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Dem Aide Tells CNN They Are "Headed" To Stripping COVID Relief Out Of Spending Bill; W.H.O. Has Verified 18 Attacks On Health Facilities In Ukraine. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired March 09, 2022 - 15:00   ET

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

[15:00:06]

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: Right now, House Democrats are pushing to pass a trillion dollar spending bill that will include billions in aid to Ukraine. But CNN is learning intraparty disputes are standing in the way and COVID relief may be stripped out of that bill.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: CNN's Manu Raju joins us now from Capitol Hill.

So, Manu, what's the latest? What you just heard?

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, there's been some Democratic revolt that just happened on Capitol Hill today after Speaker Pelosi cut a deal with other leaders from both parties, releasing a massive proposal to fund the government at $1.5 trillion. That plan to government also includes roughly $14 billion in emergency aid for Ukraine but also roughly $16 billion in COVID relief money. All day long she has been sparring with Democratic members who concerned about the way the new COVID relief money would be offset, pulling money away from some other states to pay from roughly $16 billion in COVID relief.

And just moments ago, Pelosi announced that they are going to strip out the COVID relief money, a major concession, dropping a major concession, dropping a major Democratic priority in order to get a bill through that essentially requires bipartisan support in order to get through both chambers of congress. This is in the next few days.

And in a statement, Pelosi decided that it's heartbreaking that they are going this route but they have to go this way, but there's ample frustration among Democrats as they're making this move to try to fund the government and improve aid to Ukraine -- guys.

BLACKWELL: All right. Manu Raju for us -- Manu, thank you.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

CAMEROTA: It's a little past the top of the hour on CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Alisyn Camerota.

BLACKWELL: I'm Victor Blackwell.

The southern city of Mariupol was devastated by Russian attacks today. Some of the youngest and most vulnerable Ukrainians are among those who have lost their lives and have been hurt. Ukrainian officials say a maternity center and a pediatric ward at a Mariupol hospital were hit by an airstrike and children are trapped under that rubble.

This is a warning that the images of the aftermath are graphic. The Ukrainian emergency volunteers, you see them carrying an injured pregnant woman out of a wreckage on a gurney.

A hallway so obliterated, you really can't decipher what was here. We can see in the back there changing table with pink dressing there, a bassinet as well. We don't know yet if anyone was killed, but officials say at least 17 women and hospital staff were injured.

CAMEROTA: And in less than two miles away, a second location was hit in an apparent Russian military strike. This is a university you're looking at now and a city administration building, obviously not military targets.

These new images show several residential areas before the strike. That's the left side of your screen and then on the right what they look like now after the strikes. Mariupol officials estimate that in their city alone, at least 1,300 civilians have been killed since the Russian invasion began on February 24th. That's a much higher number than we previously heard.

The cease-fire for humanitarian evacuations in Ukraine just ended but it was not upheld everywhere. Local authorities in two suburbs said Russian forces blocked as many as 50 buses that were headed for a civilian evacuation route.

BLACKWELL: CNN's Anderson Cooper joins us live from Lviv in Western Ukraine.

It's heartbreaking to look at these pictures from the pediatric ward, the maternity hospital. But the World Health Organization says that Russians have carried out attacks on at least 18 health facilities in Ukraine.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST, "AC360": That's right. And, of course, there's question of how much of that is direct targeting. How much is just blunt force, inaccurate use of artillery or some combination thereof.

Our CNN senior international correspondent Sam Kiley joins me now live from Zaporizhzhia.

Sam, these images out of Mariupol, it has been under siege for days now. We have heard from the mayor there. What more do we know about anymore information coming out about the strikes today?

SAM KILEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, if we look at the strike that hit hospital number three, the maternity hospital, a maternity hospital in Mariupol. Mariupol is the city is half a million people, 200,000 of whom have been trying to evacuate the last five days. Another evacuation plan was falling apart, the local mayor was saying as a result of Russian shelling this was what happened. An airstrike against a hospital landing in the courtyard area causing a most gigantic crater big enough to effectively swallow an adult man and some, and causing devastation across the whole hospital complex, particularly on the inside where we have seen really disastrous levels of damage, scorching, burn damage to the building.

[15:05:19]

Miraculously at the moment, local authorities are saying that 17 people were injured. They don't know about any fatalities. Yet, the reason for that probably is that most women and children, most civilians in that city have been living underground for the better part of the week. We were speaking with a young woman who's been separated from her wife -- from her husband and 10-year-old daughter, and they had been able to talk to her for the first time in week over a very brief mobile phone call in which they said they were living under ground in some kind of bunker area with many, many hundreds of people.

But they believe they only got about three days of fuel, of food and water to survive. The water that they are living on in Mariupol at the moment is industrial water. It's water basically being drained out of existing water systems. A lot of it very, very bad for human consumption but it's all they have got. They've run out of food, there's no electricity and communications are extremely intermittent.

And then the Russians hit not just the hospital area but also, we've managed to geolocate from CNN's analysis that one of the universities in Mariupol -- again, a very big, blatant, obvious civilian target and we've seen this, as you mentioned before, Anderson, it's part of the Russian playbook hitting hospitals. They did in Syria and now they're doing it in Ukraine.

COOPER: Yeah, the idea of breaking the back of opposition, demoralizing the civilian population, killing civilians, children in this case. There were reports that there may be people still buried under rubble, children under rubble. Obviously, they are still being searched for. Are the Russians saying anything about this particular strike? Is there any excuse from them?

KILEY: There's no excuse. Amazingly, we've heard a statement to French affiliate VFM TV in France, a statement from the Russian ambassador to Paris, accusing Ukrainian nationalists of self-bombing the hospital and trying to make Russia look bad, he said. This is, again, straight out of the Russian playbook, one of the more absurd claims among the many absurd claims.

We've heard in the past, of course, justification for invading this country, is to de-Nazify it, even though the president is Jewish. And now, we've got this claim of the false flag attack being made against the Ukrainians, of course, patently absurd. Not least because it's unlikely the Ukrainians have got a bomb that big. But nonetheless, it's been dismissed out of hand, Anderson.

COOPER: Sam Kiley, appreciate the reporting.

CNN's Scott McLean joins me now here in Lviv for more about the evacuation corridors where we are getting some new video just in to CNN of fighting in the streets of the city north of Mykolaiv. This is from earlier today. Take a look.

(VIDEO CLIP PLAYS)

COOPER: Scott, what do we know about the fighting there? You can see actually some folks with it looks like shoulder-fired missiles?

SCOTT MCLEAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, that's right. So, we don't know a whole lot, but we have been able to geolocate the video to Voznesensk. That's the name of the city there, and the southern part of the city, near a market there.

And in the video, obviously, you hear the gunfire there. You see the Ukrainian troops there with the shoulder-fired missiles. And what's really interesting about this particular video is that it looks -- you have to almost watch it a few times, it looks as if one of the soldiers there with the shoulder-fired missiles is actually firing, and that's what goes on.

But it's an explosion that takes place near the building just behind him. So, it's not clear what the explosion was. It's not clear if anyone is hurt. But again, this is what Ukrainian troops are up against, and this is, you know, another reason why people are fleeing.

COOPER: Yeah. And the senior official in the Kyiv region has said that there is gridlock of cars stretched for miles of people trying to escape. There's obviously a limited time on these evacuations. Any kind of road blockages is difficult, any kind of traffic jam.

One of the things you've been hearing from Red Cross officials is concerned about that both sides, Russian and Ukraine, in some cases have not hammered out all the minute details of an evacuation which is something that has to be done in advance.

MCLEAN: Exactly, and sometimes these routes take very strange, you know, they take very strange routes, because this is what they have to -- again, I mean, you have to follow the exact route. And, you know, the administrators on the ground warn people who are going in the convoys not to deviate from the routes at all. And so, it's clear these backups that we're seeing in the Kyiv region, which parts that they're coming from.

But again, it's very clear there wasn't enough time today with the hours that they had for the evacuation routes to actually get every one out.

[15:10:07]

Now you have people past curfew in Kyiv, which is 8:00 trying to get out of the city. You had had limited success with some of these other evacuation corridors, some of suburban Kyiv were evacuated today, others, the Ukrainian said that the Russians were blocking it.

There was a bright spot yesterday and that was in the northeastern city of Sumy. That is where a convoy of a thousand vehicles. Officials say 5,000 people managed to get out, and a good number of them were actually foreign students, more than 700, the majority from India. And they had a heck of journey. They took, again, one of the strange routes to try to avoid as much military activity as they possibly could.

But they still said they went past military vehicles, Russian tanks, things like that and from there they took a train to Lviv where I met with some of these students early today and they described their journeys and they described hiding out in these bunkers at their school, at their university, just hoping and praying. One student said she resigned herself to fact she may not survive this whole ordeal. Here is what one student said about the experience.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've been -- we've been crying. We have been shouting for every one to like help us out of Sumy for the past two weeks. Eventually, they came to our rescue, they brought us out of Sumy.

MCLEAN: So, how are you feeling now?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, happy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MCLEAN: So, the journey to actually get here was awful. I mean, you're in a basically city bus, standing room only for the first part of it through the humanitarian corridor, and then you're in a very old Soviet era train for the rest of it sitting on a wooden bench for the rest of it. The same kind of train I actually came in on. I can tell you for firsthand experience, it's not a good way to go.

But none of those students were complaining about that. Obviously, they were just happy to be here, happy to be in one piece and soon to get out of the country.

COOPER: Yeah, lucky that that evacuation route held.

Appreciate it. Scott McLean, thanks very much.

Throwing it back to Victor and Alisyn now in New York.

CAMEROTA: Anderson Cooper, thank you very much. We'll check back with you.

BLACKWELL: A senior U.S. defense official said that Russia still has about 90 percent of their available combat power ready to use in Ukraine. The country has launched 710 missiles against Ukraine since the start of the invasion.

CAMEROTA: Retired Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt joins us now to discuss this and so much more.

General, thank you so much for being here. Can you just help us take a 30,000-foot vantage point first on what's happening? Russian troops just obliterated a maternity ward. We are seeing the aftermath of women injured, covered in blood. We're told that there are children still trapped. They have just destroyed a university. This is in Mariupol.

The officials in Mariupol say that 1,300 civilians have been killed there. That's a much higher number than we knew.

It feels, at some point, as though NATO and the U.S. are sticking to these established treaty rules. We can't escalate with Russia. We can't give weapons, transfer weapons from Poland but Russia is not sticking to any of those rules.

And so, where does this leave this fight?

BRIG. GEN. MARK KIMMITT (RET), U.S. ARMY: Well, again, the hard fact is that the United States and its NATO partners have made the decision, and I agree with the decision, that they are not going to do a head on confrontation with the Russians because of the chance of it spiraling out of control.

Nobody can predict at this point what Putin is going to do. Most of us got it exactly wrong and he's done far worse every time than we thought he was going to do. So, if we want to take that risk and escalate it into Europe and beyond, that's a decision that most countries won't make at this point.

BLACKWELL: Yeah. The question is then what qualifies as a head on confrontation? We, of course, know that the Poles, they wanted to give their planes to the U.S. The U.S. then hand them over. You've been skeptical of that supply from the start, from when we first heard it. And now, we heard from the German chancellor that they will not supply fighter jets to the Ukrainians.

So, if they don't get any help in the sky, how do they sustain? How do they sustain a defense?

KIMMITT: Well, first of all, I think it's important to recognize that most of the damage being done that we're seeing on the channel right now has nothing to do with air support or air bombing. It's done by artillery. It's done by missiles. It's done by rockets. That's the way the Soviets have done it in their doctrinal set for years and years, from World War II on. The no-fly zone won't change anything, except it will stop us from having a direct confrontation with Russians.

CAMEROTA: Can you -- let's pull up the map so you can help us understand where we are today. It seems as though the Russian troops are encroaching on other cities.

[15:15:04]

There's Mykolaiv, which I think seems to be under siege. The red places on the map right now are where there are Russian troops and some places that have we've been told have fallen to Russian troops.

So, what are you seeing in terms of the status of where Ukraine is right now? KIMMITT: Well, I still see the Russians attacking on three axes.

They're taking one axis and going towards Odessa. They are not there yet, but they are making progress.

The second axis is they are attacking from Crimea up to Mariupol for the purposes of connecting Crimea by land to Russia. And, of course, the one that everybody is looking at, that direction from north, south from Belarus as the Russians are now closing in on Kyiv with the goal of encircling it, sieging it and then storming it.

BLACKWELL: We had Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman with us at the top of the last hour, saying that he would want to see these Patriot missile batteries that the U.S. has not placed in Poland. Those, too, some go to Ukraine as well. Do you believe that would be an undo escalation if the U.S. were to supply those to the Ukrainians?

KIMMITT: Well, at this point, I think supplied it to the Ukrainians for their use. I don't think that would cause a direct escalation between the United States, NATO and Russia. We have been providing Javelins which are killing their tanks. We provide Stingers which were knocking down airplanes and the Patriot would give a little more protection against the airlines and against the missiles. I don't see that as provoking a NATO-Russia stand off.

CAMEROTA: I mean, as you just said, our military experts have been wrong. They have underestimated, it sounds like, Vladimir Putin in terms of his willingness to escalate and so, does that mean that there's an inevitability that he will at some point go nuclear, literally use them, up the ante here?

KIMMITT: Well, first of all, let's stipulate, I'm one of those analysts that has been wrong all along. I never thought he would lower himself to this cravenness, and depravity and brutality. The Russians in their doctrinal manual do not see this fire break between conventional warfare and nuclear warfare, tactical nuclear warfare. The bombs we saw at the beginning, those vacuum bombs were in many ways more powerful than some tactical nuclear weapons. They see it as continuum in our doctrine and in NATO's doctrine, there's a fire break between conventional war and nuclear war.

So, I don't think we can predict anything that Vladimir Putin is going to do or his generals are willing to do that will train by those manuals.

CAMEROTA: Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, thank you for your condor. We really appreciate talking to you.

So, Ukraine is warning that the Chernobyl nuclear plant lost electricity for one of its off site power lines and that could lead to radiation leak. But the IAEA says there's no crisis yet. So, we have an update, next.

BLACKWELL: And we're watching the markets during the last hour of trading. They are up sharply after oil prices plunged more than 13 percent. The Dow up almost 750 points. We've got more on that, ahead.

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[15:22:55]

CAMEROTA: The Chernobyl nuclear plant lost power to one of its offsite power lines overnight. But the International Atomic Energy Agency says there's no critical impact to safety of Chernobyl. That statement eased fears of a radiation leak but Ukraine says the Chernobyl staff are working under duress in face of exhaustion and psychological pressure ever since Russian military forces took over the site nearly two weeks ago.

Joining me now to discuss this and more, we have national security and nuclear policies expert, Joe Cirincione. He's also the author of "Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It's Too Late", and he served on the international security advisory board for Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

Joe, great to have you. I know you were quite concerned this morning about Chernobyl going offline or losing power. Have your fears been assuaged now?

JOE CIRINCIONE, AUTHOR, "NUCLEAR NIGHTMARES: SECURITY THE WORLD BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE": Yeah, they have. We woke up to this fright I think tweet warning us that the power had been cut off and lost communication with the workers there and he feared an imminent catastrophe. There are about 20,000 spent fuel rods stored at the plant. It's no longer an operating nuclear plant. But those fuel rods have to be maintained in very strict conditions, and we wondered were there other fuel rods from more recent nuclear power deloading that might be there. We didn't know.

In the next hour or so, we started to get word from the IAEA that they were confident that even with the electricity off and even without the water circulating in a spent fuel ponds, this is the water necessary to keep the fuel rods cool and prevent them from reaction that they would be safe for weeks. So, there's still a danger but it is an imminent danger.

CAMEROTA: Joe, I know this is your area of expertise, but honestly, talking about the nuclear threat is so anxiety-provoking for all of us, everyone watching as well. but I think we have to at this point because Vladimir Putin has crossed every red line, as we just heard from our military experts that people didn't predict he was going to cross.

[15:25:09]

Russian troops today are bombing maternity wards, schools --

CIRINCIONE: Yeah.

CAMEROTA: -- universities. And so, we need to talk about this.

Obviously, Vladimir Putin has at his disposal the world's largest nuclear arsenal. What happens if he uses one of those weapons? CIRINCIONE: Alisyn, you're absolutely right. Look, we have never seen

a confluence of nuclear threats at one place at one time. So, he seized the site of Chernobyl. He seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, firing on it, damaging the facility.

He's having both -- in both those places, tacticians had under normal times have a very stressful job operating the plant, operating at gun point, cut off, no short changes, no contact with the family -- unprecedented. As the IAEA director says, they are knocking out the key pillars of the nuclear operations.

Plus, he's exercised with nuclear capable weapons. He's threatened the use of nuclear capable weapons. If one of those is used, even a relatively low yield nuclear weapon, it will be many more times powerful than any conventional weapon in existence, even a small nuclear weapon could be 1,000 tons of conventional explosives.

The damage is bad enough, but what happens next, how does the West respond? How does NATO respond? Do we answer in kind?

Exercises show that once you start using nuclear weapons, there's no logical termination point. Each will match in kind. Each side thinking their move will be decisive and just escalates into a thermo nuclear war.

CAMEROTA: I mean, Joe, I don't want to leave it on that note. So what is the answer for deterring that?

(LAUGHTER)

CIRINCIONE: Smart. What was that?

CAMEROTA: What's the answer to deterring that, to that not happening?

CIRINCIONE: Well, there's two basic answers. And one -- three basically. One is the way Biden has reacted to this calmly, you know, no nuclear talks in return. So, we're not seeing any replay of the Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, who has the bigger button, fire and destruction. So, that's one.

CAMEROTA: Yeah.

CIRINCIONE: Number two, you could do more. NATO and Biden should say right now that NATO and the U.S. have no attention to these nuclear weapons first. Nobody should ever use a nuclear weapon first. And press Putin to make that pledge.

And three, intensify diplomatic efforts. Try to find the diplomatic off-ramp. What Putin can get some of what he wants, Ukraine can get some of what they want.

I should, though, note, the nuclear dangers are low, but they're not zero. They're increasing. Every week of this war, increases them further.

CAMEROTA: Joe Cirincione, thank you very much. I feel slightly better with that final suggestion from you than your previous answers. Thank you very much.

BLACKWELL: You never want thermo nuclear war to be the last words in the interview.

CAMEROTA: No, I did not want it.

BLACKWELL: Considering who we're dealing with here.

All right. Some of the most vulnerable people in Ukraine are still trying to get out of the country. The latest on the refugee crisis from someone helping people evacuate.

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