president has set up a team to decide what will happen if chemical weapons are deployed. what do you believe the west should do if they are? well, i mean, the west needs to think about it now, and it needs to be incredibly vocal about what they re going to do, because there are many people, especially in ukraine, who think that all of this happened also due to the fact that there have been discussions but there was no reaction to preempt this war. so, basically, nobody believed it was going to happen and it was going to go this bad this quickly and that s one of the reasons putin invaded. so, at the moment, the west needs to be explicitly clear about what s going to happen to russia s, as a, reaction to potential use, but to be honest i m pessimistic on the weapons of mass destruction use in ukraine. let me tell you why. because kyiv is a fortress. even with 200, even with 300,000
reliance on energy and gas and fuels the economic life blood for the russian war machine there s an indication that they can t do that immediately. that can t happen overnight. we know that the ukrainians are worried about the weapons running out. and the u.s. and its allies pledged to send more. will they get there in time? we know about chemical weapons. the president said he would respond in kind. didn t elaborate and though he is collaborating with allies as to what to do if putin were to go down the road for biological or chemical weapons it is not clear the path. as much as the west and they feel like they do everything right and slapping on the sanctions even though president biden said it s not a deter rent but a punishment this war likely only ends when vladimir putin
aid that ukraine is receiving, and look, we should take a step back, right? we re one month, almost exactly, from the start of this invasion, and one month ago, plus maybe a couple of days, president zelenskyy was downplaying the threat of an invasion, was downplaying u.s. intelligence, saying that this was going to happen, that there would be a major invasion by russian forces, saying this country had been at war with russia since 2014. we now live in a very different world. we live in a world where there are 10 million internally displaced people here in ukraine, 4 million of them refugees and so what we heard today from president zelenskyy was a grateful president for all of the aid that is flowing in here. this morning, for example, alicia, we were standing in a parking lot in downtown lviv where i am, and they were unloading flak jackets and all kinds of military equipment in broad daylight. there it is. from a lithuanian group, blue and yellow, and they re bringing in aid into th
the character of the war a ten balance of risk and reward on whether or not to directly intervene. doesn t need to be an attack on nato for nato to use military force and can decide to do that as long as the members agree and i think we are today unfortunately closer to that than four weeks ago with the nature of the war and the fact that vladimir putin is not winning and trying to fig yush out how does he avoid losing? there s some stunning reporting in the washington post about general milley and defense secretary austin trying to call the russian counter parts. repeated attempts by the u.s. top defense officials to speak with russians is rejected with moscow for a month leaving the two leaders in the dark about explanations for military weapons and raising fears of a
the whole point of these sanctions, the whole point of going after the oligarch assets is to make them pressure putin to stop, but if they think they re just going to ride it out and get those assets back when this is all over, it s not going to work. that s why this simple bill is so important. that is the economic piece of it. i want to talk a little bit about the military piece of this, congressman. according to the washington post, top russian military leaders repeatedly declining calls from u.s. military leaders prompting fears of sleepwalking into war. as you see it, what is the looming risk if our top military leaders don t have a direct line to russia s top military leaders? look, the risk is always miscalculation. and the risk is enormously high when you not only have two nuclear armed nations in a face-off here, but it actually is written in russian military doctrine that they will use