solidarity. ukraine the downplaying the threat. the foreign minister has urged people to not believe in what he called apocalyptic predictions. correspondents are standing by in moscow. first let s go to melissa bell in kyiv. good to see you, melissa. as diplomatic efforts go into overdrive with the french president heading to ukraine tuesday, kyiv is desperately playing down the threat. what is the latest on all of this? reporter: that s right. we ve been hearing on sunday from a presidential aide to president zelensky saying, look, they are preparing for all the possible scenarios that might come, but they don t believe that russia ukraine, that is, don t believe russia is taking critical steps towards a full-scale invasion, even though they continue to work with partners preparing for all eventualities. that s something we ve heard a lot from ukrainian officials, both on and off the records the last couple of weeks. they are preparing for the worst, but still hoping for the
the station of things such as missile defense assets in eastern europe, and these grievances are long-standing. putin has been very open about them. last week he basically said that he felt that the west the u.s. and nato have essentially ignored russia s security demands. so clearly the west and russia remain very, very far apart. so we ll be looking for any kind of progress forward on all of those fronts today. rosemary? we ll see if any kind of agreement can be reached at this juncture. melissa bell, nathanage hodge, many thanks to you both. appreciate it. day three of the winter olympics is underway in beijing, but it s not just the olympians in the spotlight. we now know chinese tennis star peng shuai met with the i.o.c. president. she refused to comment whether she was speaking under duress during the meeting. she made headlines after
that putin sees in macron a quality inter locutor. he s had two phone calls with macron, so there is a flurry of activity on his end, a series of conversations. he does have a fairly tall order, as melissa pointed out. there is going to be an effort to see if they can get some kind of headway when it comes to restarting the diplomatic talks, both the normandy minske talks, that is one thing he faces. the other is to see if he can come away with any kind of concrete evidence of a de-escalation on the russian side. but the bigger picture question is whether macron can make any headway on long-standing grievances. those are about the expansion of nato in eastern europe after the end of the cold war.