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Russian President Recruits Say They Are Cannon Fodder In Putin's War; DOJ Is Used Access Over Floating Barrier Used To Deter Migrants; Delta Flight Diverted After Suffering Damage During Storm. Aired 10.30-11a ET
Aired July 25, 2023 - 10:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[10:30:00]
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JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, new reporting this morning. At least 50,000 Russian prison recruits are believed to have been sent to fight on the front lines in Ukraine and their fatality rate is staggering. CNN's Nick Paton Walsh has obtained rare and exclusive testimony from them. Nick joins us now. Nick, what did you learn?
NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Yes, it is startling, frankly, to hear directly from Russian convicts who formed part of this extraordinary part of Russia's frontline defenses, initially begun by the Wagner mercenary group, they as you say to 10s of 1000s of convicts, the front line very few of them ever returned.
And some that have done who now work for the Russian Ministry of Defense who've taken over the whole convict operation themselves are those who survived to tell horrifying stories of what they've been through, often at the hands of their own commanders.
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PATON WALSH: Russia is often cruelest to its own, the bleakest fate, prisoners recruited by the Ministry of Defense, basically as cannon fodder. These so-called Stormzy battalions surrendering, hear of death rates hard to fathom. Here are two rare stories, one of incredible survival, and another of a young and quick death, told to CNN at great risk from inside Russia.
Ex-con Sergei barely made it back. Now he works two jobs and can't sleep because his ears still ring from Shell Shock. We first talked when he'd been shot for the second time, but he was still sent back injured. From 600 prisoners recruited with him in October, he says, only 170 are alive. And only two of them without injury.
Sent again and again in waves to attack Ukrainian positions.
RUSSIAN CONVICT (through translator): I remember most clearly the last of the nine concussions I had. We attacked. RPGs, drones flew at us. Our commander yells on the radio, I don't care. Go ahead. Don't come back until you take this position. Two of us found a small hole and dived in there. A drone threw a grenade at us and it landed in the 30 centimeter gap between us. My friend was covered with shrapnel all over. Yet I was untouched somehow, but I lost my sight for five hours.
PATON WALSH: He only stayed in hospital that time and got home as doctors made him an orderly. He has nightmares that he is told to be first out of the trench again. But daily life in the trench was a nightmare too of frostbite, hunger and thirst.
RUSSIAN CONVICT (through translator): Sometimes we didn't eat for several days. We didn't drink for several days. It was a four kilometer walk to water and thank God it was winter.
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RUSSIAN CONVICT (through translator): We were drinking the snow. Sometimes the commander reset people. He zeroed them out, killed them. I only saw it once. A fight with a man who stole and killed his own people. I didn't see who of the four people around him shot but when he tried to escape, a bullet hit him in the back of the head. I saw the head wound, they carried him away.
PATON WALSH: For some it never got that far. Andrei was 20 when he was jailed on drugs offenses, and 23 when he was sent from prison to the front. This training was fleeting. His mother Yulia said he'd yet to grow into a man, still kidding about.
ANDREI (through translator): Really it's sea, sun and sand here. Sunburn then the wind chaps your face and (BEEP) it rains.
PATON WALSH: Like with many prison recruits, he just disappeared. But it was on May 9th, Victory Day in Russia when presidential pomp in Moscow marked the Nazis defeat. Andrei called her the night before to say his unit would attack at dawn.
YULIA, ANDREI'S MOTHER (through translator): We were arguing. It's horrible to say but I already thought of him like he was dead. He left knowing everything. Every day I told him no, no, no. And he didn't listen to me. When he said we're going to storm. I wrote him, Run, forest, run.
PATON WALSH: We think these ruins are near where he died, up to 60 others Yulia hurt died in the same assault that day. Yulia got nothing, no body. Just a letter from the military saying Andrei had died the very day he left jail.
YULIA (through translator): The hardest part was that I was afraid he would kill someone. Because I can live with my son as a drug addict but with my son as a murderer, it was difficult for me to accept it.
PATON WALSH: The horror Russia inflicts on Ukraine it seems matched nearly with that done at home.
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PATON WALSH: And John, this gives us a bizarre frankly, view of exactly how fragile Russian morale surely is in those trenches. You heard there of commanders shooting the ill-disciplined, the lack of basic things like water, a four-kilometer walk to get water. Eventually, that is going to be reflected in how Russia responds to the months ahead, most likely the most intense part of Ukraine's counter offensive.
It is really chilling to hear what Russia seems to do to its own, and particularly to hear from mothers who just see their son one day on a chat group and then into silence the next. John.
BERMAN: It really is remarkable perspective that we have not seen and provides some context, certainly for what might happen going forward if Ukrainians continue to push this counter offensive. Nick Paton Walsh, thank you so much for that reporting. Rahel?
RAHEL SOLOMON, CNN ANCHOR: All right John, coming up, the Justice Department sues Texas over a floating border barrier, where this case heads next? Also an Alabama woman who disappeared for 49 hours and then claimed she was kidnapped but she's now admitting it never happened. Just ahead her message to the community as she faces potential criminal charges.
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SOLOMON: Federal court in Texas now getting involved in a heated battle on the southern border. The Justice Department sued the state and Governor Greg Abbott for placing massive buoys and razor wire along the Rio Grande. Now Abbott says that the floating barrier is meant to deter migrants from crossing but the White House calls the tactic unlawful and inhumane.
Let's bring in CNN's Priscilla Alvarez. She joins us now for more. So Priscilla, what do we know about what's next in this fight?
PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Well Rahel, this is a political view that is now going to turn into a legal battle between the Biden administration and the Texas governor who has dug in and does not want to remove these floating barriers, despite the requests from the Justice Department late last week in a letter, that they needed to be removed.
Now culminating in this lawsuit that we learned about yesterday. Now, the DOJ lawsuit really focuses on navigating waters and the obstruction that these barriers cause to that effect. It does not however, mention the danger it poses to migrants but in a statement, Associate Attorney General Vinita Gupta said the following.
She said, "This floating barrier poses threats to navigation and public safety and presents humanitarian concerns." So that is underlined in this statement that these buoys while they are also obstructing navigation through those waters also presents risks to those migrants who are crossing the Rio Grande and particularly a potential drowning risk of which we have heard accounts.
Now the White House to your note has called this quote dangerous and unlawful. Take a listen.
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KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: We actually saw the President's plan working and what you see the governor doing is dangerous and unlawful and it's actually hurting the process. It's hurting the process of what we're trying to do. Instead of coming to the table and trying to figure out a way to work together, he continues to do this really cruel, unjust, inhumane ways of moving forward with a -- with a system that has been broken for decades.
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ALVAREZ: Now to provide some context here, Texas governor had launched his own border operation in 2021 as an affront to President Biden's immigration policies. And officials tell me they have been watching closely what was happening on the Texas-Mexico border, including actions from the governor like sending migrants to Democratic led cities without coordination.
So now all of this escalating the feud as the Justice Department moves forward with its own lawsuit, all of which could take weeks or months to resolve.
SOLOMON: More to come. We know you'll be watching it for us. Priscilla Alvarez live in Washington. Thank you Priscilla. John?
BERMAN: Alabama police say Carlee Russell could face criminal charges for falsely claiming she was kidnapped. Russell went missing for about 49 hours. Now she is admitting she had not been abducted, never saw a baby on the side of the road as she had initially claimed. Through an attorney, she apologized and has asked for forgiveness.
Dramatic video out of Texas where parents and bystanders jumped into action to rescue a baby from inside a locked car. The baby's father broke the windshield. You can see that happening right there. Then a woman climbs through that windshield through the broken glass to rescue the child inside.
Police say that the parents had accidentally locked their keys inside the car amid sweltering heat. The baby by the way is doing fine.
A mess in Missouri after a suspected tornado ripped through Scott County. Police say a house and farm buildings were destroyed. Fortunately, despite that damage, no injuries. Rahel?
SOLOMON: All right John, thank you and coming up for us. They are very popular drugs for diabetes and weight loss but doctors say they're concerned about new side effects including stomach paralysis. We got the details, coming up.
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[10:50:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SOLOMON: Welcome back. The turbulence was like a roller coaster ride. That is how one passenger described the terrifying moments aboard a Delta flight, Monday that was caught in a severe hailstorm. So the plane was bound for New York from Milan but it had to divert after it was damaged by intense weather.
I want to show you this picture. It shows a hole in the tip of the nose of the plane and it was taken, this photo after the plane was diverted and forced to land in Rome. The passenger who shot this photo praised the captain and crew for safely landing the aircraft as many passengers panicked and screamed.
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STEVEN COURY, PASSENGER ON DIVERTED DELTA FLIGHT: When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I looked around at the plane and saw that the nose of the plane had been pretty much ripped apart. We didn't know that the nose had been punched in, that the navigation system was likely knocked out that the damage to the wings had occurred, that one engine had a hole in it and had burned out and that the other engine had also sustained damage.
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SOLOMON: And thankfully, no injuries were reported. But when you see the photo and when you hear the passenger describe it the way he did, John, it is really a miracle.
BERMAN: Yes, that picture is just not one --
SOLOMON: Incredible.
BERMAN: -- you would ever want to see on a plane that I had been flying in there.
SOLOMON: Yes.
BERMAN: All right. This morning new information about wildly popular drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy used for treating Type 2 diabetes and obesity. Now as more and more patients take the medicines, doctors are questioning whether new side effects might be emerging. CNN Medical Correspondent Meg Tirrell is with us now. So what kinds of side effects are we talking Meg?
MEG TIRRELL, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, John, so the way these drugs work is they mimic a hormone in the gut known as GLP-1 and that helps the body stimulate the production of insulin and it also curbs hunger and slows stomach emptying and it's that last thing that doctors are focused on here because our reporter Brenda Goodman talked with three patients who said they experienced severe effects of that slowed stomach emptying so much that their doctors are calling it stomach paralysis or severe gastroparesis, and their doctors are warning perhaps this is something that should be looked into better with these medicines. Now Novo Nordisk the maker of these drugs notes you know, GI issues with these medicines are commonly known, things like nausea and vomiting and they can be severe. In the trials 20 percent of patients on Ozempic experienced nausea, 44 percent on Wegovy, Wegovy is really just a higher dose version of Ozempic.
Novo Nordisk the maker in the drugs label does say that this slowed stomach emptying can happen but really only warns about it in the context of how you think about taking other medicines with these medicines. Now, the FDA told CNN that it has had reports of gastroparesis with semaglutide and liraglutide, these kinds of GLP-1 drugs they said some of which really still happen even after people stopped taking the medicines.
So this is something that doctors are trying to call more attention to. The American Society of Anesthesiologists actually last month, said that there needs to be new guidance around maybe stopping taking these medicines a week before elective surgery because it's dangerous to go under general anesthesia with a full stomach and so these reports are rare.
They have not been proven to be caused by the medicines, but it is something doctors are calling for more research into. Novo Nordisk itself notes that these medicines, these GLP-1 drugs have been used for 15 years in diabetes, eight years for obesity. They've been extensively studied the company says in clinical trials, as well as large real world evidence studies.
They say there's cumulatively over nine and a half million patient years of exposure measure so they say that these drugs have been well studied but doctors are urging people just to be aware of this and if they experienced severe vomiting for example they say that's not something that they should stick with. Guys?
[10:55:00]
BERMAN: All right, Meg Tirrell, lot of information there. Obviously, talk to your doctor to find out what is right for you. Thank you so much for that. Rahel?
SOLOMON: All right, John. Special Counsel Jack Smith, zeroing in on a Trump meeting in the Oval Office. We have the details coming up. And 10s of millions of Americans trying to stay cool and hydrated amid an unrelenting heatwave. Just ahead, the new analysis showing how these record breaking heat waves are tied to climate change. We'll be right back.
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