i know that the russian people aware things are happening. i urge the russian people and the russian soldiers in ukraine to understand the propaganda and the disinformation that you re being told. i ask you to help me spread the truth. speaking in english, sub titled in russian, one thing to note, very important at last check, the official russian president twitter account only follows 22 accounts. one of those accounts is arnold schwarzenegger, so he s obviously very popular in russia and throughout eastern europe. how important was that statement, igor, and did it get through. first of all, yes, it did get through. it s trending on russian twitter, and we monitor things like that. i think there are no words to describe how important this was. i think this was an i have a dream moment, you know, for the future of, you know, the new
wars in europe. the best thing we could do to avoid that is to get involved. i think there s a very kind of famous line from winston churchill. americans will always do the right thing after exhausting the alternatives. that s the formula right now. i think there s a still great deal of wishful thinking from the administration to stay limited. we will be dragged in and need to make courageous decisions now that are not risky. risk informed. we are entrenched based on misplaced fears of risk. igor who was just on with us, former adviser to president zelenskyy, reported since off the air near kyiv and reports very loud explosions. we had the shot up since we were speaking to richard engel in kyiv. we continue to hear sirens and
we re here. we are not here for tourism. not sleeping. reporter: here to bear witness. thank you. thank you. reporter: glad to do it. thank you. igor novakov is with us, a former adviser to president zelenskyy. you, too, i wanted to check in with. our team reaches out often. how are you? i m fine. i heard the sirens. got an alarm as well. richard is a perfect example of what it is like in kyiv. so many air raid alert that is we have a system to know where you are in danger and what part of town you are not. we hear them and then make a decision to run and hide or kind of stay up. at the moment the worse that will happen is some explosions. but i think it s really for the russians to strike around midnight and then they strike a second time 4:00 or 4:00 in the
systematically kidnap local officials and replace them with puppets. again, this is already begun. i want to bring in igor novakov, former adviser to president zelenskyy. thank you for your time this morning: let s start with our last point from our secretary of state antony blinken there. he says that this kidnapping has already started. in fact, your former boss said this week that the mayor of mariupol was fleed on wednesday after russian forces captured him last week. how much of a concern is this right now? well, it is a concern, but to me the more important kind of thing here is it s a telltale sign of two really important things. it showcases the real support that russia has in ukraine. if they had, you know, as much support as they claimed, if ukraine had been a pro-russian country they wouldn t need to do that. they wouldn t need to replace
east of the city, in the direction of brovary. there are several different fronts and approaches the russians are using to push in on the city. the main approaches are to the north, the northwest around irpin but also the northeast and then this relatively new front from the due east has been more active over the last several days. it was also in that area that a russian column of vehicles was destroyed, according to a ukrainian account in a ukrainian video of the incident. but the southern flank of the city still remains open, which allows ukrainians to leave the city. it also allows supplies, weapons, food, to come into the city. so, we re seeing a russian approach that is coming in from the top and the side of this city, but not surrounded it yet. richard, after we spoke to you, we spoke to igor, who talked about former advisor