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New Midterm White House Strategy?; Inflation Outlook; Russia Bombs Kyiv. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired April 29, 2022 - 14:00   ET

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

[14:00:13]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: Hello, everyone. I'm Alisyn Camerota. Welcome to CNN NEWSROOM. Victor has the day off.

We begin with the hundreds of people still trapped in that steel factory and begging for help in Mariupol, Ukraine. President Zelenskyy's office says there was an operation planned to rescue them today. But a variable official says Russian troops are blocking a section of the city right near the plant, preventing everyone inside from a safe evacuation.

There are elderly people trapped inside trying to stay alive. There are children. There's a 4-month-old baby. And now, in the past 24 hours Ukraine says 50 airstrikes have rained down on that steel plant, wounding more than 600 civilians inside.

A Ukrainian commander from inside, inside that factory, told CNN what it's like on day 64 inside that plant with Russians surrounding them.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAJ. SERHIY VOLYNA, COMMANDER, UKRAINIAN 36TH SEPARATE MARINE BRIGADE (through translator): Situation is critical. It's beyond a humanitarian catastrophe.

It's a very difficult situation. We have very little water, very little food left. Right now, we don't have any tools, any surgical tools, but we have some basics. But we -- also, we are in dire need of medication. We have almost no medication left.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: U.S. officials assess that Russia is making advances in the Donbass region in the east.

This video shows strikes hitting a rail hub and supply line in the Donetsk region. But Ukrainians are fighting back in that same city. A fuel depot controlled by Russians was hit. And Ukrainians say they have retaken a village near Kharkiv. That's the largest city in the east. It now shows the Ukrainian flag flying over the town hall.

CNN's Anderson Cooper joins us now from Kyiv.

So, Anderson, 24 hours ago, when you just first went on the air with us, we got those first reports of the airstrikes hitting Kyiv. So tell us what's happened since then.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: Yes, we know a little bit more.

We have learned a Ukrainian journalist was actually killed in those strikes yesterday. Russians hit the Artem factory, which manufactures missiles. Rescuers found a 54-year-old woman, according to Kyiv police. A friend said the Radio Liberty reporter died while in her second-floor apartment in the building next to the plant. Six

others also suffered injuries. Ukraine is condemning the strikes, which took place just as the U.N. secretary-general was wrapping up his visit here. I spoke to the mayor of Kyiv, Klitschko, who said that this was a middle finger from Russia to Ukraine and to the secretary- general, the fact that they targeted this plant at the same time that the secretary-general was on the ground here.

In a move to help Ukraine's defense, Kyiv officials are urging people to not drive their cars due to fuel shortage, in order to try to reserve that gas for the military.

Our international security editor, Nick Paton Walsh, joins us now from a southern city.

As we mentioned, Mariupol's mayor, Nick, claims that 600 people were injured in recent bombings of the steel plant there in Mariupol. What else do we know about what's happening on the ground?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR: Yes, I mean, it was today, Anderson, that, yet again, there were hopes there might be some sort of humanitarian corridor to get the dozens of children, hundreds of civilians, and possibly as many as 500 fighters still in that steel plant.

So, that had been a hope raised by a statement by the Ukrainian presidency, light on detail, but also too by the U.N. secretary- general, Antonio Guterres' trip to Moscow, where he met Russian President Vladimir Putin, this possibly on the agenda, the humanitarian corridor, and also to his meeting with President Zelenskyy in Kyiv.

But the bombs that rained down on the city while he was there, to quote the mayor of Kyiv, probably another middle finger, frankly, to the notion of a humanitarian corridor out of Mariupol. Clearly, Russia wants to meddle with those plans as frequently as possible.

And while we can't verify the information ourselves, it does appear, according to Ukrainian officials, that Russians have blocked access from the north of the Azovstal steel plant through a park known as Veselka, potentially impeding this umpteenth attempt to get people out of there, a simple task, frankly, for any modern military, like Russia claims to be, but clearly something they don't want to let happen.

And now this ghastly trauma of the remnants of people living in the only fortified place they can find in the ruins of Mariupol continues for another day, Anderson.

COOPER: There's new videos which have come out showing the Russian -- the aftermath of the Russian shelling of a railway bridge and a hub in Eastern Ukraine. What does it mean strategically?

[14:05:01]

WALSH: Yes, I mean, there's been this fascination, frankly, with the Russians and railways since this war began eight years ago.

And I think it speaks to some degree to the kind of pace of war that they're fighting here. It's not one from the air, like you would see where that's who they feel to be their great foe here, NATO. It is something that often requires the rail stock to move lumbering armor into far-flung points.

And so certainly, yes, while we saw targeting of Western railway hubs during the visit of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary Defense Lloyd Austin, it appears to continually be something that Russia seeks to weaken around the country. It prevents Ukraine moving things in, but also too subsequently may prevent Russia from bringing its armor closer forwards in occupied areas.

But it does really sort of speak, I think, to the nature of the war we're seeing here, that railway lines are considered to be optimum things to strike, Anderson.

COOPER: Yes. Nick Paton Walsh, appreciate it. Thank you. Be careful.

This just in. The Pentagon has announced that the U.S. has begun additional training for Ukrainian armed forces in military installations in Germany, all of this as we learn that more than a dozen flights carrying military assistance for Ukraine from the U.S. are expected to arrive in the region in the next 24 hours, according to officials.

Want to go to CNN Pentagon correspondent Oren Liebermann.

So, Oren, the same official also says that Russia is trying to take out the ways that Ukrainian forces are supplying and replenishing troops in the east. What more do we know about it?

OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, Russia has repeatedly threatened, whether it's the foreign minister or President Vladimir Putin, to disrupt, to attack all these supplies coming into Ukraine, from the weaponry to the equipment that Ukrainian forces and others are using.

Now, they haven't actually attack the convoys, the movement of all this equipment coming in. In fact, the U.S. assesses that Russia has difficulty striking a dynamic target, a moving target.

Instead, we -- as Nick just talked about, they have hit the railways. They have tried to hit some of the pathways, some of the infrastructure that supports the movement of all of this equipment. And that, the U.S. assesses, is an attempt to slow down all the equipment flowing into the country.

But it doesn't seem to have deterred the U.S. or others, for that matter, from sending in the equipment and from continuing training. The Pentagon press secretary, John Kirby, just said a short time ago, acknowledging for the first time that Germany is one of the locations where U.S. forces and others are training the Ukrainians on not only the howitzers that are going in, but also some of the other advanced systems that the U.S. and others have committed to sending into Ukraine.

So, despite this attempt to disrupt the equipment going in, the ability of Ukrainian forces to resupply themselves, it is very much ongoing.

COOPER: You're also learning that the U.S. is seeing the Russians making progress. Some of their forces, however, and equipment are degraded, though.

LIEBERMANN: This is a very qualified sort of progress.

A senior defense official yesterday called it some progress, uneven, a few kilometers here and there a day. Now, certainly, that could add up, and that will be significant. But they're seeing that the Russians are still having many of the same issues they had in the early part of the invasion, logistics, sustainment. Certainly, morale continues to be an enormous issue.

It's something that Russians are trying to solve. But, so far, there isn't overwhelming evidence that they have managed to solve it. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been surprised by the conditions, or the lack thereof, for that matter, of some of the Russian units, some down to 70 percent of their combat strength, which, at least according to Western military doctrine, is where you begin to lose combat effectiveness.

Meanwhile, they're replacing some of these damaged or destroyed units with older units, sort of much older equipment. All of that means they're mixing modernized equipment with unmodernized. And the U.S. assesses that will begin to have an effect or has begun to have an effect on how effective they are at combat

COOPER: Oren Liebermann, appreciate that.

Thanks very much -- Alisyn, let's go back to you.

CAMEROTA: OK, I understand we will check back with you shortly.

Joining me now is a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, John Herbst. He is now the senior director for the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center. And Max Boot, who is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a "Washington Post" columnist.

Gentlemen, it's great to see both of you.

JOHN HERBST, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO UKRAINE: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Mr. Ambassador, so the Russians fired these five missiles on Kyiv while the U.N. secretary-general was there. You heard Anderson just reporting that the mayor of Kyiv says that's a middle finger to the international community.

Is there any other way that you would interpret it?

HERBST: No.

Putin is demonstrating that his only way of solving this problem, as he puts it, is complete victory by war, which means the subjugation of the Ukrainian people and the -- quote, unquote -- "de-Ukrainization of Ukraine, a very nasty objective.

CAMEROTA: And so -- but, I mean, this was actually an attack, sort of, de facto, on the U.N.

I mean, this was, Mr. Ambassador, him saying -- I don't know if he was trying to hit the secretary-general or trying to avoid the secretary- general, but it seems like there was room for error there.

HERBST: He was saying that he's not looking for any humanitarian solutions to any problem relating to the war.

[14:10:02]

He's not going to let those defenders out of the steelworks in Mariupol. He wants to see them be captured or killed. And so there was a message to Guterres. But Guterres kind of understood that. And what he said when he came out of Moscow suggests he understood that Putin had no interest in helping civilians avoid the cost of war.

CAMEROTA: Max, I do want to get to what's happening in that steel plant, because we're just watching this human crisis unfold hour by hour before our eyes.

Babies, elderly children, people have been trapped in there for 64 days. And the Russians Kyiv dangling these possibilities of an evacuation route. And then, last night, within the past 24 hours, they hit that steel plant with 50 airstrikes. And now hundreds more people are injured in there.

And it's just -- I mean, none of us can bear watching this unfold before our eyes and watching them die in there. But I just don't know what the other option is at this point.

MAX BOOT, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, there is no good option if you're counting on the humanity of the Russian regime, because it has no humanity.

Putin sees committing war crimes and killing civilians as being the most effective way for him to win the war. That strategy is not working, by the way.

All he's doing is, he is leading to stauncher resistance on the part of Ukrainians, because the -- almost all Ukrainians now understand that they are fighting not just for their freedom, but for their very lives, because the Russian invasion force is a force of war criminals who are competing, who are -- who are carrying out brutal, evil, unspeakable acts.

And, of course, Mariupol is one of the worst atrocities, but it's only one of many. And, unfortunately, the only way to provide any relief for the people of Ukraine is to help them defeat the Russian invaders.

CAMEROTA: I mean, the people in there have said they're not going to surrender, they are not going to surrender, even when given that option, even though they are completely outmanned and surrounded.

Ambassador, Putin has just accepted...

(CROSSTALK)

CAMEROTA: Did you want to say something there, Max?

BOOT: Well, I just wanted to say that's what happens when you commit these atrocities and massacre Ukrainians. You're not going to find a lot of Ukrainian soldiers who are willing to surrender. They're going to fight to the death because they know the consequences of being captured can be so dire.

CAMEROTA: So, Mr. Ambassador, what I was going to say is that Putin has accepted this invitation to the G20. This is in Indonesia in November.

Is that a good sign of him wanting to be part of the international community, or how do you interpret that?

HERBST: No, this is an unfortunate sign. Indonesia should never have invited Putin. They have also invited Zelenskyy, so they're not completely beyond the pale.

But Putin is correctly an international pariah. And inviting him suggests he's not. And now he's -- this poses a dilemma for President Biden and other Western leaders whether or not they should go to the G20 or whether they will demand that the G20 be structured in a certain way to make it clear that the vast majority of nations condemn Putin's brutal war on Ukraine.

CAMEROTA: Max, how should President Biden respond to this?

BOOT: There is no way in hell that any Western democratic leader should be attending a conference with the butcher of Bucha.

Putin is a war criminal. He is committing arguably genocide, as President Biden has said. There is no way you should be meeting with him with the G20. If Indonesia insists on continuing with this G20 with Putin and attendance, then the Western democracies need to go and hold their own meeting of democratic nations and not be in the same hall as this war criminal.

CAMEROTA: Ambassador, this makes the G20 fall apart?

HERBST: It certainly is a complication for the existence, for the continuation of the G20.

But, again, I agree with Max that one way to handle it, probably the easiest, is just to refuse to go unless Putin is disinvited, as we organize all the other G20 members who understand that Putin is, in fact, a war criminal in the real G20 conference.

CAMEROTA: Ambassador John Herbst, Max Boot, thank you both very much.

OK, another inflation metric shows prices hitting a fresh 40-year high, but some economists say the worst is now behind us. That's next.

And with the war in Ukraine raging, a new report shows the Russian economy is reeling from global sanctions. We have the details ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:18:48]

CAMEROTA: More proof that Americans are struggling with price hikes.

A key inflation index shows prices hit a 40-year high in March. Prices soared by 6.6 percent, which is up from 6.4 percent in February.

CNN's Matt Egan is here.

So, Matt, is this the peak?

MATT EGAN, CNN REPORTER: It might be.

I think a lot depends on what happens with the war and COVID. But today's report confirmed that inflation was really, really high in March. We have this line chart showing how inflation just keeps getting worse, highest level since 1982, nowhere near the Fed's goal of 2 percent.

Now, as you can see, it's not as bad as it was in the '70s. But it's pretty bad for the modern era. And that means that paychecks are just not going as far as they used to. The good news is that core inflation, which excludes food and energy, it actually cooled off a bit for the first time in a year-and-a-half.

Goldman Sachs says that that suggests that March was the peak for this metric. Of course, economists can exclude and food and energy. Families can't. Those are essentials.

Two big questions for inflation, though, is what happens to the war and COVID, because if there's further supply disruptions, that will make inflation worse. And how long until inflation gets back to healthier levels?

CAMEROTA: How about gas prices? Because, for a while, you have been on here saying, oh, look, they're ticking down a little bit.

EGAN: Yes, not anymore. They're ticking back up, the national average up 2 pennies overnight to $4.16 a gallon, not as bad as that peak last month at $4.33, but, again, it's moving up.

[14:20:10]

That is just a very visible form of inflation, that we see it every day. We feel it when we fill up our pump -- our gas tanks, but diesel prices also moving higher, dramatically so. The national average for diesel had a record of $5.18 a gallon, up 68 percent over the past year.

That's a big deal because diesel is what powers the trucks that transport all the stuff we buy. And, eventually, companies are going to pass those costs along to consumers too.

CAMEROTA: Let's check on how the market is doing right now.

So, how do you describe what's happened in April?

EGAN: Yes, it's been a brutal month.

As you can see, the Dow is down almost 600 points, about 1.7 percent. The S&P 500, the broadest measure of the U.S. market, is actually on track for its worst month since March of 2021, when COVID wrecked the economy. Tech stocks, though, they're getting hit really hard. The Nasdaq is down more than 11 percent this month. This would be the worst month for the Nasdaq since October 2008 during the financial crisis.

Even Amazon is getting hit hard, losing 14 percent of its value today alone. This again is all being driven by concerns about high inflation, the Fed's plans to try to cool inflation off, and worries about slower growth.

CAMEROTA: And happy Friday to you too, Matt Egan. Thanks.

EGAN: Well, the good news is, the month is over.

(LAUGHTER)

CAMEROTA: OK. Good.

EGAN: Just a thought.

CAMEROTA: Thanks so much. Great to see you.

OK, so Russia is preparing for a big parade, as its own economy is struggling.

Well, let's get things back to CNN's Anderson Cooper. He's with us in Kyiv -- Anderson.

COOPER: Yes, Alisyn, as you noted, helicopters, armored tanks, thousands of troops all taking part in the first rehearsal for next month's military parade in Moscow.

The event is set for May 9, which is a very important day in Russia known as Victory Day.

CNN's Clare Sebastian joins me now.

So, Russia has had some setbacks, obviously, in its current phase of the conflict. Will that impact the so-called victory parade?

CLARE SEBASTIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: No, I think it makes it even more significant, Anderson.

We know from U.S. intelligence and other experts that this is a crucial, potentially a crucial day in the conflict. But that, according to U.S. intelligence, is why Russia shifted its focus in this conflict away from taking the whole of Ukraine, that, of course, and the fact that they couldn't take the whole of Ukraine, towards just taking the Donbass.

And, potentially, now we see them trying to take some of the south of Ukraine along the Black Sea. It's because they wanted to bring home some kind of success, some kind of victory for May the 9th, to make some kind of announcement. That was the thinking.

That, of course, creates a dangerous moment over the next sort of week to 10 days for Ukraine and, if they can't bring some kind of victory, perhaps an announcement of sorts, the U.K. defense secretary here suggesting that they might even announce some kind of mobilization of reserves, a big call-up of the public to help in this conflict.

So, either way, it does create a difficult moment, a dangerous moment going into this holiday.

COOPER: Yes, a lot of eyes are going to be on that date to see what Russia does in the run-up to it.

The Russian Central Bank says that the Russian economy is expected to shrink by 8 to 10 percent this year. The decline began when sanctions were imposed with the war in Ukraine. What more do we know about the economic fallout? That's a lot, obviously.

SEBASTIAN: Yes, so the 8 to 10 percent forecast by the Russian Central Bank, that's in line with what we have heard from the World Bank, which said about 11 percent. The IMF last week said about 8.5 percent decline this year.

What I can tell you, Anderson, is that the full force of sanctions has not yet been felt by Russia. And that is because of the Central Bank, which, frankly, might be the only entity in Russia that emerges from this conflict with its reputation intact.

It has managed to stabilize the financial system. The ruble hit a two- year high against the dollar today. It is now stronger than it was in the days before the war broke out. But the trouble is coming. Russia cannot import parts to make cars. It can't maintain its planes. We're starting to see some kinds of shortages. There is more trouble on the horizon.

And, of course, an oil -- a potential oil embargo or gas embargo from Europe really would compound this situation. So, there's more trouble to come for Russia.

COOPER: All right, Clare Sebastian, appreciate it.

Want to go back to Alisyn now in New York.

Obviously, Alisyn, that May 9 date is a date we have been hearing now a lot about, and a lot of focus on exactly what -- how Russia is going to try to show some sort of victory for that day.

CAMEROTA: Yes, so it will be very interesting to see.

Anderson, thank you. We will check back with you shortly.

So, President Biden has a new plan for the midterms, to go after the GOP. We have the new CNN reporting ahead. And will it work?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:29:19]

CAMEROTA: President Biden is reportedly shifting his midterm strategy and expected to go on the attack against Republicans.

Sources tell CNN that the mantra inside the White House is -- quote -- "Don't compare me to the almighty. Compare me to the alternative."

But that could be a tough sell. The latest CNN poll of polls shows 54 percent of Americans disapprove of the president's job performance. And he is losing the support of black voters.

CNN political commentator Van Jones joins me now.

Van, great to have you here.

So, the idea of going after Republicans, I guess, to remind Americans, who have short-term memory loss, of what they felt under President Trump, is that the strategy here?

VAN JONES, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I think what he wants to point out is that, if you replace the Democrats with Republicans, what are you going to probably get?

You're going to get probably Biden impeached, a bunch of Hunter Biden stuff.