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Airstrike Hits Government Office Building in Kharkiv; Fears of Bloodshed as 40-Mile-Long Russian Convoy Nears Kyiv; Second Wave Feared as 25 Percent of Russian Troops Waiting to Enter. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired March 01, 2022 - 07:00   ET

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

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: That is the level of the disconnect of what's going on right now, that they are trying to say in Moscow that it is the people and the government of Ukraine that has brought this on themselves.

[07:00:09]

And they are telling complete and utter fabrications of history, full of grievance, but they are laying out a rationale right now for why they will and they aim to take down Zelensky.

And another very frightening thing, yesterday, as you know, President Macron of France spoke to President Putin and he also spoke to President Zelensky. This was ahead of these so-called talks that took place on the Belarusian border with the sort of Damocles over these negotiators, with the nuclear threat over these negotiators, on the border of a country that has now become a vassal and potentially soon to be a nuclear armed vassal of Russia, i.e., Belarus, after the weekend referendum.

Anyway, the important thing is that Macron demanded, pleaded, asked, tried to cajole Putin into an immediate cease fire and to get him to stop targeting civilian infrastructure and ordinary people. And Putin said, yes, yes, yes., not to the ceasefire but to the targeting request and, of course, he has not done that.

Is that a surprise? No. But worse, Putin is not changing or bending. He has told Macron, as far as we can gather from sources very close, that he demands that his demands are met, that he demands that the entire European security order is rewritten, according to the letter that he sent to the United States and NATO in December, that he demands that the annexation of Crimea is recognized, that he demands that the illegal occupation of Ukraine, certainly Eastern Ukraine, and presumably he hopes the whole of Ukraine will be recognized. So, he is not bending.

And this is very frightening because most military analysts believe that, yes, he's had these setbacks over the last six days and they are remarkable to consider this country has been able to stand up and keep them back for a moment, but that he will up the ante and that he is unafraid of bombarding and killing civilians. Remember, Grozny, Remember Aleppo? This is Putin and his war machine, civilians all the way. That's how they do it. That's how they try to win. And it is something that is going to be very difficult for the world to tolerate.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: And that is what Volodymyr Zelensky is standing up in the face of speaking to the European parliament. Christiane Amanpour, thank you so much.

And New Day continues right now.

Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. It is Tuesday, March 1st.

Overnight, a devastating aerial attack on Kharkiv. This is Ukraine's second largest city. You can see while it was a direct hit on a government building in the Historic Freedom Square of that city, Ukrainians say at this point more than 20 people were injured in that blast. The Ukrainian president, Zelensky, just said dozens killed. We're waiting for confirmation of that. At this point, we hear more people are still trapped in the rubble.

Zelensky called the attack an act of terror and told Europe's parliament moments ago that every square in Ukraine should be called Freedom Square. This attack was on Freedom Square in Kharkiv. Zelensky says every square in Ukraine is Freedom Square.

Also this morning, Russia's military is closing in on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. We have new satellite imagery which show this Russian military convoy, it stretches for more than 40 miles. And it reaches the outskirts of the city. U.S. lawmakers were told in classified briefings this new wave of Russian troops could consolidate their positions in Ukraine and by sheer numbers overwhelm the resistance that we've seen so far from Ukrainian citizens.

Video from one town shows residents using their cars, their bodies to block an approaching column of Russian military vehicles, about 40 of them. Those vehicles did eventually turn around and leave. And another town, you can see people putting up barricades, laying down spikes to block the Russian military advance.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: According to the U.N., more than 500,000 refugees have fled Ukraine to neighboring countries. Poland has welcomed the vast amount of them. And officials are expecting the number of those refugees to increase exponentially. The Ukrainian president speaking remotely this morning to the European parliament after making an appeal for the E.U. to expedite his request to grant the country immediate citizenship -- membership, I should say.

Let's go live now to Clarissa Ward. She is in Kyiv. And this was some kind of address that Zelensky gave to the European parliament from where you are. He urged the Europeans to choose Ukraine, Clarissa.

CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Brianna. I mean, this really feels like an existential moment for Ukraine.

[07:05:02] And the feeling here is that they're not just fighting for their own survival, but they're fighting for a way of life, a way of life that people in the west enjoy, committed to liberal democracy.

Obviously, today's events have been horrifying and very chilling indeed, particularly the targeting of Ukraine's second city, the city of Kharkiv. You saw that extraordinary image of a huge ball of flames engulfing at least several cars right in front of the administrative building in the main town hall. That's exactly where we were doing our live reports from just a few days ago, standing in front of that building. According to authorities in Kharkiv, at least ten people were killed in that. And we are definitely noticing a steady climb in the number of civilian casualties.

You can hear behind me now the air raid sirens are starting up once again. We've already heard them a couple of times today. And the fear, as Volodymyr Zelensky put it in an address today to the people of Ukraine is that the real focus now is on Ukraine's two main cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv. And he said Kyiv and Kharkiv are the most important targets for Russia. Terror is meant to break us, to break our resistance. And he went on to say that Kyiv is special. This is the heart of the country and it must keep beating.

Now, for now, there hasn't been a blanket curfew put in place. People are still able to go out. But they're only really going out, Brianna and John, to try to buy supplies, to try to get groceries, batteries, things of this nature because, as we see, this massive column of Russian armory and hardware bearing down on the capital, the very real fear is that this city will soon be completely encircled and that it will be extremely difficult to move supplies, to move food, to move humanitarian assistance in and out.

And one more thing I want to mention because it also sent a shiver down my spine, the Russian defense minister, Shoygu, accusing the Ukrainian military once again today of using civilian infrastructure as a shield for military hardware. This is the kind of propaganda we have heard from the Russians many times before. And, unfortunately, it is usually a precursor to attacking or hitting civilian targets under the guise that they're being used to protect military hardware. John, Brianna?

KEILAR: Yes, and Zelensky kind of got at that. He said children have been killed. What kind of military factories do they work in? What kind of cruise missiles are they launching?

But can you talk to us a little bit, Clarissa, about this, I mean, miles and miles long convoy of Russian military vehicles that is north of Kyiv? What is the concern there?

WARD: I think there are multiple concerns. First of all, there's just the psychological impact that that has, right? For the people, the 2.9 million ordinary people living here in this city, it brings about a state of terror, to see that amount of weaponry headed your way.

As of last night, it was just about 17 miles away. We can only assume it's significantly closer today. But there are multiple scenarios and threats that this could present. The most obvious one is the possibility that this city will be completely under siege, that it will be totally encircled, that people will not be allowed to move in and out, that supplies will not be able to move in and out, that humanitarian assistance will not be able to move in and out.

Already we have seen the oncology ward of one children's hospital had to evacuate all of its patients, and these are very sick children, to the western city of Lviv because they are not able to offer that kind of chemotherapy treatment, that specialized pediatric chemotherapy treatment at this time because of the situation. We have heard stories of maternity wards being moved down into bunkers.

Now, so far, that's been preemptive. It hasn't yet reached a stage where people need to necessarily be in those bunkers overnight. But the fear is that as the column arrives and encircles the city that you are also going to see a major air assault from the skies and potentially a lot of artillery also coming into the city from those troops surrounding it.

Now, I should say at this stage, a lot of that is speculation. It's what we're hearing as the potential fear of U.S. officials and Ukrainian officials.

[07:10:01]

At the end of the day, no one knows exactly what is going to happen, Brianna. And that is exactly what makes it so petrifying, the ambiguity around it, the lack of clarity around what Putin's plan really is.

KEILAR: We heard those air raid sirens going off behind you there, Clarissa. They have since abated. They were very loud. Is that something that has been happening regularly? Are you in a safe place? I mean, tell us about this.

WARD: So, the air raid sirens have been happening regularly. We heard them at least I would say half a dozen times a day. And I should also say that they don't necessarily mean that there's going to be some kind of an air raid. We often hear them and we don't hear any significant explosions or strikes afterwards.

Having said that, you can imagine the psychological impact for people who are immediately trying to get to cover, trying to get out of the city. In terms of being in a safe place, Brianna, it's a little bit difficult at this stage to really have a strong sense of where is a safe place in Kyiv. We haven't seen yet active, large-scale targeting of civilian sites. We have seen two apartment buildings hit. But we haven't seen a sort of large-scale carpet bombing, if you like, which is the sort of worst case scenario or the real fear that many officials have been talking about.

There are a lot of bunkers in this city, Soviet-era bunkers. And, of course, you saw a lot of people go to the city's metro stations, which are very deep underground, to take shelter. So, there are places for people to go to. But the other thing to keep in mind is how long does this last. How long can people hold out? You can't stay underground forever.

KEILAR: No, you cannot. Clarissa Ward, thank you so much for that report from the capital.

BERMAN: All right, a remarkable moment just there. Breaking news, again, as the Russians move ever more into Ukraine, now occupying all this area in red, CNN has brand new reporting that U.S. intelligence have made evaluating Russian President Putin's state of mind a top priority amid some speculation that his behavior has become increasingly erratic and irrational.

CNN's Katie Bo Lillis has the reporting on this. Katie, what have you learned?

KATIE BO LILLIS, CNN REPORTER: Yes, John. So, ever since last week when Putin gave this uncharacteristically emotional and sort of speech full of kind of crazy revisionist history, laying out his justification for launching a war into Ukraine, we've learned from our sources that U.S. officials have been asking the intelligence community to learn anything they can about Putin's state of mind, how is he coping with the stress of a campaign that really hasn't unfolded as expected, how has he dealt with the pressure that has come from a really unified western response to the Ukrainian incursion? And is there any possibility that what long-time Kremlin watchers say has been a really protracted isolation for the Russian president during the pandemic has impacted his state of mind.

One of the pieces of evidence that we know the I.C. is looking at, John, is a piece of raw intelligence collected by the FBI. My colleague, Zach Cohen, was able to obtain a copy of this report. What this report is is a description of what a source learned from another source and then told the FBI about what he knew about Putin's state of mind. And I'm going to quote what this source told the FBI, which is that Putin's behavior over the last two days, and this report was dated on Sunday, so this is very recent, over the proceeding two days had been highly concerning and unpredictable and that the Russian president had been extremely angry about the western sanctions that had been put on Russia in response to the invasion.

Now, look, it's important to understand that this is raw intelligence. The intelligence community gets lots and lots of reporting like this from lots of sources all over the world. It has not been verified, vetted, analyzed, but we do know from our sources that this report has caused a little bit of a firestorm and we do know the FBI is under a bit of pressure from other officials to try to learn more from this source, to try to figure out what they can about the way Putin is reacting right now.

BERMAN: All right. Katie Bo Lillis, thank you very much, important reporting right there.

And joining me now is Steve Hall, CNN National Security Analyst and former CIA Chief of Russia Operations. Steve, you just heard what Katie was saying there, assessing right now the mental state of Vladimir Putin. Overlay that into what we're seeing on the ground here with airstrikes, this is Kharkiv, this is where the strikes have been, on civilian population areas, that attack on the government building there. How do the two things intertwine?

STEVE HALL, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: There's obviously a lot on Putin's mind, to state the obvious, and this is one of the hardest things in intelligence world to try to collect against.

[07:15:04]

What are you thinking when you get up? Are you in a bad mood? Did you get in a fight? With Putin, it's obviously a lot more than that. He has got a lot more pressures on him. Certainly, the pressures of the war must be weighing on him. The sanctions must be weighing on him.

But one of the things that I think is really in the back of his mind that might be causing him to act like he's beginning to act or at least that we're seeing is the pressure that he wonders that must be coming up from oligarchs who are really filling these -- feeling these sanctions, much more strongly than he is directly. And he's got to be wondering how secure am I in my position? So, all that stuff falls together makes it very difficult to intelligence target to get after.

BERMAN: As we see the attack on that government building in Kharkiv, and I don't know if we have the video to show people here, it made you think, at least for a second, about what Vladimir Putin did in Chechnya, Grozny. Why? How?

HALL: I've talked to a lot of Russian intelligence officers in the course of my career and oftentimes the conversation, especially when it goes to taking out targets, like counterterrorism targets, they'll say, well, there's this guy in Chechnya that we need to get and he's in this village. And the response is great. Where are you going to find him? How are you going to suss him out? And the answer is, we don't have to. We're just going to take out the whole village. Russians will often say you have to break a couple eggs to make an omelet.

I'm afraid that that's the approach they're going to take in places in Kharkiv and other places. They're going to care less about who is in that building and they're going to care more about just putting psychological pressure on the entire country.

BERMAN: And they're already using the obvious propaganda of suggesting that military assets are being hidden in civilian populations, which is what you do when you're killing civilians. Steve Hall, thank you for being with us.

KEILAR: So, tonight, President Biden is going to be giving his first State of the Union Address amid all that is happening here at home as well as in Ukraine, where Russia has invaded. So, joining us now to talk about this is Susan Page, she is the Washington Bureau Chief for USA Today, and David Frum, who is a Staff Writer at The Atlantic.

And I have to say, having just watched Volodymyr Zelensky address the European parliament, he may have raised the bar for a presidential address on this day at a key time.

SUSAN PAGE, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, USA TODAY: Yes. He really rose to the occasion. I mean, he was conversational and emotional. He spoke from the heart. He rallied -- he spoke to multiple audiences. He was rallying Ukrainians. He was making demands of the European parliament. He was sending a message to Vladimir Putin.

And I think that President Biden will need to do all those things tonight in a State of the Union Address that has been transformed, I think, in the space of a week or two. This is not the laundry list of legislative priorities that presidents often give at State of the Union Addresses. This is going to be a different kind of speech entirely.

KEILAR: It gives an opportunity for him, I think, to frame this in a very big way. And I wonder how you think he's going to do that.

DAVID FRUM, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Well, here is what I would advise him to do if I were asked, which I wasn't. That as Susan said, President Zelensky just provided President Biden with the thing that is always lacking from State of Union speeches, or almost always, a frame. Why am I talking? What am I saying? Do I have a single message? And there are two things that I think President Biden needs to stress tonight, I hope he will stress tonight very hard.

The first is these events have given the absolute lie to the false and idiotic idea of America first, America alone, our allies are worthless, having friends is not important. What we have seen is the power of coordinated action by the United States and its European partners and its British partners, Canadians, Australians and others to bring down the Russian economy. So, I hope he will talk tonight about what we have seen is the proof, the test proof of the power of alliances, the power of friendship, the power of international cooperation.

The second thing I hope he will do is to give Americans a warning. One of the reasons Putin struck when he did was that food and energy markets were already so tight. Russia and Ukraine too are major suppliers of food and energy. So, the prices were high and that gave Putin his opportunity. And this disaster is going to raise the prices higher.

So, President Biden needs to bring home that when you, as Americans, pay more at the pump, when you pay more for food, it was already tight but the increases that are coming now are Putin's doing. And any politician of any party who tries to make domestic, political hay of the sacrifices that Americans are about to feel, is undermining support for Ukraine.

KEILAR: Because he has to -- look, these sanctions that the U.S. and western countries have in a unified way embraced, they're also a double-edge sword, to your point, right? They're going to hurt Americans as well at a time when inflation is already high. And he's going to have to make sense of that sacrifice. He can blame it on Russia, but he's going to have to explain to them why they're feeling it.

PAGE: Think about how consequential this presidency has been. He took over during a historic pandemic, after an attack on our democracy on January 6th. But I think in this, in some ways, the turmoil we're seeing in Europe, the biggest land war since the end of World War II may be the biggest challenge of all that he'll face. And it's something that, like it or not, it's going to define the rest of his term.

This is not going to be over in days or weeks. This is going to take years to unfold with all the consequences and the repercussions we're going to see in the world order.

[07:20:04]

KEILAR: It does seem, and I wonder what you think of this, even as Americans support economic sanctions, most of them are not supportive of there being military intervention, and at least in that explicit sense, that's not something that the U.S. is proposing. But I wonder, you know, what he can sell on that front for doing more?

FRUM: Well, the United States and its partners are doing a lot. And military means something more than bombs and missiles. The satellite information, that means that the Ukrainians can see in the dark, they know everything. Even if they can't always act, they know everything that is going on in their country. The ability to interfere, we hope, with Russian satellites, so that Russians do not see, the power of the social media war that is mobilizing world opinion and is going to have an echo effect back in Russia. There are already massive demonstrations, that all of those TikTok videos or things on telegram that humanize one set of targets, but also show the humanity of those scared, thin, underfed, underpaid Russian soldiers, and make the people at home say, why are we sending our boys to do this terrible thing that they don't want to do?

I think we can also start thinking about, and I've been advocating this for a long time, an incentive program for Russian deserters and prisoners of war, that there should be an offer every Russian comes over with or without arms, if they haven't committed war crimes, that across the (INAUDIBLE), it's waiting a hot meal, a comfortable bed, safe and secure welcome, SIM card if you need to call home and a train ticket to the Schengen country of your choice, where there's a job fair and a 36-month work visa, you can work in Barcelona, you can work in Hamburg, you can work in Birmingham and earn money in euros and pounds instead of the worthless rubles back home.

KEILAR: But we'll see if Spain and Germany is listening to your very creative suggestion, I will say there, David.

FRUM: Spain is 400,000 workers short for the coming tourist season. I think they will be very happy.

KEILAR: It sounds like a good job. Susan, David, thank you so much. Great to see both of you.

We do have some new CNN reporting that shows Vladimir Putin is set to use heavier firepower as this 40-mile long Russian convoy is stretched outside of the capital, just north of Kyiv. So, stand by. This is CNN's special live coverage.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:25:00]

BERMAN: All right. The breaking news, a Russian missile attack on a government building in the city of Kharkiv, this is the second largest city in Ukraine. We are now getting word that at least ten people have been killed, 35 injured in this attack.

This is in Freedom Square. This is the middle of this bustling city. You can see the destruction that the Russians have brought there. And this comes as the Russian make ever more gains in the country as a whole, now controlling all the areas in red. And there is new breaking news this morning, word that what we saw in Kharkiv might be something we see again in other places as well.

CNN Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto, who is on the ground in Lviv with this reporting, Jim, what have you learned?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: John, in the latest U.S. intelligence assessments, this is frankly a sobering warning for the 40 million people of Ukraine, and that is the U.S. assessment that as Russia has suffered setbacks and delays to its original blitzkrieg, rapid fire invasion, that they will use -- those Russian forces will use more devastating, more powerful weapons. That's a concerning point given the weapons that we have seen rolling in to this country, things ranging from the thermobaric system, which is basically a turbo-charged long distance flamethrower, the only way I could describe it, to the suspected presence of cluster munitions, as well as other weapon systems, designed frankly to kill people, to kill lots of people and very quickly.

It is also the U.S. assessment that President Putin and the commanders under him will become less hesitant and maybe really the better phrasing is more willing to commit collateral damage. What does that mean? That means kill civilians. And that means, therefore, more direct targeting of non-military targets, frankly, civilian targets, inside urban centers. And that's why that video that you just played there, John, is indicative of that, to see an administrative building, it's not a military target, an administrative building, in the middle of Kharkiv, a city of more than a million people, struck with a high- power weapon that is now, we know, killed ten people, a sign of what Russia is willing to do.

It's concerning, right? Because they have a tremendous act of firepower around particularly these urban centers and the U.S. view is we'll see more of this, frankly, in the coming days.

BERMAN: Yes, not a bug. This may be a feature, that horrifying video we just saw there might be a feature of the Russian attack in the coming hours and days.

And, Jim, what does this mean as we see this 40-mile long convoy of material, military vehicles moving ever closer to Kyiv? You can see the convoy here, only about 40-mile gap -- not 40 but 20-mile gap separates the end of the convoy from the city center in Kyiv. Could what happened in Kharkiv happen in Kyiv? SCIUTTO: Absolutely. In fact, that's the U.S. understanding of the Russian plan. It has been the U.S. assessment of the Russian plan for some time. We've been reporting it for weeks that the plan would be, as you assault in the east, you also come down from the north and surround the city, Kyiv, to do a decapitation operation. And to surround a city of millions of people, you need a lot of forces and firepower.

And what's truly remarkable about this, John, is we're seeing it play out before our eyes. You don't need to be an intelligence analyst to see it, right? You could call up on the internet, publicly available satellite images and see that 17 to 40-mile long convoy -- I know there have been 1different estimates of it -- wheeling its way down towards the capital in slow motion here.

[07:30:00]