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CNN International: CNN Tours Camp Military Group could use in Belarus; U.S. Secretary Trying to Repair China Relations; Cluster Bomb Controversy; U.S. Expected to Send Cluster Munitions to Ukraine; IAEA Chief Backs Plan to Release Site's Wastewater. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired July 07, 2023 - 08:00   ET

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

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MAX FOSTER, CNN HOST: Hello and welcome to CNN "Newsroom", I'm Max Foster in London. Just ahead, the U.S. is expected to approve a new military aid package to Ukraine that will include the controversial cluster bombs. But rights groups are urging the Biden administration to stop that plan.

Then Sudan gets a first-hand look at the camp, Wagner fighters will be located in if they went to Belarus. We will show you what the tour uncovered though with Matthew. Plus, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is in Beijing for the high stakes meetings in an attempt to improve relations between the world's two largest economies.

United Nations is providing grim statistics on the civilian toll in Ukraine as the country prepares to mark 500 days since the start of Russia's full scale invasion. The U.N. confirms more than 9000 civilians have been killed, and more than 500 of them children. It comes as the death toll from the recent Russian strike in Lviv rises to 10.

Ukraine says it's ending its search and rescue operation in that Western city located pretty far from the front lines. And CNN's Ben Wedeman has just traveled to the frontline in Bakhmut. He joins us live from Eastern Ukraine. What did you see though what progress of the Ukrainians making?

BEN WEDEMAN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: What we know is what we've spoken to soldiers there, who tell us that, for instance, the amount of incoming fire they're taking from the Russians around Bakhmut has reduced gradually over the last few days, because they're taking more ground.

And in fact, we what we heard that from the spokesman for Ukrainian forces in the east is that over the past day, they've taken one kilometer around Bakhmut. Now, they'd say they don't specify where it is. But in the same statement, they say that they've taken ground in the south and the north.

It appears that they continue to pursue this strategic goal of encircling the city. And now when we were speaking with artillery units, one unit told us they firing 50 to 60 rounds a day into Russian lines. And the focus is really on the trenches around the city that are very deeply dug.

And there are a lot of troops around there with the Ukrainians estimate as many as 50,000 Russian troops are in and around Bakhmut. But what I can tell you, just from the accounts we heard from Russian POWs, we spoke to. It sounds like there have gotten a lot of men there a lot of troops.

But they're poorly supplied, poorly equipped and poorly led as well. So the situations for the Russian seems to be deteriorating, fairly drag, gradually, but nonetheless, noticeably from the perspective of those who are closest to the fighting, Max.

FOSTER: OK, Ben, thank you for that. The U.S. expected to announce a new military aid package to Ukraine today that will include cluster munitions for the very first time. That's according to defense officials. They tell CNN changing battlefield conditions inside Ukraine over the past two weeks prompted by the administration to seriously consider giving the controversial weapons to Kyiv.

The U.S. has a stockpile of cluster munitions that it no longer uses are to facing them out in 2016. We'll have more on these weapons their potential impact and why more than 100 countries around the world have banned them, coming up shortly. Now CNN has just visited a site in Belarus where the country's President says Wagner fighters could be housed.

Should they take up Belarus his offer to move there? This follows Thursday surprise announcement that the Head of the Wagner military group Yevgeny Prigozhin is not in Belarus as previously believed. CNN's Matthew Chance has more.

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: All right, well, you join me here in this military base in Belarus about an hour's drive outside of the capital Minsk. And see it's a vast Tent City with all these enormous canvases which we're told going house about 5000 people have been erected in the past few weeks. There were satellite photographs of this place, before and after.

And we all believed this is the location where Wagner forces the mercenaries from Russia would be located if they came to Belarus, that was part of a deal remember, with the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko inviting Wagner and its leader to come into exile in Belarus as a way of diffusing their military uprising in Russia last month.

Well, I mean, at the moment, though, these tents are completely empty and you have a look inside of one of these here, completely empty, there's nobody in there.

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It's too dark for us to show you inside by I can tell you, it's just wooden platforms nobody in there at the moment but ultimately it can house as many as 5000 people. The problem is of course, the events of yesterday here with the revelations from Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader that actually is that plan is no longer sort of in operation.

It's on hold at the moment and at the moment, Yevgeny Prigozhin; the Wagner leader is not here in Belarus. He said to be in Russia, and not a single Wagner soldier has so far come here. And so we don't know whether there is going to be a transfer of Wagner to Belarus or not, at the moment, or we can tell you is that it hasn't happened yet, back to you.

FOSTER: Well, the Kremlin says it will closely watch the upcoming meeting between the leaders of Ukraine and Turkey describing them as important for Volodymyr Zelenskyy lands in Istanbul in a few hours for talks with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

On the agenda, a key grain deal, which is set to expire in days, Mr. Erdogan helped brokered that agreement to unblock Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea. And Nada is here with more on that. And obviously, Erdogan is very close to Putin. So that's interesting.

NADA BASHIR, CNN REPORTER: Yes, and often at the expensive course of relations with his Western NATO allies, but he has positioned Turkey as a crucial mediator in this conflict between Ukraine and Russia. And we saw the success of that sort of mediator position last summer.

When Turkey alongside the United Nations managed to broker this grain deal between delegations from both Russia and Ukraine and this was a landmark agreement. Of course, we know that there are many countries that are desperately dependent on those grain and fertilizer exports from Ukraine.

And its thanks that deal, that there was the decision to actually go ahead with this and contend to alleviate the food security crisis that we saw last summer. But of course, there is a huge amount of concern because that deal is set to expire in 10 days they've already extended it a little bit. It was actually set to expire back in May.

And the hope today is that discussions between President Erdogan and President Zelenskyy could lend themselves to potentially easing tensions around the potential renewal of this deal. But of course, those tensions are originating from Moscow we heard earlier in the week from the Russian Foreign Ministry, raising questions around who this deal is benefiting, whether it's benefiting those countries most in need.

Or in the words of the Russian Foreign Ministry, whether it's benefiting well fed countries, namely Ukraine's Western allies. But of course, as you mentioned that the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov spoke to journalists earlier today. He did say that the Kremlin will be closely following this meeting between Zelenskyy and President Erdogan.

He also thanked and commended President Erdogan for the mediator position that he has taken on over the course of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and also noted that there is a talk around a potential meeting between President Erdogan and President Putin at once again, although no official announcement or date has been revealed yet.

FOSTER: OK, well watch it. Nada, thank you! U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is in Beijing with a very tough task repairing relations between the world's two biggest economies earlier she met with China's Premier Li Qiang and who is considering a close, it's really considered a very close ally of the Chinese President of course.

Yellen also spoke with business leaders telling them, a separation of the U.S. and Chinese commerce would hurt both countries.

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JANET YELLEN, U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY: The United States does not seek a wholesale separation of our economies. We seek to diversify and not to decouple, the decoupling of the world's two largest economies would be destabilizing for the global economy, and it would be virtually impossible to undertake.

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FOSTER: CNN's Marc Stewart is in Tokyo with a story about this is one area of common ground between these two huge nations, isn't it? They meet each other's economies.

MARC STEWART, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Indeed, Max, I mean, these economies are tangled within each other. There is definitely some codependency. We're talking about hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in trade. So it is important that there is some strength economically.

It was interesting we had on an analyst on CNN earlier in the week, he was saying, these are two nations that certainly don't have great diplomatic relationships. They certainly don't have a military relationship, but they do have an economic relationship. And so perhaps that can be a portal to even broader conversations, besides these economic concerns.

But again, Janet Yellen is an accomplished economist. She is a scholar, she is the Treasury Secretary. So this is definitely her comfort zone to meet with Chinese leaders from the central bank, as well as from other leadership roles. You did mention she did spend time with some business leaders today from the United States, which again, is heavily invested in China.

I mean, among those on the invite list, Boeing, Bank of America, Medtronic, these are some of the people who were invited to a business roundtable if you will.

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Well, Yellen is certainly trying to have a conciliatory attitude she does have real issues about some of those blockades if you will, on what can and cannot be brought to and from the United States and China. She talks about some of these punitive actions at that roundtable. Take a quick listen to that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) YELLEN: I've been particularly troubled by punitive actions that have been taken against U.S. firms in recent months. I'm also concerned about new export controls, recently announced by China on two critical minerals used in technologies like semiconductors.

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STEWART: There's this very difficult pattern that the United States and China are involved with. China was unhappy with some technical and tech restrictions, and so therefore, imposed by the United States. So therefore, it put these restrictions on some of the chip material. So as this continues back and forth.

But Max, again, this is not just about economics. If anything, the White House has projected this image. Secretary Yellen has projected this image of coming to China, if anything, to cool things down to turn the temperature down. And that's what her goal is.

FOSTER: OK, Marc, thank you. CNN's -- investigators looking into efforts to keep Donald Trump in power, or focusing in on a chaotic December 2020 meeting at the White House. The meeting featured some of the most radical ideas about ways of overturning the election, including declaring martial law and seizing voting machines.

Multiple sources tell CNN that the special counsel investigating Trump has called numerous witnesses before a grand jury to talk about what happened in that meeting. With more on this, let's bring in CNN's Senior Crime and Justice Reporter, Katelyn Polantz. I mean some of these ideas that are floated in this meeting are utterly extraordinary.

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Yes, this is a really infamous meeting. It was very chaotic meeting, when waiting late into the night there was yelling, that happened. And this was a meeting where people from outside of the White House, outside of the Trump administration, not government employees had the ear of the President.

And we're trying to convince him to do things, that some of which he very likely was not able to do legally such as seizing voting machines. There was also an idea of him potentially appointing someone as a special counsel to investigate election fraud. And they were trying to convince him that there were votes that were switched by computers in the 2020 election.

That of course, did not happen. And people in the administration, including the Attorney General, at the time, Bill Barr, as well as his White House Counsel, other top figures, were saying quite publicly, and to Donald Trump himself, you can't do these things, and there was not fraud, and that this is not the route to go to be listening to these outsiders.

Now the outsiders in this were people like Sidney Powell, the lawyer who had represented his Former National Security Adviser, and then Trump himself and his campaign, Michael Flynn, the person that Sidney Powell had advised when he was under criminal investigation. He had come back into the fold talking to Trump and then a CEO named Patrick Byrne, who believed in election fraud as well.

They were the ones that got into the White House, and that were opposed to the people in the administration floating these ideas. And so what we are learning now is that the prosecutors from the Justice Department investigating Donald Trump and others after the 2020 election.

They are focused and making sure they understand this particular meeting on December 18 of 2020. Very clearly, they are asking lots of people about it. They have focused on it even in recent days. And in particular, they've talked to Rudy Giuliani about it, one of the other outsiders, advising Trump at that time that was insistent that there was fraud in the election as well.

He wasn't in this camp, but he was there on the premises at the White House and just recently sat for voluntary interviews over two days with criminal investigators.

FOSTER: CNN's Senior Crime and Justice Reporter, Katelyn Polantz. Thank you very much indeed for joining us with that. Twitter, threatening to sue its newest rival, Threads. Twitter claims threads stole trade secrets, when it hired former Twitter employees for its engineering team.

But Threads which is owned by Facebook's parent company Meta says there are no former Twitter employees on the engineering team. And let's see the move is a sign that Twitter feels threatened by Threads, which debuted just this week and claims to have already signed up 50 million users.

Still to come, the U.S. may soon send cluster bombs to Ukraine. Ahead we will look at what they are and why they're so controversial?

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FOSTER: Cluster munitions are very controversial. Today, the Biden administration is expected to announce a new military aid package to Ukraine that will include for the first time cluster munitions, also called cluster bombs. They're canisters film filled with smaller bombs that can be dropped from the air and released across a wide area.

They pose a major threat to civilians not only at the moment of the attack, but also long afterwards because they pollute the battlefields with unexploded munitions. These weapons have been banned in more than 120 countries under 2008 convention but Russia, Ukraine and the U.S. declined to sign that treaty.

Both Ukrainians and Russian forces have been using cluster munitions since the war actually began. For more on this CNN's U.S. National Security Reporter, Natasha Bertrand joins us from the Pentagon. I mean, they're very effective, aren't they, if nothing else and they will be useful to the Ukrainians to clear the Russian trenches?

NATASHA BERTRAND, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER: Well, that is the argument that the Ukrainians have been making. And in recent days, U.S. officials have started making it too, Max, the Biden administration has been debating whether to provide the Ukrainians with these cluster munitions for several months now.

The Ukrainians have been asking for them because they say the Russians are using them. And therefore they also have the right to use them. And they are running low on ammunition. So these cluster munitions could really help them prosecute their counter offensive against the Russians.

Now, the reason why the Biden administration has only recently come around to this is because the counter offensive has not been going as quickly as Western officials had believed it would by this point. And they believe that by providing them with these cluster munitions, they could allow the Ukrainians to make more progress against the Russians.

And importantly, fill that potential gap that the Ukrainians are experiencing in artillery ammunition, because the counter offensive has been going so slowly. The Ukrainians have been using a large amount of this artillery ammunition. And it is not clear if that is sustainable without these cluster munitions that the U.S. has sitting in its stockpiles.

So the U.S. now saying that they are preparing to provide these munitions to Ukraine, we are expecting an announcement on that as soon as this morning. And it is a big turnaround for the Biden administration, which was so concerned previously, about the risks that these could post to civilians, and importantly, the fact that they're banned by over 100 countries, including some key U.S. allies, Max.

FOSTER: This is the issue, isn't it, because in Europe, for example, they're banned and amongst many of America's allies, is this going to cause division friction within the Western alliance?

BERTRAND: Well, we're already getting some reaction from some U.S. allies, including Germany. Germany's Defense Minister said this morning, that it is not an option for them to provide cluster munitions because they are a signatory to that ban on Cluster Munitions signed in 2010 by so many countries.

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But the German Defense Minister declined to weigh in on the decision by the U.S. to send them saying that because the U.S. and Ukraine are not signatories to that ban. It is not up to Germany to decide how the U.S. decides to send what is in its own stockpile. And so we have not seen overt criticism by the allies.

And that may be because we are told that behind the scenes, the administration has been having extensive conversations with allies about the possibility of providing these munitions to Ukraine, and according to our sources in the White House, they believe that they have managed to alleviate some of the allies concerns about the use of these munitions essentially by saying, look, we know that they are very nasty weapons that they aren't. This is not necessarily a moral win for the U.S., but we also believe that it is necessary to provide Ukraine with them so that they can be successful in this counter-offensive, Max.

FOSTER: OK, Natasha, thank you. Coming up 12 years after this disaster at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, officials are moving forward with a controversial plan for the site's wastewater.

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FOSTER: The U.N.'s nuclear agency is supporting Japan's plan to release treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear site into the Pacific Ocean. Rafael Grossi says he's convinced it is safe for people and the environment. But as Marc Stewart reports that's doing little to ease concern amongst rattled residents, neighboring countries and some international scientists.

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STEWART (voice over): Soon the treated wastewater inside these massive tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will be released off Japan specific coasts. It was collected after the meltdown at the plant following the massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The release is controversial. The Chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency came to Tokyo to reassure the public.

STEWART (on camera): What do you say to members of the public who feel a bit leery about this decision to release the water?

RAFAEL GROSSI, IAEA DIRECTOR GENERAL: First of all that I understand them and so all sorts of fears kick in and one has to take them seriously to address and to explain.

STEWART (voice over): In April, CNN was granted rare access to the plant. We saw the tanks with enough water to fill more than 500 Olympic pools. The water has been treated and diluted to remove radioactive elements. One exception tritium, a radioactive isotope, which the government says is impossible to remove.

It's all part of the process to slowly decommission the plant. As you can see on this map, the release of tritium is common for nuclear plants around the world. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says that the radiation from tritium is far less than what one might assume. It says a cross country round trip flight exposes a person to 12 times more radiation compared to water with tritium from a nuclear plant.

STEWART (on camera): How will you know if this was the right decision or this is the right decision?

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GROSSI: Well, I think we have the benefit of science either you have a certain region nuclide in a water sample or you don't have it. And for that you have it's a measurable thing. So we have the science, we have the laboratories we have a network of international laboratories working with us to ensure the credibility and the transparency of the process.

STEWART (voice over): The release is drawing criticism from Asia, including South Korea and China. Despite the reservations, including those of local fishermen, the planned release is moving forward a process that will likely take decades to complete. Marc Stewart, CNN, Tokyo.

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FOSTER: Before we go pop star Britney Spears is speaking out about a bizarre encounter involving NBA rookie Victor Wembanyama that she describes as super embarrassing to share with the world. Spears, has filed a police report alleging battery after she says she was struck in the face by one of the 19 year old security guards.

The singer says she was trying to get Wembanyama's attention by tapping him on the shoulder. He tells a slightly different version the athlete told reporters on Thursday. He was grabbed from behind, but had been instructed not to stop in the crowd and didn't see what happened.

And Taylor Swift is throwing it back to 2010. The singer has released her new version of the Speak Now album with hits like this one. Speak Now Taylor's version includes six never before her tracks bringing something new to her devoted fans the Swifties. Swift has been in the process of re-recording her old album to gain that ownership of her music.

All this as you continue to Eras Tour across the U.S. and around the world. Thanks for joining me here on CNN "Newsroom", I'm Max Foster in London. "World Sport" with Amanda is up next.

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