okay, scum traitors, and flies in that speech. let s talk with greg miller, national security correspondent at the washington post and author of the apprentice, trump, russia and the subversion of american democracy, welcome back, good to have you on the show. one expert, john loff, i think that s how you say his name, telling nbc news that putin was telling elites, don t think about having second thoughts, we re all in this together, and if i go down, you go down. how about you, how do you interpret it? and do you think he s seeing this invasion that it is going poorly for him? is he feeling the pressure? it does seem for him this week you could argue, i think, shows that the setbacks and the criticism and some of the failures are getting to him, they re in his head. that speech that you just cited
bare minimum that he will let people out, so what is the end game right now, president s strategy is to keep all the big players involved, and making sure that if we are not getting the no fly zone, though we still need it, even when nato said no, it didn t change their coin that putin still critically needs it. now we need to get into the negotiations with the security guarantees from the nato countries. we don t have the position from them of are they ready to give these guarantees, and what are the other countries who will be involved into these negotiations, so president zelenskyy s statements thaemt that he wants to get into conversation with putin is just a continuation of this attempt to gather a bigger circle, bigger table of countries who will be able to support us. so among the options out
out what might be acceptable, say u.s. and european officials so in terms of negotiations i get your point that trusting putin to keep up his end of the bargain, if he were even able to strike a bargain, that might be a fool s errand. where do things stand right now in terms of at least discussions? so the negotiations do continue. though putin s attack on our peaceful cities also continue, so our plan minimal is to get the humanitarian convoys out. and you have seen multiple times that even these plans when we are getting the confirmation from russians to get our humanitarian convoys from mariupol, from other cities these agreements are not honored. they continue firing guns at the peaceful people and buses that are trying to get out. this is, again, confirming that you can not trust putin, and that we cannot even agree on
people in the crowd, i ve just seen some of the reports, i m not there in moscow but people saying they were bussed in, state workers or young people from school put on a bus and brought there so it s really hard to tell how many were there because they wanted to be, because they knew what the event was going to be before they got there, but i would just note, too, that where does this happening? moscow is also a place that shows how divided russia is right now. there s a lot of support within russia for this war, i think, in large part because of the type of information they re being given, but there are also so many people who are opposed to it, as we see by the young people who are protesting on the streets and the people who are desperately trying to flee. we get reports about 15,000 russians having been arrested as a result of protesting and those demonstrations. let me ask you about another wrinkle to this huge stadium appearance. putin s speech was abruptly cut
greater scale, the threats and intimidation by putin against nato, against the u.s. this happened last september so months before we began seeing a substantial build up in ukraine. it was laying the groundwork for this extraordinary suppression, this almost soviet style suppression that s underway now in russia, and it s all very deeply connected. so it wasn t as you pointed out, just wasn t the google executive, it was also apple s executive in russia faced an almost identical scenario, and it shows russia at this point is using everything it can to choke off information to its people. some of that is very technical. they have invested heavily in equipment that is used to so-called throttle internet platforms including you tube, including twitter, but they also use just really mob like pressure tactics, which we wrote