you mentioned the foreign minister, sergey lavrov said yesterday, again raising the specter of that. is there the possibility that there could be a russian strike on a nato target even? i would say we don t have reason to believe that concretely at this stage, but this is all coming on the heels of the defense secretary lloyd austin s words, which were very strong, saying that ukraine can win this war if they have the right support, and we want to give them the right support and, by the way, the new u.s. policy appears to be now to sort of slowly try to bleed russia dry throughout this war and so, it could be a response to that, but what exactly he meant by it is really anyone s guess. none of these statements come in a vacuum. they are often in direct response to something else that just happened. yesterday you had european countries, dozens of them meeting, the defense ministers meeting, a show of unity, and then you have lavrov saying,
already seen shows something, and ben was getting to that before, which is that they know better. this shows very clearly and concretely that he knew better. that is the part i find so disturbing about the whole thing. they clearly have contempt for their audience. 774 instances of them undermining the election in the first two weeks after it was called for biden. they built the scaffolding for the attack while simultaneously once it became clear the scaffolding they built would be operationalized for something were behind the scenes trying to dial it back but that day, that night he was sending those text messages he was promoting the rally, had peter navarro on his radio show telling people it was like when washington crossed the delaware which was a sneak attack during the revolutionary war. he did know better but continued to push his audience down a path he knew had pretty high risk to it. ben, i am curious to get your thoughts. you track so much information and disinformation o
article five would not be invoked. what they are looking at is any risk of any accident over the border. when you look at the poland and belarus border for the first time, allied nato, active troops are closer to russian active forces than any point since the cold war along that border. there is a fear there could be an error, mistake along that border. nato is looking carefully at any possibility of cyber attacks on any nato country. and much more concretely should that russian invasion take place, brianna, they will be looking at how allied troops posted at the eastern flank which has been substantially reinforced, how they can help with the refugees coming across from ukraine. very good point, melissa bell. thank you so much. let s turn to james spider,
reporter: you know, pamela, sanctions have been imposed for a very long time. when you look at ukraine, it s been happening since crimea which would be 2014. and there is a debate, you know. do they actually work? now, concretely, they have damaged the russian economy. there is no question. but putin decided early on that what he was going to have is counter sanctions. so what he did was he deliberately said, no european products, no european cheese, et cetera. but he also began building up domestically some of the industries that really weren t very well developed. so he s been able to, i would say, overcome some of those sanctions by building up domestically. but they have been hurt. the question is, will that economic math work with putin at this point? because there are issues that really go to the core of what he
just the two of us, me and putin, who can make an agreement on this. the second story is related to ultimatums that cannot be there emanating from one country to another country. i mean, in general and concretely in terms of russia s ultimatums to ukraine and there cannot be any ultimatums from any country whatsoever to another country, regardless of the army that it has, regardless of the finance, regardless of the size of the economy because it s international law. it s to respect the sovereignty of each country, therefore dialect is the only way out. it is through dialect that we have to secure the matter of security requirements for ukraine. we do not want to give any country a possibility to attack us. today it s the russian