ac 360 starts now. tonight on 360, where is the document? exclusive new cnn reporting that the former president s attorneys were unable to find the classified document he s reportedly telling people he had. we also have new reporting about what sparked investigators to go after him in the first place. also tonight, president biden speaking to the nation, spreading the credit for the budget deal, praising republicans and democrats for coming together to get things done. and later we take you inside ukraine s effort to build and acquire 200,000 drones this year, and what kind of impact they may have in the fight against russia. we begin tonight with new cnn exclusive reporting on the classified document the former president claimed to have. prosecutors issued a subpoena related to it, but his lawyers told authorities they were unable to find the actual document. evan perez joins us with the latest. what s going on here? they literally cannot find this thing? repor
russian ground troops. cheap, easy to use, and lethal, uavs, once considered toys, are now vital to kyiv s war effort. ukrainians say for them, drones are the big equalizer in this war. they say the russians have more tanks, artillery, and planes, but the ukrainians have the creativity of their population. this is a drone competition organized by ukraine s government with simulated attacks on ground targets, chasing fixed-wing drones, and even drone dogfights. we were granted exclusive access on the condition we don t reveal the location. it s like a start-up fair for fpv, or first-person view, drones. flown by pilots wearing vr goggles from a makeshift trench to simulate the battlefield.
a certain revolution is also taking place regarding production scaling. reporter: and while the ukrainians still won t admit direct involvement, the russians do admit they are concerned they might soon see more armed drones flying towards moscow. it s incredible to see up close like that, fred. is there any indication when we could see these drones, ukrainians purchasing above the battlefield in the fight? well, i think it could be very soon. some of the drones that we saw there at that drone competition, they ve already been on the battlefield but in small quantities. and i think one of the things, anderson, that we all need to understand is that on every battlefield here in ukraine whether it s bakhmut or whether it s in the south, in the rear echelon of those battlefields, you always have a small little shop that s developing new drones and that s trying to improve some of the drones that are already there. for instance, to make it impossible for the russians to geolocate the
groups to do his fighting for him. right. and part of the reason for that is there are people who are selling him on these groups being capable of conducting operations when they re really not. they re used to certain kinds of battlefields destroying things like they did in chechnya, syria excuse me. and they don t take the place of good, well-trained soldiers who are well-led on the battlefield under nco supervision. they re just a bunch of thugs in private military corporations. part of it seems to be also psychological, you know, that as you said, that there s lots of people in the fight, but also that chechens have a reputation of just being thugs and brutal and, yeah, just horrific. yeah. and i m not sure how to compare them to the wagner group, and i m not sure you can get more thuggish than the kind of prisoners that mr. prigozhin recruited in the last days of the battle of bakhmut. but, again, it s just trying to
me is they want to make it as quick as possible that they find a startup, identify that that startup could help them, and then scale up production as fast as possible. you could see some of these drones on the battlefield very soon. fred pleitgen, appreciate it. perspective from military analyst general mark hertling. what do you make of how drones are being used right now in ukraine? well, the insertion of these private sector operators is very good, anderson. you know, these are not that new. drones have been around for a while. i had, back in 2008, when i was in iraq, all of our units had small, what we call raven drones, which were literally hand launched, would give infantry units opportunity to see ahead of them in the battle to even look inside buildings at times. so, ukraine has actually taken this to a new level. the drones in the past, the