towards a city called izium, which they captured from the ukrainians about a week ago and use that as a launching pad to get into a place called sloviansk. they ll then be able to encircle the donbas area and that s going to be a very, very big fight. it s a pivotal city to get that area and all the people here know what it s going to take to fight the russians. the ukrainians are saying we need much more advanced hardware to push the russians back. we need aircraft, we need tanks to fight them and they still haven t got that kind of hardware. you also listen to any ukrainian, they know the reputation of dvornikov, the new general, the ground commander here. they have seen what he s done in syria. those tactics have already been employed here in ukraine. you speak to people here now and they think those will just be done on a much broader canvas,
is protected by 11 other countries including the united states, israel, turkey, and the united kingdom among the 11. but i d love to hear what general hodgings has to say since he was a senior nato official, a ground commander. how would this possibly work if you re a nato member? how can you form another alliance that could see you go to war against russia? independently, one of the things that the ukrainians want, they want to be stronger than nato. they want the security guarantees to be immediate, that if russia were to invade again, that there would have to be an immediate no-fly zone. how could the united states agree to that when it s not willing to agree to that now for fear of sparking as president biden said world war iii? so you have these still quite amorphous ideas of a security agreement from the ukrainians. they ve punted the issue of crimea for the next 15 years. they said we will deal with that
everybody has been uttering, which is what are they doing, not what are they saying, so what are you seeing? reporter: well, we just heard a loud explosion in kharkiv just a few moments ago, so the offensive by russia, by the ukrainian side still continues. the war is not pausing while these talks are under way. the only possible development today is this announcement from one of the top russian negotiators, the deputy defense minister, who said that there would be a de-escalation, particularly around kyiv and chernihiv, and that this u.s. official said that they are seeing some indications of ukrainian troops pull back. that s all we really have in concrete terms. rest is we re hearing more about the framework, how the ukrainians eventually see a peace deal. as keir was saying, they see one form lating with not ukraine joining nato but declaring some neutrality but neutrality that