” Hutchinson said, per the transcript, adding that a member of the Situation Room staff delivered the boxes. “I don’t know if they have to go through the FBI or the CIA, or if it was something they could have sent to the Situation Room to print and bind there.”

In the interview with the committee, Hutchinson said she didn’t know why the documents were being lugged from the Hill to the White House. 

“HPSCI had seen these documents at some point and had these documents at some point and were aware of the contents of these documents,” she said. “I am not sure if it’s something that the Republican HPSCI staffers had deeply looked into or if it was more the intention to bring them to the White House to look into them.”

“And why would they need to bring them to the White House to look into them?” Rep. Liz Cheney asked Hutchinson in the interview.

“I don’t know,” she answered, maintaining that she never took part in the meetings between the White House officials and Republican allies, despite her top security clearance.

Meadows did not respond to Insider’s request for comment. 

(NewsNation) — Incoming New York Congressman George Santos admitted to lying about multiple parts of his resume, and the man who interviewed him said a “failure of the system” allowed the Republican’s fabrications to go undetected.

John Catsimatidis, owner of WABC radio in Manhattan, had Santos on his radio show Monday to discuss the allegations that were first reported by The New York Times. Among them were that Santos never graduated college and misrepresented who he worked for.

The allegations all turned out to be true.

Santos told WABC Radio and The New York Post that he did in fact never graduate from college, despite claiming he did. He also claimed to have worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, though it was merely just work for those companies through his actual employer.

“I did extensive work on the LP side with Goldman Sachs … I did extensive work with Citigroup in my time at the LP position. So the way it’s stated on the resume, doing work for, I have worked for, not on or at or in. … Yeah, I understand that and let that be a lesson for everybody,” Santos said in the WABC interview.

Santos apologized for embellishing his resume but said he would not resign his seat in Congress as some have called for.

If “he thought would get a few extra votes, he appealed to that audience. But I looked at it a failure of the system,” Catsimatidis said Tuesday on “CUOMO.” “It’s a failure of the Republicans to catch those mistakes, and it’s a failure of the Democrats to do opposition research and catch those mistakes.”

The New York Times investigation found a litany of discrepancies between what Santos was telling voters and his actual background.

He claims to have graduated from Baruch College in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance, but the Times found that the school could not find any records of anyone matching his name or date of birth. Santos now admits that he never graduated from any college.

He’s also accused of lying about his family background. He stated on his campaign website that his mother was Jewish and his grandparents fled the Nazis during World War II.

Santos told the New York Post his grandmother told stories about being Jewish and later converting to Catholicism.

“I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos told The New York Post. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.'”

The GOP chairman in Nassau County, New York, blasted Santos for the fabrications, but otherwise, Republican leaders in the House have been silent about the controversy. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats including Reps. Joaquin Castro of Texas and Ted Lieu of California have called on Santos to resign.

Catsimatidis believes the “process” needs to play out.

“What do you do about it? He did get elected. Does the U.S. attorney indict him? Does the district attorney indict him? Does the attorney general indict him? There’s the old adage, ‘You can indict a ham sandwich if you want,'” Catsimatidis said. “There’s a process in our country that should have checks and balances and find out the extent of the guilt, but they should have caught it before the election.”

There’s also the issue of politics. Republicans will have only a 222-213 majority in January, leaving House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — who is seeking the speaker — with few votes to spare.

“If the future speaker Kevin McCarthy (had) 20 or 30 votes, then I guess he could be a little more forceful, Catsimatidis said, “but right now, they have a very tight margin of error.”

Chinese hospitals were under intense pressure on Wednesday as a surging wave of COVID-19 infections strained resources in the last major country to move towards treating the virus as endemic.

In an abrupt change of policy, China earlier this month began dismantling the world’s strictest COVID regime of lockdowns and extensive testing, putting its battered economy on course for a complete re-opening next year.

The move, which came after widespread protests against the restrictions, means COVID is spreading largely unchecked and likely infecting millions of people a day, according to some international health experts.

The speed at which COVID rules have been scrapped has left China’s fragile health system overwhelmed and prompted countries around the world, which have long been living with the virus, to consider travel restrictions for Chinese visitors, given questions about official data coming out of Beijing.

Staff at Huaxi, a large hospital in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu, said they were “extremely busy” caring for patients with COVID, as they have been ever since curbs were eased on Dec. 7.

“I’ve been doing this job for 30 years and this is the busiest I have ever known it,” said one ambulance driver outside the hospital who declined to be named.

There were long queues inside and outside the hospital’s emergency department and at the adjacent fever clinic on Tuesday evening. Most of those who arrived in ambulances were given oxygen tanks to assist with their breathing.

“Almost all of the patients have COVID,” one emergency department pharmacy staff member said.

The hospital has no stocks of COVID-specific medicine and instead can simply provide drugs for specific symptoms such as coughing, she added.

Zhang Yuhua, an official at the Beijing Chaoyang Hospital said patients who have come in recently are mainly the elderly and critically ill with underlying diseases. She said the number of patients receiving emergency care had increased to 450-550 per day, from roughly 100 before, according to state media.

Pictures published by state-run China Daily showed rows of mostly elderly patients, some breathing through oxygen tubes, receiving treatment from medical staff in white hazmat suits inside the hospital’s intensive care unit.

Official statistics, however, showed only one COVID death in the seven days to Monday. International health experts predict at least 1 million COVID deaths in China next year.

In a major step towards freer travel, China will stop requiring inbound travellers to go into quarantine from Jan. 8, authorities said this week, prompting many Chinese, cut off from the world for so long, to check travel platforms.

But while online searches for flights spiked on Tuesday from extremely low levels, residents and travel agencies suggested a return to anything like normal would take some months yet, given worries about COVID and more careful spending because of the impact of the pandemic.

Moreover, some governments were considering extra travel requirements for Chinese visitors.

U.S. officials cited “the lack of transparent data, including viral genomic sequence data,” as reasons for doing so.

India and Japan would require a negative COVID test for travellers from mainland China, with those testing positive in Japan having to undergo a week in quarantine. Tokyo also plans to limit airlines increasing flights to China.

When asked about the extra travel requirements imposed by Japan and India, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday “COVID measures should be scientific, moderate and should not affect the normal flow of individuals.”

China’s $17 trillion economy is expected to suffer a slowdown in factory output and domestic consumption in the near future, as workers and shoppers fall ill.

News of China re-opening its borders sent global luxury stocks higher, but the reaction was more muted in other corners of the market, as the world’s second-largest economy is likely to face subdued global demand in 2023.

U.S. carmaker Tesla (TSLA.O) plans to run a reduced production schedule at its Shanghai plant in January, extending the restricted output it began this month into next year, according to an internal schedule reviewed by Reuters. Tesla did not specify a reason for the production slowdown in its output plan.

Once the initial shockwave of infections passes, some economists expect Chinese growth to bounce back with a vengeance from what is this year expected to be its lowest rate in nearly half a century, somewhere around 3%.

Morgan Stanley economists expect 5.4% growth in 2023, while those at Goldman Sachs see 5.2%.

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(Reuters) – Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been vigorously promoting his 10-point peace plan, discussing it with U.S. President Joe Biden among others, and urging world leaders to hold a Global Peace Summit based on it.

Here is an explainer on the plan and world reaction:

Zelenskiy first announced his peace formula at a November summit of the Group of 20 major economies.

The plan calls for:

1. Radiation and nuclear safety, focusing on restoring safety around Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, which is now-Russian occupied.

2. Food security, including protecting and ensuring Ukraine’s grain exports to the world’s poorest nations.

3. Energy security, with focus on price restrictions on Russian energy resources, as well as aiding Ukraine with restoring its power infrastructure, half of which has been damaged by Russian attacks.

4. Release of all prisoners and deportees, including war prisoners and children deported to Russia.

5. Restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Russia reaffirming it according the U.N. Charter, which Zelenskiy said is “not up to negotiations”.

6. Withdrawal of Russian troops and cessation of hostilities, restoration of Ukraine’s state borders with Russia.

7. Justice, including the establishment of a special tribunal to prosecute Russian war crimes.

8. Ecocide, protection of environment, with focus on demining and restoring water treatment facilities.

9. Prevention of escalation of conflict, and building security architecture in the Euro-Atlantic space, including guarantees for Ukraine.

10. Confirmation of the war’s end, including a document signed by the involved parties.

In December, Zelenskiy urged the leaders of the Group of Seven nations to support his Global Peace Summit idea in winter that would focus on the peace plan “as a whole or some specific points in particular”.

Russia rejected Zelenskiy’s peace proposal this month and Moscow reiterated on Tuesday that it would not give up any territory it has taken by force, around a fifth of Ukraine, which it says it has annexed.

Zelenskiy has been on a diplomatic flurry presenting his plan to leaders including Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose country has assumed the G20 presidency.

The Western world’s support for Ukraine’s military has run into billions of dollars, led by Washington, and nations have rushed to help Kyiv with demining and fixing power infrastructure.

But response to Zelenskiy’s peace plan and his proposed peace summit has been more cautious.

During Zelenskiy’s visit to Washington on Dec. 22, Biden said in public remarks only that he and Zelenskiy “share the exact same vision” for peace and that the United States is committed to ensure that Ukraine can defend itself.

The G7 leaders said they were committed to bringing peace to Ukraine “in line with its rights enshrined in the U.N. Charter.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that chances for any peace talks are small any time soon.

“I do believe that the military confrontation will go on, and I think we’ll have still to wait for a moment in which serious negotiations for peace will be possible,” he said in late December.

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Passengers line up at the Southwest ticket desk at San Francisco International Airport on December 26, amid widespread delays and cancellations for the airline.

Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

• Southwest continued to cancel thousands of flights on Tuesday and into the rest of the week.
• Airline experts said the company is particularly vulnerable to a winter-weather breakdown.
• An outdated scheduling system and unique flight network structure exacerbated the problem.

Holiday travel mayhem continued to worsen this week as a wave of flight cancellations pummeled passengers across the country following a brutal winter storm.

Photos and videos of abandoned luggage, cranky customers, and exhausted employees consumed Twitter amid the nearly 5,000 canceled flights within the US on Tuesday.

The deadly winter storm that whipped through the country over the weekend ruined holiday plans for scores of travelers, but no airline was more impacted than Southwest, which canceled more than 60% of its flights on both Tuesday and Wednesday.

The company’s cancellations accounted for more than 50% of all domestic cancellations on Tuesday, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware, resulting in a growing number of furiously-stranded patrons.

Airline analysts and industry experts told Insider and other outlets that Southwest’s outdated scheduling system and atypical approach to mapping its flight network were partially responsible for the crisis.

Southwest bucks industry-standard in its flight network structure

Nearly every major airline uses a “hub and spoke” network, in which the company’s planes are concentrated in a central location and fly out to one or two locations before returning to their main airport, said Helane Becker, an airline analyst at the investment bank and financial services company Cowen. For example, Delta has major hubs in Atlanta, Detroit, and Los Angeles, while United Airlines’ planes are often flying into and out of Newark and Chicago-O’Hare, she told Insider.

Becker compared the approach to a bicycle tire, with a hub in the middle and several spokes leading out and away from the middle.

The “hub and spoke” approach allows airlines to halt individual travel routes amid poor weather, Henry Harteveldt told The New York Times, impacting as few people as possible.

But Southwest operates a “point to point” network, its aircrafts rarely returning to a central location, instead flying from one location to the next, Becker said. 

David Vernon, an airline analyst at the financial firm Sanford C. Bernstein, told The Times that the point-to-point system allows for a higher level of plane usage during normal operations, but can lead to widespread chaos amid winter weather. When dangerous conditions ground “point to point” planes in multiple regions, it can have a cascading effect on the airline’s future flights all across the country, evidenced by the near nationwide distribution of Southwest cancellations throughout the US this week. 

Airlines operating on a “hub and spokes” model also have the advantage of calling upon their reservist crews, employees who are typically concentrated near the hub, when extra help is needed, Becker said.

A spokesperson for Southwest in a statement to Insider acknowledged the company’s unique approach.

“Southwest stands alone in the industry as the largest carrier in 23 of the top 25 travel markets in the U.S,” Chris Perry said. “We are not a hub and spoke carrier; we have 30+ airports with high flight volume so our solution to normalize the operation looks very different from other carriers.”

Canceled Southwest Airlines flights show on a monitor at Hollywood Burbank Airport, Tuesday, Dec 27, 2022.

Photo by Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images

Staffing shortages and an outdated scheduling system also bear blame, experts say

The crisis comes amid heightened tensions between Southwest management and employees over staffing shortages, Robert W. Mann Jr., a former airline executive, told The Times. Pilots can only fly up to eight hours per 24-hour period or up to 10 hours if a second pilot is aboard, while flight attendants are guaranteed a 10-hour rest period in between flights.

The time regulations for airline crew, while necessary for safety, have exacerbated the current crisis at Southwest, Becker said: “People are running out of time” and ending up stranded in cities and airports where they aren’t scheduled to work.

The problem has been further inflamed by Southwest’s scheduling system. Becker suggested that Southwest has underinvested in its information technology in recent years and is now reaping the consequences.  

Whereas most other airlines use an automated employee app to track staffers’ locations in real time, Southwest’s scheduling system assumes where employees are located based on their flight assignments. As delays and cancellations piled up, more and more Southwest staffers found themselves fighting to get to their destinations.

“They can’t get through” on the phones for reassignment or rescheduling, Becker said. 

A Southwest spokesperson said the company is focused on investing in technology upgrades to avoid problems like this in the future.

“Our technology struggled to align our resources due to the magnitude and scale of the disruptions,” Perry told Insider. “In our desired state, we will have automation that can handle Crew reassignments quickly and efficiently.”

Passengers wait in line to claim their baggage at Nashville International Airport after their flights on Southwest Airlines were cancelled in Nashville, Tennessee, on December 27, 2022.

Photo by SETH HERALD/AFP via Getty Images

The fiasco will have long-term consequences

As Southwest continues to cancel flights days in advance, Becker predicted the crisis is likely to be ongoing through the end of the week. The company announced Tuesday that stranded passengers won’t be able to rebook their flights until Saturday, December 31. 

“The fact that they’re not taking any reservations until next year, at this point, means the impact is going to last until next year,” Becker said.

She said it’s possible that the airline will have to fly empty planes around the country picking up stranded crew members and bringing them to where they need to be before they can restart normal operations.

There are significant financial implications for Southwest as the company prepares to reimburse and rebook passengers with rescheduled flights, meal, hotel, and travel vouchers, and refunds.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks with supporters during an election night party in Peachtree Corners, Ga., on May 24, 2022.

AP Photo/Ben Gray

• Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ghosted Sen. Lindsey Graham in November 2020.
• In a newly-released transcript, Raffensperger said Graham made an odd request during Georgia’s recount.
• Graham insinuated that Georgia’s signature verification should work similar to credit card companies.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that his office never called South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham back in November 2020 after he said the lawmaker tried to insert himself in Georgia’s recount of 2020 election results.

Additional transcripts were made public by the January 6 committee on Tuesday, following the release of the committee’s 845-page final report last week.

In the transcript of the committee’s interview with Raffensperger, he testified that Graham called his office on November 13, 2020, as a vote recount by hand was underway in Georgia, with an odd request. Raffensperger said that he was rubbed the wrong way by Graham’s ask and that he gave the senator the cold shoulder.

Raffensperger’s office did not immediately return Insider’s request for comment.

“He mentioned about credit card companies,” Raffensperger told the committee in a November 30, 2021, interview. “He says, they get millions of signatures every day and they run that through their machines.”

In the transcript, Raffensperger explained that his staff member Gabe Sterling handled the talking on the call where Graham tried to pitch an alternate signature matching process to the hand recount and audit, which was underway at the time.

In December 2020, after Raffensperger’s office and Georgia ballot workers had endured weeks of harassment and election conspiracies from Trump’s camp, Sterling received a noose at his home.

During the call with Graham, Raffensperger said that there hadn’t been an outright ask to find additional votes like Trump requested in January 2021 but maintained the conversation was ominous. 

“He was talking about a process of using companies, and I didn’t know exactly where he was going,” Raffensperger said. “I just didn’t want to go where he was — where I thought he might want to go. I just thought it best not to call him back.”

Graham’s office did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment. 

“And so I told him — we finished up the call, and I said, ‘Well, let me talk to our general counsel,’ who wasn’t on the call, ‘and we’ll get back to you,'” Raffensperger said in his November interview with the committee, of the conversation with Graham. “And we just never got back to him.”

In January 2021, Raffensperger was asked by former President Donald Trump to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, a move which Raffensperger said led to months of death threats to him and his family. In an interview with Insider, Raffensperger maintained that election misinformation was the biggest threat to democracy in the US. 

When darkness falls outside, it can often kick up the survival instincts of our friends in the great outdoors. That’s when survival of the fittest comes into play for many of them.

With rustling leaves, whistling winds, and an unknown plethora of enemies silently waiting, making it through the night, can often spell disaster. That’s why animals — many of them – are quick to run if they smell danger.

It’s like that for humans too. Only for some of us, danger often does not make itself known in such direct ways.

Danger can sometimes come in the terrifying form in the faces of those which are supposed to be our friends. And on Christmas Eve, in what should have been one of the brightest and most festive times, danger came for the migrants of Texas.

It came in the form of a tyrant — a smiling face that should have been their friend. Only he wasn’t. Texas Governor Greg Abbott was their worst enemy.

On Christmas Eve, dozens of cold and bewildered migrants were bussed into D.C. to the home of VP Kamala Harris. Three busloads of migrants were delivered there. The temperatures were well below freezing. It was frigid out and dangerously cold — but he didn’t care.

Can one imagine how those bewildered migrants felt? I imagine they felt very much like hunted animals — only they could not flee from their danger.

“Governor Abbott abandoned children on the side of the road in below-freezing temperatures on Christmas Eve without coordinating with any federal or local authorities,” White House assistant press secretary Abdullah Hassan said.

Freezing temperatures outside. Freezing cold inside the soul of the Texas governor.

That is not all. The U.S. Department of Energy said on Friday that an “emergency” exists in Texas. This is because Abbott never fixed the power grid. And now there is a shortage of electric energy.

We tried so hard to warn Texas. Although many of you might write Texas off, I cannot do that. Why? Because EVERY state has some good Democrats in them. And I know of people — good people in Texas who worked their tails off trying to see to it that Abbott did not win.

It is a shame that he did. It is a tragedy. Greg Abbott is a sadist, a sociopath, and an all-around bad person. And we must keep his crimes in the national spotlight — for the sake of those that do not have the power to run when danger appears.

The post The unrelenting tyranny of Greg Abbott appeared first on Palmer Report.

Russia retaliated on Tuesday against a price cap on its oil imposed by Western countries, while its forces were involved in heavy fighting around the bombed-out ghost town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.

Despite an intensification in the fighting the frontline in eastern Ukraine remains little changed, with neither side making any major advances, said Britain’s Ministry of Defence and Ukraine military analysts.

Moscow will ban oil sales to countries that abide by the price cap that was imposed on Dec. 5, President Vladimir Putin decreed.

The price cap, unseen even in the times of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union, is aimed at crippling Moscow’s military efforts in Ukraine – without upsetting markets by actually blocking Russian supply.

Under the cap, oil traders who want to retain access to Western financing for such crucial aspects of global shipping as insurance must promise not to pay above $60 per barrel for Russian seaborne oil.

That is close to the current price for Russian oil, but far below the prices at which Russia was able to sell it for much of the past year, when windfall energy profits helped Moscow offset the impact of financial sanctions.

The decree from Putin, published on a government portal and the Kremlin website, was presented as a direct response to “actions that are unfriendly and contradictory to international law by the United States and foreign states and international organisations joining them”.

The Kremlin ban would halt crude oil sales to countries participating in the price cap from Feb. 1-July 1, 2023. A separate ban on refined oil products such as gasoline and diesel would take effect on a date to be set by the government. Putin would have authority to overrule the measures in special cases.

Russia is the world’s second largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia, and any actual disruption to its sales would have far-reaching consequences for global energy supplies.

On the ground in eastern and southern Ukraine, Russian forces again shelled and bombed towns and cities on Tuesday. After a number of dramatic Ukrainian gains in the autumn, the war has entered a slow, grinding phase as bitter winter weather has set in at the front.

The heaviest fighting has been around the eastern city of Bakhmut, which Russia has been trying for months to storm at huge cost in lives, and further north in the cities of Svatove and Kreminna, where Ukraine is trying to break Russian defensive lines.

In Bakhmut, home to 70,000 people before the war and now in ruins, Reuters reporters saw fires burning in a large residential building, while debris littered the streets and most buildings had had their windows blown out.

“Our building is destroyed. There was a shop in our building, now it’s not there anymore,” said Oleksandr, 85, adding he was the only remaining resident there.

Nearby, 73-year-old Pilaheia said she had long got used to the “constant explosions”.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence said in an update: “Russia continues to initiate frequent small-scale assaults in these areas (of Bakhmut and Svatove), although little territory has changed hands.”

Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said in a YouTube video that fighting had intensified with Russia deploying armoured vehicles and tanks.

“There has been very little change in terms of the front line, but pressure from the enemy has intensified, both in terms of the numbers of men and the type and quantity of equipment,” Zhdanov said.

In Kherson, abandoned by Russian troops last month, Russian forces shelled the maternity wing of a hospital, said Kyrylo Tymoshenko, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s deputy chief of staff, on Telegram. No one was hurt and the staff and patients had been moved to a shelter, Tymoshenko said.

Reuters was unable to immediately verify the reports.

The Kremlin’s military campaign had set out to subdue Ukraine within days of a February invasion, but its forces were defeated on the outskirts of Kyiv in the spring and forced to flee other areas in the autumn.

Putin has responded by summoning hundreds of thousands of reservists for the first time since World War Two to fight in his “special military operation”.

Putin has repeatedly spoken of a desire for peace talks in comments in recent days. But his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov made clear Moscow still has a list of preconditions, including that Ukraine recognise Russia’s conquest by force of around a fifth of Ukrainian territory, which it says it has annexed.

Kyiv says it is winning the war and will never agree to relinquish land.

In a late night address on Tuesday, Zelenskiy said a meeting of the military command had “established the steps to be taken in the near future.”

“We will continue preparing the armed forces and Ukraine’s security for next year. This will be a decisive year. We understand the risks of winter. We understand what needs to be done in the spring,” he said.

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Storm-weary road crews and residents of western New York state struggled on Tuesday to dig out from a deadly weekend blizzard, with snow still falling and forecasts for rapid warming and rains that could cause flooding and turn the frozen landscape to slush.

The region in and around Buffalo, New York, downwind of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario emerged as ground zero for an Arctic deep freeze and massive winter storm that extended over most of the United States last week and through the Christmas holiday as far south as the Mexican border.

Confirmed storm-related deaths in New York’s Erie and Niagara counties rose to 32 on Tuesday, officials said, as snowfall began to taper off. Emergency crews continued locating and removing vehicles left buried under mounds of snow and drifts several feet high.

Some of the dead were found frozen in cars, others in snowbanks outdoors, while some died in medical emergencies such as cardiac arrest while shoveling snow, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz told reporters.

“We’re recovering from the worst storm I’ve ever seen, certainly in terms of death from mother nature’s wrath,” he said.

Nationwide, at least 60 people died in weather-related incidents in recent days, NBC News reported.

In and around Buffalo, up to 52 inches of snow fell over four days, and a bit more was expected by Tuesday night, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

The situation was expected to change dramatically. The NWS forecast a rapid thaw later this week, with spring-like temperatures well above freezing and well above normal, accompanied by rain that could unleash flooding.

“This is one of the reasons certain streets are targeted for extra clearance to allow for proper drainage of melt water,” Poloncarz said on Twitter.

Progress was slow due to the sheer volume and depth of the snow, which Poloncarz said “is not plowable.”

Front-loader tractors were brought in to shovel snow into dump trucks to be carted off and discarded elsewhere. Poloncarz said it would take two days to open up one lane on every city street.

Giant snow-blowing machines were deployed to help clear several major highways clogged with towering drifts. A ban on personal road travel was still in effect for Buffalo.

Hundreds of electric company linemen were out restoring power, and Poloncarz tweeted that some 4,500 customers remained without electricity on Tuesday, as crews cleared downed trees with chain saws.

For residents essentially trapped in their homes for two days, the easing of the storm brought a realization of how much snow fell during white-out conditions that had limited their view.

“We would look out the window and it was blowing so much that we couldn’t really tell if we were getting any accumulation, but when it finally settled we had a lot of work to do,” said Jim Nowak, who was out shoveling on Tuesday.

Accounts also emerged of residents who welcomed in strangers caught outdoors at the height of the blizzard and spent much of the holiday weekend with them. One was a barbershop owner who told the Buffalo News he sheltered 40 people the first night of the storm and about 30 the next.

NWS meteorologist Bob Oravec of the NWS Weather Prediction Center in Maryland predicted two more inches of snow would fall in western New York Tuesday, but said that was “probably the last.

“It’ll be warming up soon. By Thursday the high will be 46 (8 Celsius). By Saturday it’ll be 54 (12C),” Oravec said. Tuesday remained cold, with a high of 28F (minus 2C) and a low of 20F (minus 6C), he said.

Buffalo, New York state’s second largest city, was hardest hit by the blizzard, which took shape over the Great Lakes on Friday and extended its grip into the Ohio and Upper Mississippi valleys and mountains of Appalachia.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul called it an “epic, once-in-a-lifetime” weather disaster, the worst blizzard to hit the Buffalo area in 45 years.

The county has called in 100 military police from the state National Guard as well as officers from New York City to help manage traffic and enforce road restrictions.

Buffalo residents with plows attached to their Jeeps and pickup trucks helped clear side streets. People walked a mile or more in lanes cut by snow plows to reach convenience stores and supermarkets that were beginning to reopen.

Poloncarz, speaking at a press briefing Tuesday, urged residents to stay home and the curious to stay away.

“Please stay out of the city of Buffalo,” he said.

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