was smart. i said, of course he smart. putin is saying, oh they re gonna sanction, native sanctioned before the last 25 years. you mean i can take over a whole country and they re going to sanction me? the problem is not that putin is smart, the real problem is that our leaders are dumb. heather, it gives me no joy to have to play or to listen to that montage but i play it because i want to ask you the extent to which you think it undermines the international communities efforts at this moment to have a former president say such a thing on stage. you know, what really undermines u.s. efforts to lead into an effective member of the international community is this constant uncertainty of whether we mean what we say and whether anything president biden promises can be sustained beyond 2024. that is a huge problem, and it
ukrainians who are already here. we need to let in some additional ukrainians, although we won t be the primary destination, we have to do some to show europe that we are with them, and we are going to need to, on top of what we are already doing with both civilian and military help in poland, we re gonna have to do more financially and technically to help you or copy and countries manage that, which if it is 5 million, that will be the biggest refugee flow since world war ii. heather halberg, thank you so much for a time. that is it for this hour, i am alicia menendez, i will see you back here tomorrow, 6 pm eastern for more american voices. our live coverage of russia s invasion of ukraine continues after this quick break. breakv.life. .home and more.
over the freedom to russia. the ukrainian military to store this convoy saturday morning. and russia is growing increasingly frustrated by their lack of progress in capturing the capital city of kyiv. so how can the u.s. and allies help roll russia back even more? joining me now, heather halberg, she s the director of new models of policy change at new america. thank you so much for being with us. the big news today, of course, swift, talk to us about but that actually means and what that can actually do. swift, to make it s really simple, it s a system that they use for banks to talk to each other. so if you quickly need to sell dollars and buy rules or syllables and by pounds, you have an instant messaging system. and what happened today is some russian bangs will be thrown out of that system. so if your russian bank anyone make transactions anywhere else in the world, you have an
incredible you basically, your back to using passive digits to do it. so there is already predictions that there will be a massive catastrophe in russian markets on monday morning, which is really going to bring home what a disaster this war is for them. heather, you, know i ve talked a lot about the other big news which is germany reversing course announcing it is going to send weapons into ukraine. and i ve talked about that in the context of military. i want to ask you a slightly different question which is, given that this is the largest economy in the eu, given the extent to which germany s reliance on russia for natural gas, one message does that send geopolitically for germany to do this about face? this is one of putin s fundamental miscalculations here, alicia, he believed that