katie, welcome to the show it s always a pleasure to see you. you re already worried, aren t you? what did you make of the press conference, and how did you fee about the it s a priority of issues. i don t think he talked abou what the american people cared about but my concern is he did basically invite vladimir putin to move into your crane and it a ripple effect. so prudent now has the green light. to do hybrid warfare which will accomplish the same thing. and then biden tried to clean i up today. let me explain what i really mean. mean invasion means armed units going across the border cyber attacks, hybrid warfare, false flag operations, but what the really big problem, whatever putin does commit you now will see china respond you will seat north korea decide it s going t
its commitment to support ukraine and other lawmakers say a bipartisan deal on russian sanctions is also about to get through congress. president zelensky, obviously, is trying to maintain his economic growth in his country which is pretty strong right now. and keep the country from panicking while having them be prepared. but we re together. that s what s important. there are some sanctions that really could take place up front because of what russia has already done. cyberattacks on ukraine, false flag operations, the efforts to undermine the ukrainian government. imminent means it could happen really at any time. when i say it it depends on what vladimir putin might want to do. as secretary austin said he has a lot of options and capability available to him. he could do something on a small scale or on a fairly large scale and he continues to add troops to that border with ukraine.
it could be all kinds of, you know, insurgency, false flag operations, and still blinking pointing out there s a window for diplomacy here between secretary blinken and the foreign minister lavrov when i was covering that on friday. yeah, two points, andrea. first, with respect to the intelligence picture, throughout this crisis, we have been collecting intelligence, sharing it with our key partners, our closest partners, including the british and the rest of the nato alliance. if you talk to u.s. officials, it wasn t until late in 2021 when we were able to declassify, i should say classify for release to our nato allies, a lot of our intelligence about what putin s ambitions were and the posture he was arraying on the border of ukraine looked like. nato perked up and realized, this is a series crisis, we have to get along. so using intelligence to get the nato alliance together and unified is something that has occurred and will have to occur
publicly. just last week we sanctioned four agents of russia, ukrainians in ukraine, seeking to destabilize the government. this is part of the russian tool kit. it runs the gammit from a large conventional incursion in an attempt to topple the government. it s important that people be on notice about that possibility. does this intelligence make it more likely in your view that putin is going to invade? i don t think it speaks to whether it s more or less likely. i think it speaks to the fact that, as always, russia develops lots of different options for doing things including in ukraine, and this is one of them. it s something that people have to be aware of. similarly, we ve warned about the possibility of so-called false flag operations. that is russia manufacturing a provocation and justifying anything it does in terms of responding to this manufactured provocation. there s been a lot of focus that russia has concentrated so many
we think so. i m more than cautiously optimistic at this point that when we get back to d.c. tomorrow that we re going to be moving forward, and i know bob shares that hope, also. what are you going to do about the timing of the sanctions? will you say that they will not go into effect until after an invasion if that happens? or will you do it preemptively? that s a work in progress. but i can describe where we ve come together on that, and i think it s a combination of both. bob, would you agree with that? i agree with senator risch. look, there are some sanctions that really could take place up front because of what russia has already done, cyberattacks on ukraine, false flag operations, the efforts to undermine the ukrainian government internally. those are just some examples of sanctions that could take place