move before then. so these will all be questions for jake sullivan who is president biden s national security adviser that s going to be joining the press secretary jen psaki at the briefing here in a few hours. and, of course, the question is whether or not this threat level has changed. if now they believe an invasion is more likely than before because we had been in this pattern, john, where the administration was using words like imminent to describe an invasion, saying it could happen at any time. they ve backed off that a little when there was pushback from ukrainian officials who said the west was causing a panic by using terms like that. now you re seeing these warnings ratchet up, not just from the united states but also from prime minister boris johnson who yesterday was saying we are in the most dangerous moment phase of this crisis really with the pentagon saying that they are continuing to add troops on ukraine s border. with this reporting about the intelligence, you ve
as you can. that s what the ukrainians are demonstrating and need to continue to do. first five days have not gone as well as you anticipated, if you re putin. they show belarus is about to add troops to the fight. they recently trained with russian forces to work on command and control, communications operations. from putin s perspective, you could say things haven t gone that well. let s negotiate. or you could say, i m backed into a corner. i m going to lash out. that s what u.s. defense officials fear. that this will accelerate. what would you be watching for from the what you anticipate russia would do next? well, we see two things. right? to your first point, i don t think diplomacy is really a legitimate avenue that putin wants to go down. even though there was this opportunity to have the negotiations in belarus with a delegation from ukraine and a delegation from russia. i think that s simply a head fake. that s off to the side. we ll see what comes out of that. but clearl
as somebody who has expertise here, as a nonexpert, the way i see this war is that once donald trump cut the deal and said we re out of there. we re going to leave. the only choices that biden really had realistically were negate the deal and say we are staying and probably that means we have to add more troops because we are just going to continue this operation. or leave and it was always going to be inelegant when we left. am i wrong about that? no, i think you re right. those are the two sort of binary choices. had we had we walked away from the trump deal on may 1st, and retained u.s. forces, we probably would have had to escalate. that is, add troops. to simply sustain an eroding status quo. i mean, the taliban were resurging over the last several years. so, you know, for americans, this looks like it all happened overnight. but for those of us who watch this very closely, it s actually been eroding steadily for
if he hadn t, we would have had to add troops. did he have a better option? better i don t know, but that s what the other option was. we have seen reporting of the white house and administration officials that thought that look, this was going to happen anyway, the taliban were going to either fight or walk their way into kabul, and the amount of troops trump left in kabul wasn t enough to do anything. it would take another 10,000. we reported two years ago, talked to senior commanders, asked that question. what s the minimum number of u.s. troops we need in the country to do the minimum counterterrorism mission, not fight a war, to do minimum number and to continue the job of advising and assisting the army there and to continue to train and equip them. the number was always between 8 and 10,000. as soon as trump went below that a few years ago, it was a different ball game.
notifying relevant agencies and committees in congress, but at the same time that the president has not made a final decision, and we do know that the president is expected to meet with the ukrainian president next week. so it s possible that is discussed and perhaps the president will change his mind as far as where he s headed. the president making news today on another national security front as well. indicating he s prepared to leave 8600 troops in afghanistan should there be a deal with the taliban for withdrawal of several those be add troops. the president making clear he will leave a troop presence there even if there is a deal. we re going to keep a presence there, we re reducing that presence very substantially. we re always going to have a presence. we ll have high intelligence. i will put this word out. if they do anything in afghanistan, we ll come back with a force like never before.