of vladimir putin inside russia itself, the elimination of the leading russian human rights association found out in the waning days of the association this week that it was thrown out of business by the russian supreme court. and you have the jailing this year of alexei navalny, the leading dissident in russia. instead of talking about that, putin has turned to aggression, and he has brought troops to nato s borders which seems to have gotten people s attention. nick, what s putin biden s he decides to up the ante? it will be the opposite of what vladimir putin wants. he will send more troops to the western border, the very thing he says he s concerned about.
it has a ways to go. but the real question is for president putin, and if president biden can get this out of him over the coming weeks, that would be a real positive for the united states. is he really, really determined to go to the wall on this issue of nato as his view expansion is towards russia, is he ready to go to war on that right now? susan, what are your thoughts on that, and what do you think has changed in the last 23 days since the leaders last spoke? that s the whole thing, because this is a manufactured crisis on putin s part. he can be misleading. he cites nato and nato expansion as if it s the pretext for this crisis, but it s not. there is no imminent threat. this is just not true that there is some imminent threat of nato expanding into ukraine. that s not happening now and it was a subject of discussion back in 2014 when putin originally
groups, human rights type groups are turning a blind eye to it. there are protests in the streets against this action because many people are now inured to president putin s version of russia. many of them are also afraid to go out and protest. susan, what is president biden s goal with this call? he s accepting that this is a call at putin s behest. is he just listening on this call? can he steer putin in any direction, or is that an impossibility? well, it s interesting, alisyn. first of all, a lot of what putin is demanding is not joe biden s or the united states to give. that s one of the big challenges, that putin is essentially refusing to negotiate directly with the ukranians and insisting this be sort of a superpower to superpower type discussion. biden and his administration have worked around that. they have been aggressively consulting with ukraine and with european allies in nato in order
federal level. and voter i.d. is a critical component of that. i want to talk about this. because you bring up, you know, being done at the state level. that is a republican principle, of course. and let s talk about ideas, too, right? um, republicans call biden s social spending plan a trojan horse for radical policies. one of the policies in there and i asked a republican meyer of michigan last night about this paid family leave for four weeks. that is what obama obama president biden saids it s at right now in the negotiations. here is what congressman meyer had to say about that. i think that those type of plans are far better executed at the state level where there is a need to have the consistent application across the country is two weeks too little, it s four weeks too little. should it be six? should it be eight? being able to have that alternative and that comparison, and also know what the impacts of that policy will be before it is rolled out across all 50 state