partners are ready to impose severe costs and significant harm on russia. today, ukraine s president tweeted, we want to remind the great powers there are no minor incursions and small nations. joe biden said this by way of clarification. i ve been absolutely clear with president putputin, if any assembled russian units move across the ukrainian border, that is an invasion. and it will be met with severe and coordinated economic response that i have discussed in detail with our allies, as well as laid out very clearly for president putin. cnn s chief international correspondent clarissa ward is in kiev for us tonight. so what is the mood for lack of a better word right now like in ukraine and about what joe biden said?
for any ukrainian president for the last decade to publicly rebuke or speak out of turns with the sitting u.s. president. so there s definitely a mood here that things are looking increasingly grim, and a lot of anxiety about what the u.s. and nato s position will be regardless of whether it s a minor incursion or a full-scale invasion. as vladamir putin said anything about joe biden s comments? reporter: we haven t heard much from president vladamir putin today. you know, we did hear that russia has announced a new raft of huge, sort of naval exercises to take place in the coming months. and there s a sense that he s continuing to ratchet up the pressure, to increase the drumbeat. he wants to see some tangible, written statement from the u.s. as a response to the request or demands that russia has made. we also heard today from his
today, anderson, is the fact that the u.s. signaled the three baltic countries that they can transfer javelin anti-tank missiles and stinger, you know, ground-to-air missiles to ukraine. i guarantee you, putin paid a r lot more attention to that than this statement the president said, which they cleaned up. putin has to be sitting there thinking, i have 100,000, 140,000 troops around this country. it s a country of 44 million people, and they don t want to be part of russia. this could get very bloody, very fast. if you think with the stories we covered, think of saddam s invasion of kuwait. at the time, there was the issue, did we encourage him? and then saddam went in. and low and behold, america got its act together, you know what
reporter: there s still a lot of consternation here about what was said, despite the attempts of the white house to row it back and provide more clarity. one ukrainian official said if biden wants to stop an invasion, he needs to do more. what does doing more look like in the opinion of this ukrainian official? doing more means providing more weaponry, sophisticated, heavy weaponry, things of that nature. this official said he would like to see the u.s. impose those sanctions right now, opposed to waiting for that russian aggression to happen. now, there is no sense or feeling that the u.s. is going to go ahead and do that. but i think it speaks to the level of anxiety here that you really saw again president zalenski putting out that tweet, say thing s no such thing as a minor incursion. i can t say how unusual it is
it. what was the trump campaign s justification for this? clearly, there was this trump was leading the way wanting to overturn the election results. i spoke to one source who argued that part of their thinking was, hey, we have all these lawsuits in these states. we should just go ahead and have these lectors and move forward as though trump won the state, just in case we win these lawsuits. that was fantasy thinking, because at that point, they had lost so many cases, that their lawsuits didn t have any merit at all. but that is what they are saying. clearly, though, the overarching reason was they were trying to do everything they could. and now we re get thing clear picture to overturn a valid election. incredible. it s just stunning. pamela brown, thank you so much. coming up, more on the growing worry about a potential russian invasion of ukraine. thomas friedman joins me to look at the biden administration s