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U.N.: More Than 2 Million People Have Fled Ukraine; Displaced Ukrainians Try to Keep Life Normal for Their Children; Pro-Russian Social Media Accounts Spread Fale Claims on Ukraine; Soaring Prices Send Key Inflation Measure to 40-Year High; Moody's Says Gas Prices Could Cost Families $1,300 Per Year; British Soccer Giant Chelsea FC Frozen by Sanctions on Russian Billionaire Owner Roman Abramovich. Aired 1:30-2p ET
Aired March 10, 2022 - 13:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[13:32:45]
ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Welcome back. The U.N. reports more than two million people have fled the country since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Romania now has almost 85,000 Ukrainians in shelters right now. Most people arriving with next to nothing.
CNN's Miguel Marquez joins us at a train station in Bucharest.
Miguel, what's the flow of refugees like there?
MIQUEL MARQUEZ, CNN SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Yes, look, it's heavy today. There's a lot of refugees coming through here. We're sort of at the area at it time where it's hard to tell what's hush hour and what's refugees.
But I want to show you what is still happening. This area has been setup as a refugee center here. There are several in the train station.
What we've seen in the last couple of days, though, is the level of organization by the Romanians has gotten so much better. They bring in food here all day long.
You can see how busy the train station is. They're laying on more trains as well to get them from different parts of the country -- out of the country to where they want to go.
They even have folks for -- they set this up in the last 24 hours or so for pets.
People come here with their cat, their dog, get everything from pet food to leashes, vaccines for the animals, even international passports so if they're going on from here.
They had hundreds of thousands of refugees come through Romania. Most of them are leaving. They have about 8,500 here remaining in the country, as you mentioned.
And they are gearing up for more. Here in Bucharest is where most of the refugees come. And then they go out from here.
They're preparing for as many as 6,500 refugees to be in temporary centers here in Bucharest -- Ana?
CABRERA: Miguel Marquez, thank you for that update.
Not all Ukrainians fleeing their homes have headed to other countries. Many have moved to cities farther west, like Lviv.
Anderson Cooper reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST (voice-over): It's good to know there are still some children in Ukraine who have no idea a war has come.
(on camera): Can you make the sound of the pigeons? Coo, coo, coo.
(voice-over): In Lviv, a little girl named Eva delights in feeding pigeons in the park. She's 3 years old. But this is not her home.
She arrived two weeks ago with her mother, Ana, and Timoor, her father, and baby sister from Kharkiv.
[13:35:01]
(on camera): Do they understand what's going on?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translation): No. We are lucky because when the bombing started it was night and she was asleep.
All the basic things were already packed. You understand, my husband and I just grabbed documents, our photo cards, my child's toy, and the suitcase already pack.
We put that in the car and drove straightaway. Every day, Timoor filled the car with gasoline so we would be ready. We expected this to happen. We are from Donetsk. We have gone through this before.
COOPER: What do you tell a child about what is happening?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translation): Adventure, just an adventure.
COOPER (voice-over): The kids think it's an adventure. But for Ana and Timoor, it's more like a nightmare. It's the second time they've lost their home.
In 2014, when Russia invaded, they lived in Donetsk after fleeing to Kharkiv. Now they're displaced again.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translation): They will never defeat us because this is our land. I just want the world to help.
Yesterday, I saw in the news that a baby died because its mom was crushed under the building. I cannot imagine it. I want the world to help us to stop it.
COOPER: Timoor has volunteered to fight any day now.
(on camera): You took a military course but you never fought before. Are you worried about it? Are you scared?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translation): I am ready to defend my country. I'm not scared.
COOPER: Ukraine?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ukraine. Nobody can defeat us.
COOPER (voice-over): For now, Timoor volunteers moving and packing supplies for soldiers on the front lines.
(on camera): How do you both try to keep things normal for your children?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translation): Simple, really, cartoons.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translation): Cartoons, drawing, dancing.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translation): Now we are playing hide- and-seek so they can learn to hide when it will be needed. Maybe they will come here, too.
COOPER: You pretend everything is normal for them?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This place is not safe because of the rockets can --
COOPER: The war can come here.
When you go to fight, will your family stay here?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
COOPER: You don't want them to go to another country?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I love my country and my wife loves my country. We don't leave our motherland.
COOPER (voice-over): Like so many here, they plan to stay. One family determined not to flee anymore.
Anderson Cooper, CNN, Lviv, Ukraine.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CABRERA: Such beautiful girls there.
Ahead, they're fighting the facts, the truth, what's really going on in Ukraine.
How pro-Russia social media accounts are trying to convince the public not to believe news reports on this war. They even call suffering Ukrainians, quote, "crisis actors."
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[13:43:08]
CABRERA: As the world watches the brutalities of war play out, pro- Russian accounts on social media are waging their own war on the truth and sowing doubts about the deaths in Ukraine.
CNN reporter, Daniel Dale, joins us now to call out these blatant deceptions.
Daniel, take it away.
DANIEL DALE, CNN REPORTER: There are a bunch of examples, unfortunately. And one of them that has spread in the last week is especially sneaky. So I want to break it down step by step.
There was a protest in Austria in early February calling for action against climate change. Protesters laid down on the ground in body bags. They were moving around a bit. They were obviously not deceased.
And an Austrian news reporter covered the climate protest speaking in German. Here's a clip.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED AUSTRIAN NEWS REPORTER: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DALE: Three weeks later, after Russia invaded Ukraine, a faker on social media tried to make it seem like this clip showed something totally different.
The deceitful mainstream media televising footage of crisis actors in Ukraine. That is Ukrainians pretending to be killed in the war.
This fakery went pretty viral. So how did they do it?
Number one, someone deleted the German audio from the real climate news segment and replaced it with totally different unrelated English related audio from an NBC News report about Ukraine.
Number two, they deleted the on-screen German text about the climate protest and put in NBC's English-language text about Ukrainian casualties.
So watch a snippet of this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And 149 people wounded. Those numbers are going to go up. There's just no question about that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DALE: So this looks super shady, of course, except it's actually super deceptive.
Pro-Russia accounts on social media also circulated this clip of people running and screaming toward a camera that had been setup in an urban square, again, supposed evidence of Ukrainians faking their war terror.
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[13:45:04]
(SCREAMING)
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DALE: So that looks super staged, right? The thing is that it is staged.
But the staging has nothing at all to do with Ukraine. Rather, this is footage from the making of a low-budget British science-fiction film called "Invasion Planet Earth."
This film was filmed in 2013 in Birmingham, England. You can see a well-known building, plus the flag of the United Kingdom. And it has nothing to do at all with Ukraine.
The media didn't televise this footage as being from Ukraine.
So social media fakers are also claiming that the media are tricking with this footage. Actually, the tricking is actually being done by the pro-Russia accounts.
Yet another clip circulated by these pro-Russia accounts on social media shows a smiling actor having blood-style make-up being applied to his face. This is also being used as Ukrainians faking their war wounds.
In reality, it's just behind-the-scenes footage from the making of a TV thriller series about a deadly pandemic. It was filmed in 2020.
The show does take place in Ukraine but, again, it had nothing to do with the war.
And this footage is not being used by prominent Ukrainians or the media as evidence that Russia is wounding people. Frankly, Ana, there's more than enough terrible real footage to go
around.
CABRERA: And you pointed out thousands of people have shared some of these videos because they were duped, not because they were maliciously trying to spread misinformation.
So what are we learning, though, about the people behind the lies who are aware that what they're doing is completely, you know, unacceptable and yet they're doing it anyway?
DALE: The unfortunate thing, Ana, it's super hard to tell who actually created these fakes in the first place.
I can tell you the people aggressively spreading it are a mix of malicious pro-Russian actors, Russian-flagged accounts, even a Radio Sputnik host, Russian propaganda host, Lee Stranahan.
Plus, in addition, people who, again, are genuinely confused, just average Americas, average citizens of the world, who don't know they're spreading fakes and genuinely think something is array.
They've been tricked. And unfortunately, they pass on the trickery to others.
CABRERA: Another reminder just be very careful on social media.
Thank you so much, Daniel Dale. Appreciate you.
Can't live without food, gas, clothes. But how long will we have to live with the soaring prices? And just how high could they go?
Stay with us.
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[13:51:50]
CABRERA: A new government report confirms what your wallet already knows. Almost everything is getting more expensive.
The consumer price index, which is a key measure of inflation, just hit a new 40-year high, rising 7.9 percent over a 12-month period that ended in February.
And that means we are paying more for pretty much everything, including gas.
So, just how costly will those gas prices be for Americans? A new report from Moody's says they could drain an extra $1,300 per year from your wallet.
Right now, AAA says the average price is $4.32 per gallon nationally, up nearly 60 cents in a week.
CNN's Vanessa Yurkevich is at a gas station in New York City. What are you hearing there from drivers?
VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN BUSINESS & POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: Well, terrible is how one woman described the rising prices to me earlier today.
And $4.32 a gallon. That is a record today. Up seven cents, as you mentioned, overnight. Up almost 80 cents since the beginning of the Russian invasion into Ukraine.
And this is coming on top of inflation that was already pushing gas prices higher.
We spoke to one small business owner, a driver in California. That's the state with the highest gas prices in the country.
He says that he drives 450 miles a week for work. He says that the higher prices he's paying at the pump is affecting all of his expenses.
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DAVE LEMOS, LOS ANGELES DRIVER: We're hitting close to about $2,300 over budget on things that we never thought we had to even worry about, on gas and travel and couriers and stuff
(END VIDEO CLIP)
YURKEVICH: A new AAA study out this morning reveals that 60 percent of Americans said that they would change their driving habits, so either carpooling or cutting back on driving, if gas reaches over $4 a gallon. We are there.
And 75 percent of Americans in the survey said that they would change their driving habits if we saw gas over $5 a gallon. Analysts are expecting that we could reach $5 a gallon nationwide in the next month or so.
So with inflation, with the summer driving season and what is happening in Ukraine, Ana, it could be a very pricey couple of months for Americans at the pump -- Ana?
CABRERA: Yes. Gas prices are already over $5 a gallon in California, as you just showed us. And $7, we've seen at some places there.
Thank you, Vanessa.
One of the richest sports teams on the planet featuring America's top soccer star is now frozen by sanctions targeting its owner, Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich.
Now, United Kingdom's freeze on the oligarch's assets means that his soccer team, Chelsea Football Club, can't sell any new tickets for games, any merchandise, buy or transfer any players, or even offer new contracts for current players, which includes U.S. soccer star, Christian Pulisic. CNN's Amanda Davies is outside Chelsea's stadium in London.
What happens now, Amanda?
AMANDA DAVIES, CNN INTERNATIONAL SPORTS ANCHOR: Well, Ana, there are lots of questions that need some answers and need some answers fast. The sale of Chelsea Football Club is on hold for now.
[13:54:59]
The U.K. government have made it very clear they have imposed these sanctions in order that Abramovich does not in any way benefit from his ownership of the club.
So, that means the likes of Woody Johnson or Todd Boehly, who have been linked with potentially buying the club, after Abramovich said he was selling it on March 2nd, have to wait.
The club have said they will apply for a special license, a new license, which would mean it could still proceed, providing they can prove that Abramovich will in no way benefit from any new deal.
But this is certainly not the news the club wanted to hear on this, its 117th birthday -- Ana?
CABRERA: Amanda Davies, thank you.
That does it for us today.
The new continues right after this.
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