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U.N.: 600,000-Plus Flee War-Torn Ukraine Amid Russian Invasion; New Military Strike In Kharkiv Hits Apartment Complex As Russian Attacks Increase; White House Prepared For Split-Screen If Kyiv Is Under Attack During State Of The Union Address. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired March 01, 2022 - 14:30   ET

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

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[14:32:55]

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: The United Nations Refugee Agency estimates around 660,000 Ukrainians have so far fled to neighboring countries.

The thousands have been arriving at a Poland train station seeking safety from Russia's invasion, trying to stay warm in the freezing cold temperatures that are in Ukraine right now.

Our CNN senior correspondent Sara Sidner joins me now live from the border of Ukraine and Poland.

Sara, you've been showing this really remarkable scenes of volunteers, people who have come out, Polish people, people from Germany, all around the region, to help these Ukrainians who are pouring over the border.

SARA SIDNER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It is an incredible show of support, of humanity, if you will, Anderson.

I'll give you another quick look at this. This is volunteerism at its absolute best.

This is not a government-led situation. This is people who got online, gathered together. Some of them do not know each other. Some of them are strangers.

But they have been here day in and day out doing just what you're watching now, offering food, offering drinks, offering a hot cup of coffee, offering a hot soup, trying to make sure that people feel welcome.

There was even a sign when we first got to the train station, one of the very first stops that you end up at when you leave the border of Ukraine into Poland, and there were signs up that said, "Ukrainian, we are waiting for you here in Poland. Welcome to Poland."

So, it is open arms for many refugees.

I do want to give you another look, because we talked about this earlier, at some of the other things that are going on here. So, what you are seeing are tents set up. And you've seen this,

Anderson, in the many times that you have reported from any kind of disaster situation, right?

You're seeing tents, and these tents have been set up. They have been set up so that people can get warm, so that people can sleep at some point in time.

Look at what is -- I mean, people are bringing whatever they could muster.

[14:35:01]

These are the meager belongings of folks who have left their entire lives behind, as we have seen so many times when war comes to a country, when refugees are created because some greedy despot wants to take something over.

So, we are seeing this over and over again. And here we are again, Anderson, in 2022, and war is being perpetrated on a people who did nothing to provoke it.

All they're trying to do now is survive and eventually go home. But they just don't know when that's going to be.

COOPER: And there are so many -- I mean, this is women and children who have had a long journey just to get to that spot. I mean, just getting out of Ukraine for women and children is extraordinarily difficult.

It can take days and days and days. Train rides, bus rides, walking long distances in the freezing cold, sleeping outside at times.

When we crossed over from the border from Poland, I think it was yesterday or two days -- I guess yesterday morning, I mean, there were hundreds of people waiting.

There was an elderly man who we're told had died at the border checkpoint from making the journey. I don't know if it was a heart attack or exhaustion, but he was covered with a tarp. It is just a chaotic scene.

I'm wondering, where do the people go from there? Are Ukrainians allowed to, then, go into Poland? I know there was a bus to take people to Berlin from German volunteers. What happens to them from here?

SIDNER: I'm glad you asked. Let me come over here and see if I can get you a picture.

The buses for the most part have just left, but if you look just behind me, you'll see, like, a truck pulling up.

People are literally coming from their homes. People in Poland are saying, hey, do you need a ride? Do you need a ride to Krakow? Do you need a ride here? Do you want to come to my home and stay with me? That's happening in this country. So, yes, Ukrainians are being

offered a place to stay in people's homes.

And the government is saying, hey, you can come in. They are -- they aren't even, at some points, checking papers. And they're allowing now children on their own to be able to come out of Ukraine and into Poland.

And you just talked about what you saw on the border, and we saw something very similar, which is heartbreaking.

We saw a 15-year-old girl who says she had just crossed over from Ukraine by herself to meet her mother who had come from, I think, Belgium, and so she had showed up from Belgium to meet her daughter.

And all of a sudden, I look over, and the mother has fainted. No pulse. She had no -- she wasn't breathing.

There are medics there from Israel who had shown up to volunteer from an organization that's similar to Doctors Without Borders called Rescuers Without Borders.

And they were literally working on this woman on the freezing cold ground and trying to revive her. And by god's grace, she was revived. The medics got her breathing again. She had a very light pulse.

But the daughter is standing there and wondering what she's supposed to do. You can see the panic and the heartache.

And she's crying and talking on the phone, trying to figure out what to do now because they're taking her mother to the hospital. An ambulance came about 30 minutes later.

And the daughter's standing there, going, I don't know what to do. What do I do? My mother -- I want to go home. So, it's a really, really, really depressing and difficult situation.

But you do have one thing. You have some light, all of these volunteers who care about these people.

COOPER: Yes. Sara Sidner, so glad you're there to bring us this side of the battle here.

Let's go back to Victor and Alisyn.

Alisyn -- I mean, Victor, obviously, the impact on families is something we can't stress enough here. Families being separated, men leaving -- man having to stay behind, try to join the fight.

Families having to make the decision, do I stay with my father, with my husband, with my boyfriend? Do I stay with my children to keep the family together?

Or do you make this difficult journey and take your chances of trying to get to the border and then trying to get through and then figuring out from there? It's just -- I mean, it's really just heartbreaking to see, day after

day.

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: Yes.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: And specifically, the impact on children.

And coming up, we will have a segment on what this is doing to children. I mean, children in cancer wards that are hiding in a bunker now and can't get treatment because, as Sara points out, there's a power monger who just wants more territory.

BLACKWELL: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Anderson, thank you very much. We will check back with you.

[14:39:43]

BLACKWELL: We're just getting this in from Ukraine. A Russian military strike has destroyed an apartment complex in Kharkiv. We've got more details on this.

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CAMEROTA: We are just learning of a new Russian military strike in Kharkiv. The attack hit an apartment complex, as you can see on your screen.

There's a fire burning. This is a clearly damaged apartment building. This is located just across the street from a hospital.

I know it's hard to keep track of where all of the recent attacks are, so let's illustrate for you where the Russian attacks exactly are targeting these cities across Ukraine.

[14:44:59]

BLACKWELL: So, we've seen an increase in the attacks in the capital here. Of course, we saw that TV tower that was targeted as well.

Alisyn just talked about the apartment building across the street from a hospital in Kharkiv. That was targeted. There was a government building as well that was hit. Ten people killed, dozens wounded there as well.

And the mayor of Kherson says his city is under attack, telling the Russians that you have already come for what you wanted, including lives.

CAMEROTA: As you know, there are attacks on apartments and government buildings.

Also let's bring in now retired Brigadier General Peter Zwack. He's with us.

He's a global fellow at the Wilson Center's Keenan Institute. He served in Moscow as the United States senior defense official and the attache to the Russian Federation for 2012 to 2014.

He's also the author of "Swimming the Volga: A U.S. Officer's Experience in Pre-Putin Russia."

Peter, what is your assessment of what you're seeing in terms of the Russian positions and where they're attacking today?

BRIG. GEN. PETER ZWACK, U.S. ARMY, RETIRED & GLOBAL FELLOW, WILSON CENTER KENNAN INSTITUTE & AUTHOR: All right. They're moving. A lot of the columns, reinforcements have come up. They've had a very, very clumsy initial five days. They're amassing their fire power.

There's no clean way to take a city. They would prefer doing it by intimidation. They don't have the time to besiege them because of all the things we talked about, the stress at home in Russia, the world. They want to get this thing done fast.

So, if you're going to take a city, and you're going to storm it, you need a lot of artillery, a lot of air power. And we're seeing the front end of it.

They declared they're going after communications facilities. Witnessed the Kyiv tower, which is, by the way, ironically, sits right on the lands near a major Holocaust site in the second world war.

So again, Ukrainians know conflict. But the Russians are pushing. They want to finish this.

In the north, we don't know what -- exactly what the Belarusians are doing, if forces are now. If so, it would be unbelievably craven.

So yes, they're putting the pressure on. But the Ukrainians appear to be putting up a spirited fight. And this is frankly taking a whole lot longer.

Kharkiv is not far from the Russian border. We're already into -- deep into day five, and it's not taken.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

ZWACK: And Kyiv, strong pointed.

CAMEROTA: Well, I just wanted -- we've zoomed into Kyiv because you were talking about that TV tower that was taken so it's obviously harder for Ukrainians to broadcast their message and tell their civilians what's happening.

But this is the goal, isn't this? This is what the Russians ultimately want is to take Kyiv. So what are you seeing in terms of the possibility of all that?

ZWACK: I think that they are -- they know they can't rush into the center of Kyiv with tanks. This is more of a deliberate mass, artillery, infantry backed by tanks.

They don't want to storm the center because it's bloody, but they want to take Kyiv. They want the seat of government. They want to put in their proxy or puppet government.

And the longer the Ukrainian revenge is just, hang on. The longer they hang on, the harder it gets for Russia all around, if you will, it, both militarily and politically and economically.

BLACKWELL: General, you say that they want to take Kyiv. Of course, we know that there's this 40-mile-long convoy that has been outside of the capital city.

A U.S. defense official says that it's not a lot further along than it was yesterday. So what's happening here?

ZWACK: Well, I think that, if you look at some of the video, they've got, you know, four, five supply trucks. This is a really exposed -- and there are multiple convoys of this type all over. We're only looking at one area.

And they take a lot of people. They're soft targets. And like the Finns tortured the Soviets in 1940, you got Ukrainian forces stay behind, even local civilians, probably making it really hard to, you know, culvert mine.

And you don't need javelins, just an old, traditional cold war RPG-7 -- and there are thousands of them in those regions -- will knock out a truck, a jeep, a light-armored vehicle.

So this is hard. They're probably carrying a lot of ammunition.

So, it looks very tentative, because they should have been there by now.

[14:50:02]

BLACKWELL: All right, Retired Brigadier General Peter Zwack, thank you so much.

CAMEROTA: So, in just a few hours, President Biden will deliver his first State of the Union. Russia, of course, will be a focus of it. And the White House is preparing for this split screen if the Russians launch more attacks during that.

We have much more on what expect ahead.

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[14:55:11]

BLACKWELL: The White House is prepared for a split screen if Kyiv is under attack during President Biden's State of the Union address tonight.

We know the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S. will be in first lady, Jill Biden's, box. And the war in Ukraine is expected to be a major focus.

CAMEROTA: The president will also lay out his domestic agenda focusing on issues like rising inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Let's bring in CNN's political director, David Chalian.

David, set the stage for what we should expect tonight.

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: The first thing I'm looking for is how does the president strike the balance between news environment around us, which is the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And as Victor mentioned, this White House is keenly aware of a split- screen image tonight while fighting may be going on as he's addressing the nation and the world.

So look to see how they reflect this moment without the speech becoming entirely a foreign policy speech.

Ukraine, out of the box, is what we're told to expect.

And remember, Joe Biden, as a candidate, as president put the Biden doctrine, his image of world affairs as this notion that democracy must be back autocracy. That's the framing I would expect to hear in the Ukraine messaging.

But there's a ton of domestic concerns that need addressing as well, as you mentioned -- Alisyn?

BLACKWELL: Let's talk those. We know there's a lot of people concerned about the economy, the pandemic as well.

What about the president's role as consoler in chief?

CHALIAN: You know, Joe Biden is known for his empathy. Watch to see how he plays that card tonight, the sort of feeling your pain moment that presidents need to employ.

Does he convincingly show that he understands the pinch at the pocketbook that's going on with Americans? You can expect he will invoke his Scranton roots as he does.

But how he deals with that, how he shows an acknowledgement that it's not all rosy, despite the successes he may have had with the COVID relief package and the infrastructure bill, which he'll sell, but how does he acknowledge there's still work to be done?

And of course, COVID is part of that. He's addressing a country tonight with two years of exhaustion dealing with this pandemic. How does he try to put COVID in the rearview mirror?

We heard from White House aides that he plans to address we're at a new place and have proven we have the tool ifs a new surge of the virus emerges, we know how to beat it back. So listen carefully for the president there.

But take a look at these price increases. This is what I'm talking about, a pocketbook pinch. From just a year ago, guys, gasoline up 40 percent, used cars up 40 percent, food at home up 7.5 percent, electricity, 107 percent.

And if you look at gas prices specifically, $3.62 per gallon today. A year ago, $2.72.

Joe Biden will need to deal with that in his speech in some way.

CAMEROTA: Davide, all of this comes as his approval numbers are down. We talked to Leon Panetta and he talked about how the message needs to be unity, which doesn't define our politics.

How will he weave in all that?

CHALIAN: He will call for unity, especially as it relates to the Ukraine matter. But he also needs the fire up his base. One of the things see in the polling is this real enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats.

After voting rights and Build Back Better failed to advance in Congress, what does Biden offer without stepping on his own call for unity? What does he offer Democrats to get excited about?

Certainly, his Supreme Court nominee will be part of that messaging in is an opportunity, one of the biggest opportunities he'll have this year to set the course for his party this election year as midterm season gets under way.

You noted he's doing it in front of a defensive crowd. He's at 41 percent approval, 54 percent disapproval. Only one president was lower than that at the first official State of the Union. That was Donald Trump.

CAMEROTA: David Chalian, thank you very much for setting the table for us. We really appreciate it.

Be sure to tune in to CNN for President Biden's first State of the Union address. Our special coverage, live, will start tonight at 8:00 p.m.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

CAMEROTA: OK, it's almost top of the hour here on CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Alisyn Camerota.

BLACKWELL: I'm Victor Blackwell.

We begin with Vladmir Putin's escalating violence against Ukraine. The British minister just posted there's increased number of Russian strikes against densely populated urban areas over the last two days.

[14:59:49]

Today, some key facilities in the nation's two biggest cities were destroyed. A television tower in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, was hit.

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BLACKWELL: Ukrainian officials say that five people were killed. And the Ministry of Internal affairs says the blast knocked broadcasts off the air.