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Crackdown in Russia; Civilian Death Toll Rises in Ukraine. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired March 17, 2022 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:50]

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Hello. I'm Ana Cabrera in New York. Anderson Cooper is with us in Lviv, Ukraine.

We're staying on top of the breaking news. Survivors are emerging from the ruins one day after Russian forces bombed a theater in Mariupol. This is where hundreds of civilians were thought to have taken shelter.

A former Ukrainian official moments ago saying as many as 1,300 people were inside, and 130 of them reportedly have been rescued so far. Here's what it looked like before. These satellite images show the word "Children" written on both sides outside this building in Russian. And this was before Russian struck it. Again, we don't know the exact number of casualties.

What we do know is that this city has been reduced to rubble. New mass graves are being dug, as bodies, many of them children, line the streets -- Anderson.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: In Kyiv, stunning drone video of rescuers searching the wreckage on the top floors of an apartment building, this bomb striking just a few hours before curfew there was finally lifted. That curfew was in set for 35 hours.

We're told one person died in this attack. Still, British intelligence says that Russia's invasion has largely stalled on all fronts. Vladimir Putin's forces are resorting to older, less precise weapons that could lead to even more civilian deaths.

As Ukrainian fighters are about to get a big boost of weapons from the U.S. and NATO. We are hoping to get a lot more answers minutes from now on the situation from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is expected to speak live.

CNN's Sam Kiley is in Kyiv for us right now.

First, our Nick Paton Walsh in Odessa with the latest on that theater attack.

Nick, what do we know from the local officials?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR: I have to tell you, Anderson, still chillingly not really enough to answer the key question of how many lives may awfully have been lost in this, I should point out, this utterly barbaric airstrike on a bomb shelter which was crammed full of women and children.

Now, the ultimate question has been since the start of this, how many people were inside that bomb shelter? Repeatedly, officials have said today 1,200, 1,300 possibly as the most. Initially, thoughts were possibly 1,000.

Now the first problem everybody faced, of course, was that the bomb initially hit the entrance to the bomb shelter, making the rescue of those inside impossible initially, partly because of the intense shelling. Now we're learning from the former governor of the Donbass area before it was essentially taken over by separatists backed by Russia that rescuers are scarce, because simply those services that should exist do not anymore in a city under siege, under consistent bombardment.

So people have been trying to clear the rubble themselves. That has been an exceptionally slow and difficult process even today in daylight hours. Apparently, 130 people have been removed or have got out from that bomb shelter as survivors, which leaves this chilling question of the possibility of 1,000 people who may still be in there whose whereabouts are unclear at the moment.

A lot of -- a paucity of information here, Anderson, leading people to perhaps fear the worst, but also this morning, as it began to be clear people were possibly going to emerge and the bomb shelter may be intact, that this may not be quite as horrifying as thought.

But the one thing that simply cannot be overlooked or assuaged here by any reduced death toll is the act of dropping a bomb on a place you mentioned yourself that has the words "Children," "Deti" in Russian, sort of visible from space on either side of it, a place which had social media posted videos posted six days ago showing how crammed even then there were women and children in that basement, trying to survive on the basic amount of food they could lay their hands on.

Utterly shocking any military would consider that a viable target -- Anderson.

COOPER: And, Nick, in the images that we're seeing, there are buildings relatively intact on either side. It's not as if the entire area was destroyed.

It looks like this building in particular was the target.

WALSH: And so you ask yourself, do Russian officials believe the kind of preposterous idea that they put out, that this was in fact Ukrainian nationalists destroying their own -- we have heard this sort of stuff before.

[13:05:08]

And it always comes out after some atrocity like this, that Russia essentially says the Ukrainians did it to themselves.

You mentioned there the pinpoint nature of this strike. I think that is what is so deeply chilling. There is video posted six, seven days ago now of the people running that shelter standing outside of it, saying, there are just women and children inside here. We need food. We need help.

And you have to ask yourself whether that video, in fact, led the Russian strike to them. It's a really warped logic, as a human being, to work out why somebody would possibly think that way. But you have to ask yourself, given how precisely this shelter seems to have been targeted, whether that was at fact, in play, in Moscow's military planners' minds -- Anderson.

COOPER: Sam Kiley in Kyiv, more strikes have been taking place, I understand, there.

What have you been seeing and hearing now that the curfew is over?

SAM KILEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, in the small hours of this morning, Anderson, as you said in your introduction there, an apartment building in the west of the city was hit. It was actually hit by a downed missile.

The missile defense systems here are working pretty well. I think that's why we're seeing less destruction here in the center of the city so far, because the caliber-type cruise missiles that the Russians have fired -- and it would have been something in that precision strike that Nick has just been reporting on in Mariupol that did that catastrophic damage.

This was one that was shot down. But, nonetheless, they have to come down somewhere. Tragically, one woman was killed in that strike. But, elsewhere, just to the north of here -- and it's all part of this pattern that Nick's been reporting on and we have all been talking about of the deliberate targeting of civilians; 53, 53 civilians have been killed in the last 24 hours in Chernihiv.

That is the first town -- or the last town before the Belarusian border on this axis that the Russians first came in on, and they hope to capture the capital here in Kyiv, 53 people killed in 24 hours, 10 in a bread queue yesterday, again, an absurd blaming by the Russians of the Ukrainians, claiming that the Ukrainians shot these people in a queue in order to make the Russians look bad.

This is the sort of propaganda that they're churning out that I don't suppose even their own population are now believing. But it does indicate an ongoing pattern reconfirmed again by British intelligence, saying that, because they have run into the sand, effectively, or the mud in this part of the world, they have lost the momentum, the Russians are resorting to wholesale killing of civilians, and, above all, the use of dumb bombs.

Yes, we have seen the precision strike in Mariupol. We have seen this caliber-type missile, cruise missile shot down over Kyiv. And -- but we are seeing a lot of the use of dumb bombs. And now we are seeing counterattacks. Those pictures, they're coming from the west of the city, where the Ukrainian government has now confirmed it is now pushing hard back on the Russian forces, who are stalling in their attempts to get into the capital.

And, indeed, from the Ukrainian perspective, sources are saying they're doing reasonably well in pushing the Russians back, which, of course, gives greater urgency to their begging and demands for more weaponry from the West, particularly the stuff that they can use at infantry level and knock out those tanks that so threaten the capital and have so been destroying places around the country -- Anderson.

COOPER: Yes.

I just want to point out. I mean, I know we just showed a video of a woman bent over crying over the covered body, I imagine, bloodied cover over a small body in the street in Kyiv, just weeping on the side of the street.

I mean, I don't want this to just become wallpaper that people just look at and get used to. This is -- I mean, the agony of this one person, and life in the city, sadly, goes on, because people have to get shelter. They have to get food.

And yet this woman's life is -- her love is over. Her -- I mean, it's just -- it is -- it just bears -- I just want us to bear witness to that moment, because I just think it says a lot about what people are going through right now.

Sam Kiley, thank you, Nick Paton Walsh as well -- Ana, back to you in New York.

CABRERA: It is just so, so painful to see images like that.

And we heard Sam talk about these dumb bombs that are being used by the Russians. And I want to focus on that, because we're hearing from British intelligence that Russia is using older, less precise weapons.

And joining us now is retired us Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt.

And, General, I want to show the video, additional video, of some of these recent Russian strikes, because I wonder, does this intel about these older weapons, less precise weapons that they're using mean, A, the Russians don't care who they kill, or, B, they don't have the weapons the U.S. thought they had, or, C, that they're saving more sophisticated, more expensive bombs for something else?

[13:10:22]

BRIG. GEN. MARK KIMMITT (RET.), FORMER U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR PLANS AND STRATEGY: Well, listen, Ana, before we talk about that precisely, I'd like to follow up on what Anderson said.

And, unfortunately, we continue to use these ephemeral terms like military planners. Look, I was an artilleryman, and I know how to control fires. I was responsible for looking at a map and telling my subordinate units what they can't fire at. And they can blame this as being incidental or accidental, but that's not what the senior officers do.

They put in restrictions on areas that they do not allow their people to shoot at. And to allow this kind of carnage, I think people understand what's eventually going to happen to these people. But, in the interim, we have got to quit referring to them as military planners, and we start -- need to start naming them by rank and by name and blaming them and shaming them and sanctioning them.

We have got to stop saying that this is sort of some abstract military planner. These are named generals, named colonels, and they ought to be shown with wanted posters for what they're doing inside the country right now.

CABRERA: So the weapons they're using, though, do you think it's because they don't have more sophisticated weapons to use that could be more precise? Or do you think that they do have them in their arsenal, and those are coming later?

KIMMITT: I don't think they care. I don't think they care in the lease.

Their job is to terrorize the population. They're trying to make sure that the cities are shelled, that the people see this kind of shock. And they want the city to capitulate. They want to surround it. They want to shell it. They want to starve it. And the Russians then will storm it.

This is intentional. And whether they use dumb bombs or precision weapons, it doesn't matter.

CABRERA: The U.S. is sending a laundry list of new weapons, right, to Ukraine to try to help in this fight.

KIMMITT: Yes.

CABRERA: As we put that up, what stands out most to you here?

KIMMITT: Well, a couple of things.

They are starting to send weapons appropriate for urban combat. Yes, they're sending more Javelins. Yes, they're sending more air defense Stingers. But now we're starting to see in that list weapons like AT4s. This is a short range anti-tank weapon that is used in -- it's only good to 300 yards. That means it's really only good inside of urban combat.

Same with the extra ammunition. Same with some of this other equipment. They are not only resupplying the outside fight, but they're now trying to make sure that the Ukrainians have what they need to fight the inside fight inside of Kyiv and other cities.

And, candidly, there are a couple of missing items there that I would have liked to have seen.

CABRERA: What's that?

KIMMITT: Well, for example, I don't see a lot of what we call counterbattery and countermortar radars.

I was an artilleryman. I had two responsibilities. And that was to fire on enemy positions, but also counterfire on their artillery, their missile and their rocket sites. These radars allow you to backtrack where those missiles and artillery are coming from, so you can then use those as targets and fire against them and shut them down.

I would have liked to -- we have sent some, but I would have liked to have seen many, many more. It may be an issue of training, but we have got to....

CABRERA: I do want to point out a couple of...

KIMMITT: Yes, go ahead.

CABRERA: I just wanted to point out a couple of the weapons, though, that we do understand that they will be getting and using. And that includes a Switchblade drone.

And, for our viewers, these are small portable drones that carry a warhead on them.

KIMMITT: Yes.

CABRERA: They detonate on impact. They also are being sent the S-300 surface-to-air missile systems. These have longer-range than those Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

KIMMITT: Yes.

CABRERA: And I know that these are not the jets or the no-fly zone that Zelenskyy has really wanted and asked for. But are these game- changers?

KIMMITT: Two quick comments.

The S-300 and the other Warsaw Pact equipment that we're sending, in the SA-4, 6's and 8's, that will make a difference against their aircraft. The Switchblade, not a game-changer. It basically is a hand grenade with wings. It's got limited capacity, so we shouldn't expect too much out of it.

CABRERA: OK, thank you so much, General. I really appreciate your time, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt. Thank you for joining us.

[13:15:02] And I just want to reiterate the barbarity and the gravity of this tragedy unfolding in Ukraine. It's hard to put into words. It's hard to really demonstrate with just a single image, but something that I read shook me to my core. And I want to share it with you.

It's from two of the few journalists who are working in the port city of Mariupol, which has just been devastated. This is where that maternity hospital was bombed last week. It's where the theater full of civilians was struck in just the last day or so.

And listen to this reporting. This is from Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka of the Associated Press. I want to warn you, the images that are also part of this report are as heart-wrenching and disturbing as their words.

I'm quoting: "The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling. There's 18-month-old Kirill, whose shrapnel wound to the head proved too much for his little toddler's body. There's 16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were blown up in an explosion during a soccer game at a school field. There's the girl no older than 6 who wore the pajamas with cartoon unicorns and who was among the first of Mariupol's children to die from a Russian shell.

"They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap of white fabric. Workers toss the bodies in as fast as they can, because the less time they spend in the open, the better their own chances of survival.

"'Damn them all, those people who started this!' raged Volodymyr Bykovskyi, a worker pulling crinkling black body bags from a truck.

"More bodies will come, from streets where they are everywhere and from the hospital basement where the corpses of adults and children are laid out, awaiting someone to pick them up. The youngest still has an umbilical stump attached."

We will be right back.

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[13:21:42]

CABRERA: It's a chilling threat, President Putin fueling fears of a fresh crackdown on any Russians with a pro-Western mentality.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

VLADIMIR PUTIN, RUSSIAN PRESIDENT (through translator): But any people, the Russian people especially, are able to distinguish true patriots from bastards and traitors, and will spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths. I am certain that this necessary and natural self-cleaning of our

society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, togetherness and our readiness to answer any calls to action.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: Joining us now is Max Boot. He is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's also a "Washington Post" columnist.

And, Max, you were born in Russia. Your family is from Russia. What's your response to Putin?

MAX BOOT, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, this is really deranged rhetoric, Ana, which is sort of reminiscent of Stalin.

It's not something you would expect from a leader of modern Russia. But I think it's emblematic of what Putin is doing to Russia, which is that he is re-Sovietizing it. It's really going back to the kind of country that my family and I fled in 1976.

He is extinguishing all hope of an open society in Russia. He is moving from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, and he is disconnecting the Russian economy from the West. I mean, I think it's very symbolic that there are pictures coming out of Russia now of women practically fighting with one another in long lines for sugar, which is suddenly in short supply.

I mean, these are the kind of shortages of basic consumer goods that my family was certainly very used to in the 1970s in the Soviet Union under the dark days of communism. But you never imagined that they would happen with Russia taking a capitalist turn after 1991. And yet here we are.

CABRERA: Yes.

BOOT: Putin is really returning Russia to some of its darkest days.

CABRERA: I do wonder, because this has that personal connection to you. And you remember when.

Has it been extra painful, then, to watch what's unfolding right now? Does it feel more personal to you?

BOOT: Well, absolutely, because my whole family is Russian.

We still have very distant relatives in Russia. But, certainly, it's a tragedy, what's happening, not just to the Ukrainian people. I mean, that's the bigger tragedy, that they're getting bombed and killed and murdered, as you have shown just a few minutes ago. But what's happening to the Russian people is also a tragedy, because they don't get a chance to vote on their leaders.

They didn't get a chance to decide on this war. It was basically a decision that was made by Putin and maybe a handful of people around him. And now he's sending these poorly trained Russian soldiers to their deaths in Ukraine. And he is cracking down on the last vestiges of freedom in Russia.

It's -- you're seeing young people, anybody with any hope fleeing the country, much as my family fled the country in 1976. I mean, it is personal. It is tragic to me to see what's happening, because there's no reason why Russia can't be a normal European country.

[13:25:00]

It is now being held hostage by this homicidal dictator, Vladimir Putin. And it's really on his head that these war crimes lie.

CABRERA: And, Max, you mentioned your own experience and what your family fled in 1976. You wrote about it in an opinion piece in "The Washington Post."

And one of the things that really stood out to me was how you focused in on McDonald's. The fact that McDonald's has shut down its operations, that stood out to you. Explain why.

BOOT: Well, this was a real revelation for me. When I came to the U.S. in 1976, I was only 7 years old, and I never had a hamburger, I'd never had a french fry, that these were all new experiences for me, because, of course, in the 1970s, there were no McDonald's, there was no Burger King, there was no nothing in the Soviet Union.

So I was just pulled over moving to California, and, as a little kid, getting to go to McDonald's and pig out. So it was very symbolic that, in 1990, the first McDonald's opened its doors in Moscow. So, all of a sudden, even people living in Moscow, could have the kind of experiences that those of us who left in the '70s could only acquire by leaving the country.

And so that was symbolic of Russia opening up to the world and creating a more capitalist economy. And so I think it's very symbolic the other way that, just recently, all 850 McDonald's restaurants in Russia have suspended their operations. I think that's an indicator of what Putin is inflicting on the country.

Again, you're going back to the dark days of communism, when there were just no Western restaurants or shops in the Soviet Union. And now all these Western stores and restaurants are rapidly closing one by one.

CABRERA: Yes. Yes, and so now no more Big Macs, no more french fries, no more Starbucks, no more independent media. And now you have the ruble falling. That means everything is a lot more expensive.

But the people are responding. Not only are they fleeing. You have thousands who have been arrested protesting. Sports stars are speaking out. Ballet dancers are leaving. TV hosts are quitting.

Has Putin lost control? Could this snowball into a full-blown revolt?

BOOT: Well, I would not say Putin has lost control yet. I mean, he has a very effective police state. The Russian security forces are not very good at invading other countries, as we're seeing, but they're very good at keeping control of their own country, and they're utterly ruthless.

Alexei Navalny remains in jail. And a lot of these protesters, very brave people, are going to prison as well. But I think the fact that, despite all of Russia's repression, you're still seeing so many protests, including high-profile actions, like the woman who held up the anti-war sign on the Russian news broadcast, you're seeing high- profile sports and artistic figures denouncing the war, I think that's an indicator that Putin does not have a lot of support for the conflict, even despite all of his brainwashing, despite all of his attempts to crack down on independent information.

I mean, granted, most Russians probably don't know what's really going on in Ukraine, but I think Putin is so concerned to crack down on dissent and crack down on information because he's worried about what Russians will say if they knew what was being done in their name.

And I just think that there's a statute of limitations on how long Putin can keep the truth from the Russian people.

CABRERA: Yes.

BOOT: They will find out.

And as the body bags continue to come home -- and, by some estimates, the Russians have already lost at least 7,000 troops in Ukraine, the worst loss of life in combat for them since 1945. That is going to make an impact. People are going to understand that something very bad is happening...

CABRERA: Yes.

BOOT: ... despite all of Putin's attempts to keep the truth out.

CABRERA: And there is reporting that there's been a big increase in demand for VPNs, which people can use then to get around some of those blockages when it comes to certain media.

Max Boot, thank you for your time and sharing your own personal story as well with us. We really appreciate it.

Millions of Ukrainians are risking their lives to flee their country. They're worried about food, warmth, a place to sleep. Now growing fears Ukrainian refugees could be targeted by traffickers.

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