the air just a couple of minutes ago, president biden taking some questions from reporters while in nantucket talking a lot about that variant of concern as it relates to covid. talking about another concern that he has, the rising tension on the ukrainian border. ukrainian s president zelensky claims russians are promising a coup next week and that all options are on the table if russia keeps up its aggressiveness essentially towards ukraine. the kremlin is denying zelensky s allegations, no surprise there. think about the backdrop, right? russia has history of flexing muscle on the ukrainian border. for weeks they had them concerned about this military at the ukrainian border. i want to bring in a correspondent who knows this area well, keir simmons, good afternoon or good evening where you are. reporter: hey, good evening.
make sure americans heard from him about these new travel restrictions, given that it s understandable, people would say, hey, we re shutting off travel once again. does this mean we re going backwards like corona virus. the president acting on advice of top officials briefing him on this new variant. also this is something they re doing out of an abundance of caution. it s not necessarily something people need to get overly worked up about until we have yet more details about the dangers of this variant and how to tackle it. he was asked about the effects we are seeing on the stockmarket, commenting they go up and down. that s expected. reporter: and then, right, exactly, something that we are expected. then as you point out the president sending a message of support to ukraine in light of the comments from the ukrainian president zelensky who suggested to reporters there, he believes a coup attack might be imminent. that s something the russian said they have no involvement
look, ukraine is a mess, honestly. it s really hard to unravel at times the intrigue and the espionage. but what people need to really understand i think is that two countries can stumble into conflict. they can get dragged into war and dragged others in by escalating tensions and certainly these accusations ratchet up the tension. so what you have is the president of ukraine, president zelensky alleging there was this attempt, this plan, to launch a coup next week that he has intelligence and some kind of a recording with russians and ukrainian billionaire oligarch making this plot. now, the state department appears to be surprised by this. it doesn t appear to have known about this in advance, so the statement from the state department, i could assure you, we are aware of the statements that were made this morning, we are in touch with the ukrainian government to discuss this further. and we re working to obtain