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Interview With Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor; President Biden Set to Deliver Remarks on Ukraine Invasion. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired February 24, 2022 - 13:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[13:00:27]

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Top of the hour here in Washington, D.C. I'm Jake Tapper.

This is live CNN special coverage of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine.

This hour, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, is expected to chart a course forward. Joe Biden also holding an urgent call with the G7 power leaders this morning. Next, expect more sanctions, but, at this moment, the world appears to have a little appetite for actually taking any serious measures to stop the Russian invasion militarily.

Russian special forces, Russian tanks, Russian missiles, Russian mortars all parts of Putin's no-holds-barred assault on Ukraine, an independent, sovereign nation. Nearly 400 separate shellings have been reported since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine overnight. Explosions, air raid sirens pulse every hour inside Ukraine's major cities.

Today, we're seeing scenes we haven't witnessed really since World War II, civilians hiding from bombs in subway stations. Most cannot escape the country. They cannot choose to leave their lives behind and effectively become refugees. There is nowhere to go that is necessarily safe within Ukraine.

Let us start with the breaking news out of Moscow right now, though.

Nic Robertson's there.

And, Nic, tell us what you're seeing.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Yes, Jake, the police have just been trying to arrest people here. They have been arresting people.

About 10 minutes ago, we witnessing the arrest of at least a dozen people. The police have been sort of moving us away here. They're trying to close down this area, stopping people coming out of the subway station. I don't know you can see over my shoulder here, but there's a lot of riot-clad police officers here.

Anyone that they think is out here to protest against the war, they're arresting. It's been young people. It's been older people. It's been men. It's been willing. The police are going through their bags. Sometimes, they're pulling out signs that say "Stop the War."

Then they load them into the police van. And every 10 minutes or so, one of these large police vans -- there is a fresh one pulling up just around here I will show you, because this is what they do. They bring in an empty police wagon like this one here. They will arrest people, they will fill it up, and they will drive it off.

The one where people were being arrested just a few minutes ago, that's full. That's driven on. More police officers mobilizing around here. What the police are telling people in this area is, there is no authorization for an anti-war protest. It's illegal to protest. If you protest, you can get arrested. If you get arrested, you can be charged.

If you get charged, that could count against you for the rest of your life. The message from the police here is, go away. Despite that, there are still protesters are coming out here. It's not a big gathering of protesters. It's individuals. And that's how we're seeing them getting arrested, picked up as individuals, Jake.

TAPPER: A reminder that, in Russia, opponents of Putin tend to end up in prison or quite often dead.

Nic Robertson, thanks so much.

Let's go to Erin Burnett, who is live in Lviv in Western Ukraine right now -- Erin.

ERIN BURNETT, CNN HOST: Right.

It's interesting, Jake, when you hear that. According to an independent monitoring group we're getting, you look around that country in Russia, nearly 1,000 people are willing to take that consequence. And, as Nic is reporting, they're being told, this will be held against you forever. Nearly 1,000 people have been willing to take that risk.

So, a moment to pause and consider what any of us would do in that situation.

Let's go to Kyiv right now, of course, as people across this country are bracing for what will happen tonight.

Matthew Chance is there. And, Matthew, I know one of the things that's been happening here is

understanding when reports come in and pictures come in what's real, what isn't, trying to sort through that. What are you seeing right now here just after 8:00 our time.

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I mean, you're right. It is very difficult to get a picture of what's real and what's not, particularly when you're in these remote locations that we are, where the action and the fighting isn't necessarily taking place right in front of us, which is why, this morning, when I'd heard that an air base just outside of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, had been taken by Russian forces, I got my crew and we headed up there.

And when we got there, we found troops there who we assumed in the first instance were Ukrainian troops. We spoke to them. We asked them. I asked them, who is in charge? Was it the Ukrainians or the Russians? They said it was the Russians.

[13:05:00]

I said, well, where are the Russians, then, if they're in charge? And they said, we're the Russians. And it was at that point we realized we'd found that very forward operating group of Russian special airborne forces that had been deployed to that air base just a few hours before, and had been engaged in fierce fighting with Ukrainian forces, but had seemed to have pushed them back at that point and were in control of that air base just outside of Moscow (sic) when we saw it.

Since then, Ukraine officials have said, look, they're not there anymore. They're -- we're back in control. We staged a counteroffensive.

I don't know whether that's true or not, because we're not -- we're not there anymore. But it just sort of adds to that sort of picture of confusion that exists right now. And, of course, the fact that Russian forces were there or may even still be there shows you just how close they are to the center of the Ukrainian capital.

Ukrainian officials telling us tonight that they believe Russian forces plan to encircle the entire capital. Why would we -- why would they do that? Well, one theory that Ukrainian officials say they're contemplating is that they believe that the Russian forces, the Russian government, is planning to topple the Ukrainian leadership, to decapitate it, and put in a pro-Moscow regime instead.

It's all speculation at this point, but with the extraordinary events that we have witnessed over the course of the past 24 hours, no one is ruling anything out at the moment.

BURNETT: Yes. If there is one thing we have learned, there's no predicting, there's no knowing. And it has been a sobering reality for all.

Thank you so very much, Matthew -- Jake, back to you in Washington.

TAPPER: Thanks, Erin. Stay safe.

I want to go now to Clarissa Ward, who is in the, I believe, capital of -- oh, no, she's in Kharkiv in Eastern Ukraine.

Clarissa, tell us what you're seeing there and how people in that city, which is, I think, only about 18 miles from the Russian border, how they're dealing with all this.

CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: People are petrified, Jake.

I mean, everyone is now waiting to see when this ground invasion turns into a full-on encirclement of this city. Will they lay siege to the city? Will there will be fighting in the city?

I asked a woman who was one of hundreds of people we found taking shelter in a subway station, in a metro station. Normally, it would have been full of commuters. Today, it was full of people who were hunkered down, as artillery and strikes continue to target various places around the city.

And I asked a woman. I said, do you have a car? Is there somewhere you can go? And she said, yes, I have a car, but where is there to go right now?

And I think that is a sentiment shared by a lot of people here. There's no clarity as to what people should do right now. They have been told to take shelter. They have been told to stay at home or not to be out and about on the streets. There is now a curfew being enforced here in Kharkiv from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.

It's well before that curfew, Jake, but you can probably see behind me there is no sign of life on the streets of this city tonight. Last night, that square behind me was lit up beautifully. You would see some cars. It was late at night. But there were still some signs of some semblance of normalcy.

All of that now has completely disappeared, as people wait to see what these troops are going to do. We have seen them building up just -- as you mentioned, just over 20 miles away on that border for weeks now. And now we understand that they are coming across that border. They have been engaging, from what we're hearing, in fighting with Ukrainian forces, but they're not far from here at all.

And I think that is what is psychologically so devastating for the people of this city, is not knowing how close they are, when they might arrive, and what they might do when they get here, because the thing you hear again and again, Jake, is that nobody here understands what this war is about.

Why has President Putin decided to launch an invasion into a country that most Ukrainians feel that Russians are their brothers, that most Ukrainian speak Russian often as their first language? There are millions of Ukrainians living in Russia, and vice versa.

And so I think, for the longest time, even as U.S. intelligence and the White House were being very clear about what they believed was about to happen, here on the ground, people just didn't see it coming. They didn't buy it. They couldn't wrap their heads around it.

And, even now, they're struggling to really process the full magnitude of what this means, not just for their security in this moment, precarious and tenuous as it is, but for the future of their country, Jake.

TAPPER: All right, Clarissa Ward in Kharkiv, Ukraine, thank you so much. Please stay safe.

We have some breaking news for you now having to deal with the former site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which is north of the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv, right near the border of Ukraine and Belarus, Belarus, of course, an ally of Vladimir Putin.

[13:10:17]

Let us go now to Matthew Chance.

Matthew, what can you tell us?

CHANCE: Yes, so we have just had this come to us from several sources.

It's the Ukrainian officials, basically, both at the Chernobyl station and in the administration here, saying that Russian troops have now seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It's, of course, still the location of that power plant after the disaster that took place there, in 1986, I think it is, off my memory, it was.

It was a battle that was covered multiple times in a concrete sarcophagus to try and stop the radioactivity from spreading any further. It's obviously a very, very sensitive site, indeed. I have been there myself several times into the exclusion zone.

The idea that it has been the subject or is now the subject of some kind of confrontation between Russian and Ukrainian military forces is -- Jake, quite frankly, it is terrifying. But we have got no indication right now that there's a battle in Chernobyl. I want to spell that out.

But we do know, according to Russian officials, and according to the exclusion zone management spokesperson, Yevgeniya Kuznetsova, who's told -- spoken to CNN about this, that the -- that Russian troops are now in control in that region.

Here's what she said to us: "When I came to the office today in the morning, it turned out that the nuclear power plant management had all left, so there was no one to give instructions or to defend it," she told CNN earlier.

So that is another interesting development. Chernobyl is -- I wouldn't say how far it is from Kyiv, not that far away, I don't think. It's about -- I would say about an hour's drive, maybe less than that, from the Kyiv -- from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. And, of course, because of the contamination there, and the

radioactive material that still exists in the surrounding area, which is why it's an exclusion zone, of course, any kind of disruption at all threatens to bring all that dust back up again, brush all that dusk back up again. We're literally talking about dust that is radioactive, and at the time, back in the late 1980s, caused thyroid cancer amongst many, many people in Kyiv and in the surrounding area as well, as they breathed in those radioactive particles.

The last thing anybody wants right now is for that nightmare to be revived with a military confrontation on the grounds in the area of that exclusion zone. So, I think we all hope right now that that's something that won't happen, Jake.

TAPPER: All right, Matthew Chance.

And your memory is right. It was April of 1986, the Chernobyl disaster.

Before we do our next step, I want to bring in the former director of national intelligence, retired General James Clapper.

What is the potential significance if there is a firefight going on in the area of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster with all that still radioactive dust?

JAMES CLAPPER, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: It's huge.

It would have huge implications, not only for Ukraine, obviously, but for the whole region, to include, ironically enough, Russia. And this is apart from the 15 other nuclear reactors still active at four different sites across Ukraine, none of them in the Donbass region, fortunately.

But this, to me, is a real problem. And the Russians are not known for discriminate targeting. If they either wittingly or unwittingly hit one of these facilities, you would have a real disaster on your hands.

TAPPER: It's sobering news, of course, on a very serious day already.

Let's talk now with the former United States Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor.

Ambassador Taylor, good to see you, as always.

I guess the first question is, is there anything that can be done to stop Putin and Russia from a complete and total takeover of Ukraine, short of NATO sending troops in, which they will not do?

WILLIAM TAYLOR, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO UKRAINE: Jake, the Russian military clearly has the capability to go into many of the cities, many of the largest cities. It probably doesn't have the capability to go in all.

It doesn't have the manpower. The Russian military doesn't have the three million, four million troops that would be necessary to occupy all of Ukraine. Several people have noticed, the size of Texas. This is not something that can be controlled or occupied all over it.

However, they can go into Kyiv. They can go into Kharkiv. They can go into Lviv. They can go into Odessa. They can go into certain places and take over. And the key will be Kyiv. The key will be the seat of government.

[13:15:06]

And the important thing for the Ukrainians will be to maintain that government somewhere, whether it's in Kyiv, if they can defend, or if it's somewhere else. But, other than that, Jake, there's not a lot that they can -- that the military can do, nothing that is going to make the Russians bleed.

It's going to be painful for the Russians. It will be more painful for the Ukrainians. But the Russians and Mr. Putin will have on his hands a lot of Russian soldiers dead going back in, back to Russia, to be buried.

But they will be able to go all the way to some of these big cities, Jake.

TAPPER: So, we have heard today from the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as the foreign minister of Ukraine, pleading for the West, specifically for the European Union, to remove, unplug Russia from what is called the SWIFT banking system.

Explain what that is, and why this is not just an easy decision for the European Union to stop Putin, to punish him?

TAYLOR: Stopping Putin is going to be hard.

He's -- Putin has indicated by his actions that he's not to be stopped by disincentives like economic sanctions. So it's not going to stop him, clearly. It will -- if they will -- we will talk about SWIFT. SWIFT or sanctions on other banking facilities, other big commercial banks, the three or four or five largest commercial banks, Jake, if sanctioned in full blocking sanctions, so that they can't operate with U.S. dollars, that will have an effect on the economy right away, on the Russian economy right away.

And it will make it impossible for Russians to use bank accounts and credit cards. SWIFT will have a similar effect. But just putting the sanctions on the top three or four or five commercial banks will have as big an effect as SWIFT.

SWIFT is known, but this is another approach. We're going to hear from President Biden, clearly, about how to address this. One or the other of those two options, SWIFT or large commercial banks, are going to be blocked. That's clear.

TAPPER: An emergency meeting of the G7 powers this morning took place.

What do you think the international response should look like right now? Should it include sanctioning those banks that you mentioned, perhaps booting Russia from the SWIFT system and more? What would actually cause Putin to -- I mean, I don't think he's going to withdraw from Ukraine, but to reconsider what he's doing?

TAYLOR: So, just the fact that the G7 is united is very important. And that's got to be troubling to President Putin. He's got to have -- he's been surprised, I imagine, at the unity of the NATO alliance, of the G7, of the alliance between the United States and Ukraine, about the resilience of President Zelensky.

President Putin has undoubtedly been surprised by all that, not enough to keep him from this fateful step that he's taken right now. But that will have an effect. That unity of effort by the G7, by the other nations that are associated with the Western alliance, that will have an effect. And it will it would push back on him.

The other thing, Jake, is, he has to know, President Putin has to know that he will -- in the end will lose. He remembers Afghanistan, where he went in strong and came out weak, very weak. The Soviet Union went in very strong, and the Soviet Union in the end dissolved, in some degree because of Afghanistan, that they were run back out.

You can go in strong, as he's doing now, but the Ukrainian people, the Ukraine resistance, Ukrainian territorial defense forces, the Ukrainian people value their freedom, value their association with Europe, and they want to continue that. They don't want to be behind a new Iron Curtain. They want to be free.

And Mr. Putin will have to face that. And he's facing the unity of the international community with the Ukrainians.

TAPPER: Ambassador Bill Taylor, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today.

Coming up much, more from our reporters on the ground in Ukraine, on the ground in Russia, as we await President Biden.

Stay with us.

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[13:24:03]

TAPPER: I'm Jake Tapper with our continuing coverage of Russia's unprovoked attack and invasion of Ukraine.

Explosions have been reported in more than a dozen cities throughout Ukraine, including the capital, Kyiv. A short time ago, this blast rocked an airport in Southeastern Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin's predawn barrage from land, from sea and from air on a sovereign nation is unlike anything Europe has seen since World War II.

I want to bring in CNN military analyst and retired Army General James "Spider" Marks. General Marks, a senior U.S. official tell CNN that Vladimir Putin

intends to control at least the eastern two-thirds of the entire country of Ukraine. Do you believe he would settle for that, or does he want the whole enchilada?

BRIG. GEN. JAMES "SPIDER" MARKS (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Well, I think he's looking for, as you put it, the entire enchilada.

But the control aspect is definitional. In order to control Ukraine with military forces, at least initially, to try to settle it down, he would -- in fact, he'd kick up the exact opposite type of a response. And then an insurgency would begin in very, very short order.

[13:25:12]

He would need close to 800,000-plus soldiers, which he does not have, in order to control Ukraine and really occupy it in force. So the notion that he might be satisfied with Donbass and then an extension down toward Crimea, the Dnieper River, and then to create this land bridge to Crimea, seems like a legitimate opportunity for him that can be done.

And he is doing it right now. And it's going to be quite swift. Also, what we're seeing is the -- I think the initial stages of a decapitation of Zelensky, which I don't think we really thought was going to come. Ultimately, we saw that he wanted Zelensky gone, and he wanted to have a government in Kyiv that was going to be favorable to Moscow.

He's looking to achieve that right now. But having been a part of one of those decapitations before, it doesn't always turn out very well, right?

TAPPER: Right.

If Putin were to seize the entirety of Ukraine, the new Russian Federation would border both NATO allies and non-NATO allies. What does that mean in terms of Putin's long-term goals? Does he then set his sights on another former Soviet socialist republic that is not a member of NATO?

MARKS: That's a real troubling scenario. That's exactly right.

I mean, look, this is learned behavior. If he can get away with this, it's logical to think that he would get -- try to get away with something else. You do have bordering the former Soviet Union those elements that used to be a part, those countries that used to be a part of the Soviet Union.

So, Russia borders up against the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, but you then have Poland, NATO partner, Romania, NATO partner, Belarus, certainly not, vassal state, Bulgaria not bordering, but to the south a little bit.

He might be emboldened to do that. I think what he is looking for, when you look at the geography, with Belarus and Ukraine, that gives him an incredibly deep -- militarily definition of deep -- buffer zone that he gave up, he lost when the Warsaw Pact went away. So this is his effort to try to recreate something that looks like that.

And it won't be in its entirety, because Poland's not going anywhere, Romania is not going anywhere. And, clearly, we would invoke -- any action against them would invoke Article 5. And I'm sanguine that NATO would hold fast, would stay together were that to occur.

TAPPER: I believe there's a bite from Vladimir Putin, a sound bite that we got, and I want to play it for you and get your response to it.

Control room, if you could run that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

VLADIMIR PUTIN, RUSSIAN PRESIDENT (through translator): Whoever tries to interfere with us, and even more so to create threats for our country, our people should know that Russia's response will be immediate, and will lead you to such consequences that you have never experienced in your history.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: And I believe -- I believe, during that same speech, he also reminded the world that Russia still has nuclear weapons.

MARKS: A pretty dangerous thought. I look at that, I become incredibly concerned that that might be an outcome that he thinks is plausible.

Look, the only differentiation in nukes was how we accounted for tactical nukes, those that have a shorter range, and the strategic capability of intercontinental ballistic missiles. And those are the ones we counted. Those went through the START and SALT protocols.

I would hate to think that he might think that he can get away with a tactical nuke use and that there wouldn't be a concomitant response. That then begins the cascading effect of the end of times.

I'm incredibly concerned that that might be something that he would move in the direction to try to achieve.

TAPPER: Retired General Spider Marks, thanks for joining us.

More special coverage ahead. President Biden is just moments away.

Stay with us.

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