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Ukraine Says, Mariupol Evacuation Buses Being Held at Russian Checkpoint; Russian Shelling Relentless Despite Promise to Reduce Attacks; Putin Authorizes Draft of Nearly 135,000 Into Russian Military. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired March 31, 2022 - 10:00   ET

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

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[10:00:00]

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Good Thursday morning. I'm Erica Hill.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Jim Sciutto.

This is the nature of the war in Ukraine right now. Russia is blocking a convoy of evacuation buses filled with people or intended to be filled with people from the besieged city of Mariupol, this after both sides had agreed to a new humanitarian corridor out of that hard hit city today.

We're also getting fresh look at the destruction in the city of Kharkiv in the northeast this morning. Officials say that Russian troops struck the area at least 47 times yesterday. And oftentimes, the targets are civilians.

Russian forces slamming parts of the east, the Donbas region as well.

HILL: Also breaking this morning, Vladimir Putin said to be looking to draft more than 134,000 additional Russian citizens into its military, part of its twice a year draft. This as the Pentagon believes that Putin is being misinformed on the progress of the war.

Let's begin with CNN's John Berman. He is, of course, reporting from Lviv, Ukraine. So, john, officials believe Putin is not only misinformed but also he massively misjudged the situation in Ukraine as we see Russian forces continue to strike several areas, specifically in the east. What more is happening today with the situation?

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, both really can be true at the same time, that there has been a failure to achieve what he wanted to on the ground, but shifting some of the focus to the air and just devastating some cities from the air. Officials also say that Russian forces may be regrouping in Belarus, north of Ukraine.

The mayor of Chernihiv, this is one of the cities where the Russians had claimed they were going to, perhaps, back off some of their operations, he told me he thinks the Russians are still targeting civilians. I'm joined now by CNN International Correspondent Phil Black here with me in Lviv. And it really does seem that the Russians have shifted some of what they're doing.

PHIL BLACK, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: There is a transition taking place on the map. I think there's no question about that now, John, because we're already hearing reports from the east of a real uptick in the intensity of attacks that is taking place there. Ukrainian officials say that is because of new units, new Russian hardware arriving there to join the fight.

This is entirely in line with what Russia is saying that they are going to focus on this eastern Donbas region but the intensity is quite extraordinary. In the region of Kharkiv, the military chief there said 400 Russian attacks, Russian rocket attacks in the last 24 hours. And, of course, we're also seeing a withdrawal of Russian forces from the area of Kyiv and Chernihiv in the north as well.

Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, is the latest senior western official to make the point that this isn't really a withdrawal, this is a repositioning. Russia is set launch new offensive operations, consolidated defensive operations, and there's a real fear about what sort of suffering that will cause particularly for the civilian population.

Meanwhile, some support for that U.S. intelligence assessment that Vladimir Putin isn't particularly well informed about what's been happening here, but during the war, and n the lead-up, these are comments that have come from a British intelligence chief. Take a listen now to the head of the GCHQ, that's government's -- the British government's electronic surveillance operation. He made this comments a little earlier in Australia. Take a look.

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JEREMY FLEMING, DIRECTOR OF BRITISH SPY AGENCY GCHQ: We've seen Russian soldiers, short of weapons and morale, refusing to carry out all of this, sabotaging their own equipment, and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft.

And even though we believe Putin's advisers are afraid to tell him the truth, what's going on and the extent of these misjudgments must be crystal clear to the regime.

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BLACK: Now, on the subject of demoralized soldiers, John, you remember that some of the Russians that had been captured here, no doubt, hurt here as well, have been conscripts. That is Russian men serving their annual military compulsory service. Vladimir Putin has just signed his regular decree, calling up another 135,000 or so Russian civilians to perform that military service.

Now, it will take some months for them to train and be ready and be ready for deployment and so forth. So, presumably, hopefully, that call-up would have no impact on the war that we're reporting here right now.

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BERMAN: Right. And, again, the presence of novice troops may not help the Russians anyway.

Phil Black, thank you very much for that. Erica, Jim?

HILL: All right. John, thank you.

Officials in Mykolaiv say at least 20 people are dead following the attack that left this massive hole in an administration building on Tuesday.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Keep in mind what we're seeing here. In multiple cities in Ukraine, Russia's deliberately attacking civilian targets and civilians are dying, it's happening every day.

CNN Senior International Correspondent Ben Wedeman, he is there. So, Ben, I mean, we had you at the site of that attack earlier this week in and around there. What do you see? And can you explain to folks at home exactly where these bombs and missiles and rockets are falling and who's suffering as a result?

BEN WEDEMAN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, specifically, Jim, this was on the regional governor's headquarters, which is in the heart of the city, literally in the heart of the city. It is surrounded by apartment buildings, home to civilian residents and we saw that just row after every floor blasted, windows shattered.

So -- and, in fact, this is the regional governor's office. It's a civilian's office. It's not a military office. There's never been a suggestion that it was a military office. But, clearly, the intention of the Russians is to make the price of resistance something very high indeed.

And what's amazing is that, you know, that strike took place at 8:45 in the morning local time on Tuesday. More than 48 hours later, they are still pulling bodies from the rubble.

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WEDEMAN (voice over): Somewhere in this jumble of concrete, bricks and twisted metal are more bodies trapped in the ruins of the office of Mykolaiv's regional governor. Tuesday morning, a Russian missile struck the building, killing more than a dozen people, wounding many more.

MAYOR OLEKSANDR SYENKEVYCH, MYKOLAIV, UKRAINE: They bombard our city. And only civilians are dying here.

WEDEMAN: Mykolaiv Mayor Oleksandr Syenkevych doesn't normally come to city hall like this but he saw a war coming long ago and prepared himself.

SYENKEVYCH: Starting from 2014, I thought that the war will be like this. So, everything for me is bulletproof vests, boots, anything, I bought it a couple years ago. So, I started to learn how to shoot. I was in a special school for that.

WEDEMAN: On the outskirts of this city, recently downed Russian attack helicopters suggest that Ukrainian military also saw this war coming. They've managed to stop Russian forces in their tracks, regaining territory lost at the start of the war.

Five-year-old Misha is recovering from shrapnel wounds to his head in the basement turned bomb shelter at Mykolaiv's Regional Children's Hospital. His grandfather, Vladimir, shows me phone video of the bullet-riddled car Misha's father was driving with his family to escape the Russian advance. Russian soldiers, Vladimir calls them bastards, opened fire on the car, killing Misha's grandmother and mother.

As we speak, the air raid siren goes off. Taking shelter is an oft- practiced drill. Stay calm and carry on.

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WEDEMAN (on camera): And, indeed, this city is staying calm and carrying on. Right behind me, you can see these are trees that city workers have cut down all along this boulevard. They're going to use the larger trunks to reinforce trenches and barricades outside the city and they're going to be using the smaller branches to provide fuel and firewood for soldiers on the frontlines.

But as I'm talking to you, if we just pan the camera over here, there's traffic. People are out. Stores are open. People, despite everything, despite frequent bombardment in this city, are keeping calm and carrying on. Jim?

SCIUTTO: It's one of the most remarkable features of this war, right, is that people standing up to this as best they can in the midst of danger. Ben Wedeman in Mykolaiv, thanks so much.

So, as the world watches for Vladimir Putin's next moves in Ukraine, my next guest says that when it comes to U.S. claims that putin has been misinformed by advisers about just how badly the Russian military is doing, there's, quote, no bigger insult to Putin. Of course, he's once a KGB agent himself.

So, joining me now, Russia and Cyber Security Expert Dmitri Alperovitch. Dmitri, good to have you on this morning.

DMITRI ALPEROVITCH, CO-FOUNDER, CROWDSTRIKE: Thank you.

SCIUTTO: First, I want to begin with your sense of the situation on the battlefield right now, because you do have evidence that Russian forces, at least for now, redeploying from around Kyiv to the east and southern parts of the country, but you have President Putin now announcing a draft presumably to send more forces into Ukraine.

[10:10:11] Do you view this as a short-term tactical shift by Russia to the east and the south or longer term shrinkage of Russian ambitions in Ukraine?

ALPEROVITCH: No, I think there's no question that they have to shrink their ambitions. They know they can't take Kyiv. They know they can't occupy the whole country. Their forces are exhausted. Most of their ground forces have been committed to Ukraine, so they have to rotate them out. The draft is not going to bump up in the short-term. Most of these conscripts need to be trained before they're sent in to fight. So, he's going to have a real problem on his hands and he needs to shrink the ambitions just to the Donbas, and even that is in question whether he can actually take that whole area.

SCIUTTO: A fascinating aspect of this war from the beginning has been the information aspect of this. One piece of that has been the U.S. releasing so much intelligence about Russian planning prior, about Russian plans for false flag attacks to kind of undermine Russian information operations. Now, we have the Defense Department declassifying, in effect, intelligence about what senior advisers are telling or not telling Vladimir Putin.

And you say this is a fascinating strategy. Tell us why.

ALPEROVITCH: It has been absolutely remarkable to watch this. The fact that we're declassifying some of the most sensitive intelligence we probably have, learning what the advisers are telling Putin, imagine the type of access that we have to have to know that and, frankly, the source of the methods that we're putting at risk to do that. But it's messing with his head. As I said, there is no bigger insult to a KGB officer, former KGB officer, than to tell him that he's misinformed about his own military and his own war. Even calling him a butcher, he probably considers that some sort of twisted phrase. But calling him misinformed, he's really upset about that.

SCIUTTO: Yes, he does not want to be called dumb, certainly.

Another thing that many of us, and I know yourself as well, have been watching is how the Russian public is reacting to this. We have to grant that it's a largely closed information environment. They don't see the facts, certainly on Russian media, and so much has been chased out of the country, the few independent outlets remaining.

There's a new from the Russian independent pollster, Levada, which has had some accuracy in terms of measuring Russian public opinion in the past and it shows that Putin's support has actually increased since the start of the invasion. And I wonder how you read those numbers. Do you believe that's an accurate reflection of Russian public opinion?

ALPEROVITCH: I do believe it. I think you have sort of a rallying around the flag, the fact that is taking place right now, closing ranks to consolidate around the president, the wartime president, for many Russians. The propaganda forces in full swing, touting not just the Russian successes on the battlefield, alleged successes but also touting the fact that Ukrainians are building nuclear weapons and have biolabs, all the nonsense that they're pushing out, and many people are believing it.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Russia has a history of hiding or attempting to hide or punishing people for acknowledging military losses, including families who have lost their sons in war. The Russian personnel losses are off the charts in this war. Even the low end estimates already outpace U.S. losses in Iraq and Afghanistan combined in 20 years, and it's already approaching Russian losses in Afghanistan in its invasion in the 1980s, over the course of nearly decade here.

Can Putin hide those losses from the Russian people?

ALPEROVITCH: No. And they've tried in the past to classify the losses to tell the parents that if they disclose that their sons have died in wars, that they'll be prosecuted under revelations of state secrets. But you can't hide something this massive, particularly when you have general officers that have been killed.

But the problem, of course, is the propaganda is working. You hear from parents of dead soldiers saying that they believe that their sons have died for a righteous cause. It's not yet having a corrosion effect on Putin's popularity.

SCIUTTO: Yes, we'll have to watch over time.

Okay. So, you have peace talks underway. There's a lot of skepticism, certainly from the U.S., NATO, also from Ukrainians, but they're participating here and they're presenting public proposals. Given that Putin has said explicitly, he said this publicly in his television address before the invasion, he doesn't believe Ukraine is an independent country, that, historically, in his view, it's part of Russia. Can Ukraine, can the west trust any peace agreement Putin that might sign?

ALPEROVITCH: Not over the long-term. And, by the way, he's also called him a Nazis. So, how do you make a deal with a Nazi? That's going to be problematic for him as well. But the problem is that he can walk away from the deal that does not at least acknowledge Crimea, that does not consolidate his control over the areas that he's occupied, particularly that bridge to Crimea area, some of the extensions in the Donbas. And Zelenskyy is just never going to sign it. So, I think the sides are very far apart. You might have a small cease-fire to give both sides a chance to regroup and get some rest, but I don't see a long lasting peace here.

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SCITUTTO: Dmitri Alperovitch, great to have your expertise.

ALPEROVITCH: Thank you.

SCIUTTO: Still to come this hour, intense shelling still on the frontlines in Ukraine, the danger that remains around the capital, Kyiv. Our next guest is there in the capital where explosions and air raid sirens continue.

HILL: Plus, a Republican senator echoes Donald Trump, essentially inviting Russian interference in the United States, saying if Vladimir Putin has, quote, dirt on President Biden, he should release it.

And just moments ago, Blue Origin successfully launched its fourth crewed space tourism mission. All six passengers just touching back down after their flight of about ten minutes. The crew included the chief architect of that New Shepard capsule and five paying customers.

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HILL: Right now, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is warning Russia will continue to inflict pain across Ukraine, reinforcing a view that Russia is planning to regroup and resupply rather than abandon attacks around Kyiv all together.

CNN's Fred Pleitgen was in the city of Irpin, near Kyiv, and found evidence that the violence there has not slowed.

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FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Through heavily fortified checkpoints, we reached the edge of Kyiv, at the suburb, Irpin. Suddenly, on top of the artillery barrages, you hear gunfire, much closer than we have to take cover.

This is what it sounds like after Russia said it has to scale down its military operations around Kyiv. Even in the calmer moments, the big guns are never silent.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: Joining me to discuss is Bennett Murray. He's a Freelance Journalist in Kyiv. Bennett, good to have you with us this morning.

As Fred points out there, as we've heard from officials and from our teams on the ground in Ukraine, certainly, the attacks have not stopped. In some areas, they've actually increased, it sounds like. I know you wrote a piece about the sound of the explosions, the constant sound of explosion, the sites burned out buildings all around have become common place. Give us a sense. What is it like there on the ground, because as I understand it, there are also areas of central Kyiv that are sort of returning to a more normal life in some ways?

BENNETT MURRAY, FREELANCE JOURNALIST: Well, that is true, Erica. Central Kyiv has been fairly untouched since the war began for the most part. There have been exceptions. Just today, I went to a Georgian restaurant for the first time since I've arrived here and you are seeing some coffee shops out. Traffic that's getting more intense, nowhere near pre-war levels though, and yet, just today, after going most of the day without hearing much in the way of combat, shortly before this call, there was a major explosion. That could have either been a missile strike or an intercepted missile. I haven't been able to verify it. So, the war is still there.

HILL: Is it -- and when you're out and when you're seeing residents out, what is that like? I mean, if you make the decision to go to a restaurant, how do you make that decision, right, because you're also weighing your safety?

MURRAY: Well, in the area around Central Kyiv, for a few square miles, it is more or less safe in a minute-by-minute basis. Of course, air raid sirens indicate that something could be going wrong. There's the risk of that things could be not so safe in a fairly short amount of time. However, day-by-day, I, more or less, walk around before the curfew begins at 9:00 P.M. in the middle of the city without a whole lot of personal fear.

HILL: You have a really unique perspective because you were in Russia starting in November of last year there through the early part of the war, or actually, the beginning, I should say, before you made your way into Ukraine. I'm curious, did you notice a change at all in what was being said and the way in which this propaganda, for a lack of a better word, was being put out in Russia about what the intent was and about what the actual action on the ground was?

MURRAY: Well, right. Right up until the war began, February 24th, Russian state propaganda was not (INAUDIBLE) people whatsoever. It was all talk about how the west is making up these lies about an invasion of Ukraine, they would never do that. Russians themselves who were pro-state who I met and encountered in my life would tell you as much that there's no way that we'll ever attack Ukraine. They're a Slavic fraternal nation. And so when the war struck, people were dumbfounded, as I saw.

I was only in the country for a few days and, in fact, I was in Siberia with that many people around. So, I didn't really get to see the change. When I left, it was just shock.

I'm still in touch with people in Moscow, Russians who tell me these people have begun to make peace with the situation, not everyone, of course, but people are maybe starting to kind of accept it and nod their heads along, unfortunately.

HILL: When you say, make peace, do they believe that it's an actual Russian invasion or do they believe some of the lines that have put out there that this was about saving Ukraine from neo-Nazis?

[10:25:04]

I mean, what are they making peace with?

MURRAY: They're making peace with the fact they live in a country where these things have to be believed or out there in the open, you act like you believe them. Russia has become far more totalitarian or authoritarian in the last weeks, really, as far as I've been told kind of observed from afar. And it's just easier to believe some of these ideas of the war, for many people at least.

HILL: I mean, have you told them though about the reality is on the ground in Ukraine? Do they believe you?

MURRAY: The people I know in Russia who I'm still in touch with already know what's going on.

HILL: And they believe it for what it is, that it's an invasion.

MURRAY: Yes. I mean, I think a lot of email who spend time in Moscow, foreigners make friends with Russians who are very -- they pay attention to the world through the same media that westerners do. And so my friends are definitely biased toward my own biases in this regard, yes.

HILL: Bennett Murray, I really appreciate your insight and your view from where you are there in Kyiv. Thank you.

MURRAY: Thank you, Erica.

SCIUTTO: Yes, great view there into what folks think on the ground in Russia.

Still ahead, another Republican, normalizing foreign interference in U.S. politics. Republican Senator Kevin Kramer, his suggestion to Vladimir Putin, who, in the same sentence, he called a war criminal. That's coming up.

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