this is my country. i need to document it, and i m much more useful with a camera than a kalashnikov. is he out today taking pictures? i think so, yeah. he s in kharkiv today, last i spoke to him. oh my god. what is it that, despite your brilliant reporting from the country, we still don t understand about the ukrainian people? well, i think, you know, as your segment highlighted, i think it was really good. the woman, iulia there who works with world central kitchen, the optimism and the smiles. that s something i saw consistently. the optimism, the spirit, the morale among ukrainian people is enormous. the thing i hear most from them is, if we can make it through this war, if we can make it to the other side of this and survive as a country, with the leadership we have, in president zelenskyy, we will be stronger for it. we will be more united, and we will be have a much bigger chance of reaching the goal of integrating with the european
audiences and speak to the people. i m guessing that you acknowledge the showmanship doesn t show up something that isn t there and what s spl there is a man that refuses to leave kyiv, like magnetically drawn to the troops. giving them medals. that s right. there s no faking that courage and bravery. if people had any doubts. ukrainians did have doubts about his abilities as a leader before this invasion started a few weeks ago. the approval ratings were not good and dropped throughout the time in office but i think when he made that decision to stay and just taking enormous risks putting out the videos in rooms where we meet for interviews and
i guess what is coming through here is this combination of defiance in the unthinkable human horrors that are mariupol and something that is very much to type that some of these peace talks that we d heard about yesterday may, in the view of the ukrainians, be a fakeout from the russians. reporter: yes. and you have, beyond just the targeting of civilians now, you have the russians clearly trying to target specific things like food security and medical help using those as weapons of war. whether or not that is to influence these talks, whether or not that is to force the president of ukraine to make concessions that he otherwise wouldn t, i think it s fairly obvious. these wouldn t be used as weapons of war unless you were trying to influence events on the ground. if we look at cities like kharkiv, and we spent a lot of time talking about mariupol, but if we look at kharkiv, they bombed a marketplace there today, a food market that is now
nice to see you, my friend. director brennan, i want to start with you on something cal perry said about the weapons flowing into this country, into ukraine. and i want to ask you, i want to ask you a question. it seems that president zelenskyy and every ukrainian official john interviewed a member of ukrainian parliament who said the same thing. i ve interviewed ukrainian citizens and government officials, said the same thing. they want america to protect the skies over ukraine. it would appear that everything up to that is still more than what they had when this war began, and i wonder if you think our national security policy objective is to protect the skies over ukraine without stepping foot in ukraine. is that the aim of these massive lists of weapons systems that, unless you re a defense contractor, i m not sure you even know what all these things are. i think that s exactly the aim, nicole. i think the biden administration is trying to make the air space
sort of psy-op kind of manner, is that putin s expectation was that ukraine would fall and it seems to have trickled down to the morale of his troops, that to the degree they even knew what they were doing, director brennan, they didn t think they were going to war in a prolonged manner in ukraine, a country that their leader, vladimir putin, describes as a land made up of their brothers and sisters. i want to understand, in your view, how all of those things, you would assess, are playing into what we re seeing. i want to start with something that president zelenskyy said about how this war will go. and to john heilemann s point of sort of the definitions of winning is losing. let me play this first. we don t have it. we re going to find this. this is president zelenskyy, asked by lester, if kyiv falls to the russians, does the entire country fall to the russians? president zelenskyy says this. our people are unconquerable.