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Call to Arms for Polish Civilians; Increased Risks for Dementia; Biden Meets with Polish President. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired February 21, 2023 - 06:30   ET

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

[06:30:00]

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: That would have carried a five year prison sentence if he is convicted. But he still has two involuntary manslaughter charges and could get up to 18 months in prison. A live round from a prop gun killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in October of 2021. Baldwin has maintained that he did not pull the trigger. Now, the same charge was dropped against the film's armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed.

Let's go ahead now and move over to Kaitlan, who is in Poland for us for the last few days with so much news you can barely contain yourself.

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, and the president is actually here today, I should note. You know, we were here yesterday. He was supposed to be here yesterday. He ended up making that surprise trip to Ukraine. He arrived here overnight.

And, obviously, these are very serious matters at hand here. This is where he was 11 months ago, right after the invasion had started, now with a war raging next door in Ukraine, there are massive concerns here.

We've talked to people here, teachers, bankers who have now signed up to train to defend their own country. It's remarkable because Poland has the lowest gun ownership per capita in Europe. We're going to tell you the stories of these people you see right here. That's next.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COLLINS: Had you ever handled a gun before?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No. No.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:35:34]

COLLINS: All right, welcome back.

You can see Warsaw there. President Biden, moments from now, is going to meet with the Polish president, Duda, here in Warsaw. They're going to talk about support for Ukraine, bolstering NATO. Obviously, Poland has greatly felt the impact of Russia's invasion.

Their defense forces have grown in numbers as well since Russia started invading its neighbor. And when we got here in Warsaw, we spoke with some of the newest Polish recruits about why they're signing up for Poland's version of the national guard.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COLLINS (voice over): Some of them have never held a gun in their life. They are teachers, farmers, bankers, and even an aspiring opera singer, now volunteering for basic training in Warsaw. They are days away from graduating and becoming infantry personnel in the Territorial Defense Force, Poland's version of the U.S. National Guard.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, and placed war on Poland's doorstep, the TDF saw a rise in recruits. Now, Poland's defense minister expects the volunteer group to reach 50,000 in the coming years.

2ND LT. MARK ZALUSKI, POLISH TERRITORIAL DEFENSE FORCE: Awareness is the first step of preparedness.

COLLINS: For Poland, the country with the lowest gun ownership per capita in Europe, the invasion became a national call to arms for people with day jobs.

ZALUSKI: We slowly turn civilians into soldiers. We teach them the structures. We teach them how to wear the uniform. We teach them how to behave. We teach them when to salute, when to not salute.

COLLINS: Mary, a 36-year-old mother of two, now finds herself balancing life as a banker on the battlefield.

MARY, POLISH TERRITORIAL DEFENSE FORCE: I'm very happy that I have this possibility to work and to be a soldier.

COLLINS: Twenty-two-year-old Laura is an aspiring opera singer who joined the TDF in solidarity after being shocked by Russia's brutal invasion.

LAURA, POLISH TERRITORIAL DEFENSE FORCE: Young people, we are shocked about that situation, and we want to help the Ukraine.

COLLINS (on camera): And have you ever handled a gun before?

LAURA: No. No. When I came here, it was my first -- first connect with everything military.

COLLINS: Did it surprise you?

LAURA: A little bit, yes, because it's heavy.

COLLINS: Very heavy.

COLLINS (voice over): Laura's twin sister joined the TDF before her, and their mom has also just applied.

COLLINS (on camera): Your mom is joining TDF?

LAURA: Yes.

COLLINS: And you're in TDF? And your sister is in TDF?

LAURA: Yes.

COLLINS (voice over): Laura, Mary, and the rest of the recruits undergo 16 days of basic training before graduating and then reporting once a month.

ZALUSKI: What's very important about TDF, is that in TDF you have to learn how to crawl before you walk.

COLLINS: Putin's unprovoked war in Ukraine prompting civil readiness not seen in Europe for decades.

ZALUSKI: Throughout the very short period of time, you see civilians turning into really amazing soldiers.

COLLINS: Despite their differences, one thing unites the newest members of the Territorial Defense Forces.

COLLINS (on camera): What is the one thing that you think they all have in common?

ZALUSKI: Patriotism. Everybody you see behind you loves their country. And regardless of their background, social economic status, education level, employment, they all love Poland, and they all want to serve with the flag on the shoulder. Patriotism is the common denominator.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SIDNER: Patriotism is the common denominator.

COLLINS: Sara and Poppy, it was just amazing -- yes, ,it was just amazing to spend several hours with them.

SIDNER: That was a great piece, Kaitlan. Like, really, really great.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: It was great. I think it's something we never expected to see. And all of these people giving so much for the cause from all walks of life, it was fascinating.

SIDNER: All right.

COLLINS: Yes. And as you guys know, when a story like this, it takes a team effort. Betty and Clay and Antonio, we all were out there setting this up. It was really amazing to just see these everyday, regular people who now have never held a gun in their lives and now they're signing up to defend their country because of what Putin has done in Ukraine.

HARLOW: Yes. SIDNER: And I love that she's like, my mother signed up too. I'm, like, yes.

HARLOW: Yes. Family affair.

Kaitlan, that was great.

COLLINS: Yes.

HARLOW: We'll get back to you in just a minute.

[06:40:01]

Ahead for us here, chronic pain and dementia. What a new study shows about a possible link. Elizabeth Cohen is standing by to explain.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HARLOW: Welcome back.

This morning we're learning chronic pain from arthritis or an old injury could actually age your brain faster than normal. It may be linked also to cognitive decline in dementia.

Our senior medical correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen, is here to explain.

How? How? How can that be?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: It is really interesting. And I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news this morning, but did you know that our brains start to shrink in our 30s and 40s? That is -- that was sort of a startling thing to hear. And what they did in this study was they looked at brain images for more than 19,000 people, and here's what they saw.

[06:45:06]

If you take a look at the Hippocampus, this is an area of the brain that deals with cognition, and they say that not only did it shrink with age, which they expected, but it shrank even more when people were in pain as they aged. They could actually see it in the scans that it shrank more if you were in pain, and it shrank more if you had pain from more than one place, let's say your back and your knee. And then they gave these folks cognitive tests. And here's what they found. They found that they were -- people who were given - they were given 11 cognitive tests and they found that if you had pain in one site, just like, let's say in your back - you performed worse on one test. If you had pain in multiple tasks, if you had pain in more than one place, then you had pain in several different sites.

So, this really showed that pain is not good for you. You need to do what you need to do in order to address it as you age.

SIDNER: This is completely freaking me out right now because I got -

HARLOW: I know. SIDNER: I should be mush right now.

HARLOW: No.

SIDNER: My brain - no, I -- because I have a lot of pain. I was an athlete.

HARLOW: Yes.

SIDNER: I played volleyball for the University of Florida. Go Gators. And -- Sorry. Sorry. Had to. And - but I know a lot of athletes, female and male athletes -

HARLOW: Yes.

SIDNER: Who suffer from a lot of pain. Shoulders, knees are usually the two that really get you.

HARLOW: Yes.

SIDNER: What do you do about it? Because you don't want to get hooked on pain pills.

HARLOW: Right.

COHEN: You don't, but there are over-the-counter pills that you can take. You can also - t here are anti-depressants, actually, are often used for pain, or things like massage or acupuncture. There are things you can do other than, you know, prescription opioids.

SIDNER: Thank you so much, Elizabeth. That was really eye-opening and terrifying at the same time.

HARLOW: You're not -- never going to be mush, my girl.

SIDNER: Feels mushy.

HARLOW: OK, Kaitlan, back to you in Poland.

COLLINS: We're here over in Poland. President Biden is here in Warsaw. We are waiting for him any moment now to leave his hotel. He's going to be meeting with the Polish president here. They've got a lot to discuss, obviously, following that speech from President Putin, President Biden's surprise trip to Ukraine. We're going to talk about the split screen of Biden's visit, Putin's address, all of that covered with Fred Pleitgen, Clarissa Ward. We'll bring you all of the latest, right after this.

This is CNN's special live coverage of President Biden's trip to Poland.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:51:24]

COLLINS: Happening now here in Warsaw, President Biden is about to meet with Polish President Duda here at the presidential palace, as you see there. We are waiting on the U.S. president's arrival via his motorcade. This is the same place why last year you saw President Biden give that speech where at the end he got the world's attention when he said Putin could not - cannot remain in power. Now he's set to give another speech on the world stage condemning Putin as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is entering its second year.

Putin delivered his own speech earlier this morning, a lengthy speech, where he vowed to keep fighting and announced that he was suspending Russian participation in a nuclear weapons treaty with the United States. A significant announcement from the Russian president.

We're joined now by former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, CNN military analyst Spider Marks, CNN contributor Jill Dougherty. So we have got essentially everything covered here.

Ambassador, I'd like to start with you, though, on what your takeaways were from Putin's speech, and if you think you'll -- we will see Biden directly respond to that when he himself speaks in just a few hours from now.

BILL TAYLOR, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO UKRAINE: So, Kaitlan, I'm sure that President Biden has a strong measure to give. It is not directed at President Putin, but President Putin will hear him. President Biden's message is going to be, we're supporting Ukraine against this invasion from the Russians, and it will continue. It will continue as long as it takes. And I hope he says as long as it takes until victory. That will be the message for President Putin directly.

HARLOW: Jill Dougherty, you have covered President Putin for, what, 20 years plus and I wonder if you heard anything different from him this morning than you expected.

JILL DOUGHERTY, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: You know, I wouldn't say it was very different. I mean all of the criticism of the west was exactly what he said, kind of in one place. You know, they're disgusting. He used the word cheating, hypocritical, disgusting.

But I think what - what I - I did pull away from it is that this -- he is bringing Russia back to the Soviet days. And what I mean by that is that he is bringing his society back. Everything that he described was government control and government all-important (INAUDIBLE). Young people need possibilities (INAUDIBLE) programs. It was very much a Soviet idea.

There was even one moment, you know, where he said, we're producing x number of tons of grain. And I thought I was back in, like, 1985. So, I think it's - it's a sad commentary because right now Putin -- every problem that he talked about domestically is a problem that he has created because of this war in Ukraine.

So, news reports (ph) is (INAUDIBLE) agreement, and that's very disturbing because it not only suspends their participation right now, but it raises questions about where we are going. Will there be another type of arms control agreement or not? And I think Putin showed this (INAUDIBLE). SIDNER: Jill, you're - you're -- you are breaking up just a tiny bit,

but we got 99 percent of what you said, and you're always on the mark. You have been covering this for so long.

I want to move now to CNN military analyst Spider Marks.

I'm curious what you think it means. We know that Putin has not been following the rules of this treaty.

[06:55:05]

But for him to state it out loud like this, is that an escalation somehow?

MAJ. GEN. JAMES "SPIDER" MARKS (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Well, he's made it very clear that he has nukes, which is certainly no mystery, right? I mean all along he has said you're going to have consequences if you push too hard, which is really unnecessary. We know what the capabilities are of the Russian military, the nuclear capabilities. And going back to Jill's point, which I think is absolutely spot-on, is you see this -- this movement, this recidivist behavior, if you will, of Putin where he's trying to recreate something that's been gone for 30 years. And when you look at it, you realize that this Russian military that he has put in the field to go against the Ukrainians has demonstrated itself to be an abject failure from top to bottom. It's a corrupt military. It's leader-less. It has no competence at any level. And every time it engages with the Ukrainians, it loses quite considerably.

But what we need to be -- we need to take this very seriously because the law of large numbers applies here. Russia, three times the population of Ukraine, can continue to conscript young men, put them into combat without the necessary training, obviously, and put this into this meat grinder, but that is the intent that we see for Moscow right now, which is to try to wear down not only Kyiv, but also to try to wear down the NATO alliance.

COLLINS: And, Ambassador Taylor, I'm here in Warsaw, and, obviously, Poland has been a very vocal advocate for giving Ukraine what it needs. There's actually a protest outside where President Biden's motorcade is going to go by this morning that says, send Ukraine the F-16. That is something that the White House has so far resisted doing. They have said there's no plans to even train Ukrainians on fighter jets. This idea that was raised to train them in advance in case they do decide to give them to them. What do you make of that?

TAYLOR: Kaitlan, this is a trend. I mean we see the United States thinking about providing weapons to Ukraine. They think about, for example, providing stingers, anti-aircraft, and that was decided -- they finally decided to do that. And now we're all the way up to patriot missiles, the most advanced anti-aircraft that we've got.

Same thing on the tanks. That is, we provided them javelins. First, we didn't provide them javelins. Then we decided we would, and now it's all the way up to HIMARS, these very advanced weapons, these rockets. So, the trend is clear. My bet is that the discussion within the

administration, within the NATO alliance, will soon lead to the decision to provide those F-16s as those Poles are asking.

HARLOW: That's - that's a really interesting perspective.

COLLINS: Wow.

HARLOW: Go ahead, Kaitlan.

COLLINS: No, I was just - I think there's a little bit of a delay. I was just saying that's remarkable he does think that they're going to ultimately send the F-16s.

HARLOW: Yes, 100 percent.

I was going to bring Clarissa Ward - I think we have Clarissa Ward, right, in?

So, Clarissa, just your response to that hearing now, what, 24 hours after President Biden was on the ground in Kyiv, knowing that is what Zelenskyy wants is those F-16s and longer range missiles, is it the belief of the people of Kyiv and Ukraine that that will ultimately come from the west?

CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I wouldn't say it's the belief yet. It's definitely the fervent hope. And I think that yesterday's visit from President Biden kind of stoked those dreams even further, particularly when you heard some slightly cryptic comments coming from the chief of staff of the presidency, Andriy Yermak, who said that some issues had been resolved and some things that were stuck would now be sped up. It wasn't clear exactly what he was alluding to there. But certainly when you talk to ordinary Ukrainians, the hope very much is that they could be talking about F- 16s, that they could be talking about the kind of long-range missiles and artillery that they have been asking for.

Because Ukraine is sort of looking down the barrel right now at what promises to be a deeply unpleasant spring after a very grim winter with some kind of a large scale offensive, although we don't know exactly what that will look like, and there is some speculation as to how the Russians are actually -- what kind of ability they have to launch that kind of an offensive. But Ukraine understands militarily that if outright victory is the goal, what they have as the status quo will not be enough to achieve that objective.

So, for them, they really view this as kind of an existential moment.

[06:59:52]

We need this more sophisticated weaponry if we're going to finish this off, or else this conflict really risks sort of devolving into a protracted stalemate, war of attrition with many more lives lost on both sides, and with Vladimir Putin.