you go in now during a war and bring ukraine into nato, then the united states is directly at war with russia because the core of nato is a mutual defense pact. that s really going to get in the way here. so you ll have president biden, germany opposing anything that sets too much of a time line. you ll have the baltic states trying to say it s time for this to happen. and we re going to be talking to the british defense minister ben wallace later in the show about just that. all right. arlette saenz, beth saner, david sanger, thank you very much. stick around. we re waiting for president biden to give some remarks a the top of this summit. first, we want to turn to the historic and catastrophic flash flooding in parts of the northeast. it s being called a once in a millennium rainfall. particularly in vermont is bracing for more after nearly two days of intense rain.
between turkey and erdogan and putin is similar to the one between xi jinping, the chinese leader and putin, which is to say that they have a relatively tight relationship as beth explained before. it s a contradictory one. there are moments when they re on opposite sides of these issues. but it is born essentially of mutual need, different needs than they have with the chinese. i think the place where you re going to see this really play out may well be in the decision about what to do with ukraine getting admitted to nato at some point in the future. you heard jake sullivan say it s not going to happen now, but you also heard president biden in his interview with cnn last week say to fareed zakaria that he had two objections. and the first objection is that ukraine isn t ready, that it s not yet a democratic country. it hasn t gone through the reforms. but the second one was that if
said they don t have a timeline to outline right now for when air quality could join nato. that is something that could possible come up as president biden is set to meet here with ukrainian president zelenskyy at the nato summit tomorrow. there had been questions whether zelenskyy would be attending. but it will be a major show of unity as the president is once again trying to show that the nato alliance is right behind ukraine, ready to offer that support in the face of that war against russia. all right. arlette saenz on the ground for us in vilnius. stay with us. a lot going on this tuesday morning. let s bring in former deputy director of national intelligence beth saner and david sanger will be joining us from lithuania in just a moment. dave, we ll talk to you soon. beth, short of getting an invitation to nato, president biden ruled out. what does success look like for this nato summit and for ukraine? well, the nato summit itself is absolutely historic in terms
let s bring in beth saner. i m kind of mind blown. fred makes the great point, over the course of the last several weeks, you ve seen prigozhin kind of completely undercut on russian state media, you saw president putin s statement when he finally started speaking after the immunity, really attacking the idea of it. and the actions that were taken. what do you make of the fact that prigozhin was in was meeting with president putin, just five days after the immunity? well, you know, i think this shows another step in the kremlin plan to deal with prigozhin in this kind of post-mutiny environment. i think they have three things that are going on right here and we re seeing unfold. one, they re trying to change the narrative and discrediting prigozhin and getting leverage over this still-popular figure is the first part of this plan. the second part is to wrest control over as much of wagner as they can, because wagner is extremely important. so they took over, for example,
where prigozhin either has something on putin, or he s got enough leverage where we can actually control some of not only the narrative, but also what putin does next. think about what they have, for example, in africa. you ve got the wagner group all over africa, in syria. that s a huge arm of russian foreign policy that s sitting right there. and if that is somehow stopped or doesn t work as well as it once did, that creates a real problem for the kremlin. and putin can t afford to have that problem, in addition to the problems that he has in ukraine right now. keep your friends close, your enemies closer, right? exactly. and beth, that brings me to my next question. our ben wedeman called this a little bit of a soap opera. if you re u.s. intelligence at this point in time, how are you kind of watching, analyzing what s been happening and trying to draw some conclusions about what this may say about next steps for president putin and russia? well, you break it down into the t